owning the weather

I had the chance to fast-forward through a doc­u­men­tary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Own­ing the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy sci­ence of geo­engi­neer­ing, in which sci­en­tists and char­la­tans attempt to mod­ify the earth’s weather.


As one cau­tion­ary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hat­field who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hat­field set up his appa­ra­tus on the east­ern edge of town and got to busi­ness seed­ing clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 peo­ple were dead in the ensu­ing flood­ing. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a char­la­tan tak­ing advan­tage of a nat­ural weather occur­rence. Whether this sort of weather mod­i­fi­ca­tion actu­ally makes a dif­fer­ence in prac­tice is in dispute. ]

Bill McK­ibben, author of The End of Nature, is inter­viewed and gets some of the bet­ter lines in the film:

“One of the great sad­nesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warm­ing get com­pletely out of con­trol is [these geo­engi­neer­ing pro­pos­als] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…

“The 20th cen­tury taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that sci­en­tific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trou­ble. Any sort of solu­tion that we could intro­duce that was actu­ally going to lower the tem­per­a­ture of the world sev­eral degrees—you know, what­ever geo­engi­neer­ing solution—is inher­ently a big scale scary as hell.”

Inter­est­ingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or look­ing out at the world from the cli­mate con­trolled space of a car inte­rior. All that rein­forces one of the film’s points that we’re a cul­ture that has cut our­selves off from what the envi­ron­ment brings us naturally.

I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some peo­ple are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the per­fect tem­per­a­ture. Just extrap­o­late that out onto the entire earth and you can see that com­ing up with a scheme to mod­ify weather so that every­one is happy is bound to be an impos­si­ble task.

What if Siberia decides it wants to grow trop­i­cal man­goes and geo­engi­neers a frost-free cli­mate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What hap­pens to the rest of the world?

April 27 2010 06:30 am | Categories: art • rambles | Tags: • • •

7 Responses to “owning the weather”

  1. Town Mouse on 27 Apr 2010 at 8:07 am #

    I com­pletely agree, it’s very scary. And even more scary is the fact that most peo­ple are not inter­est­ing in chang­ing their behav­ior (con­sume, consume)…I find it hard to be optimistic.

  2. Elephant's Eye on 27 Apr 2010 at 12:20 pm #

    And they have already started exper­i­ment­ing. Just qui­etly going ahead with a small scale attempt at … dumped a load of some­thing in the South Atlantic Ocean. But it is done so qui­etly, only a few know. And most don’t care, that they don’t know. Geo­engi­neer­ing — just the very word, the idea. There is no bio in that word.

  3. Jean on 27 Apr 2010 at 3:59 pm #

    Yikes, I had no idea! Very, very scary — like some par­tic­u­larly hor­rific sci-fi thriller, only real. I will look for this film.

  4. George on 28 Apr 2010 at 3:44 pm #

    You’ll have to see “Toxic Skies” too. It’s a movie with Ann Heche about the poi­son­ing of the pop­u­la­tion from an ingre­di­ent put into jet fuel and spread through exhaust contrails…corporate con­spir­acy to cap­i­tal­ize on a vac­cine? secret gov­ern­ment pro­gram to coun­ter­act global warm­ing gone awry? Watch it and find out.

  5. Wendy on 28 Apr 2010 at 6:29 pm #

    Wow. Scary stuff. I hon­estly don’t know too much about this — how to seed clouds and all — I should make some time to watch the doc­u­men­tary as well!

  6. Brad on 28 Apr 2010 at 7:39 pm #

    It seems com­mon sense is a rare com­mod­ity these days. What­ever we’re doing is mak­ing things worse, let’s try and keep doing it to see if we get bet­ter results. It would be inter­est­ing to see if the crazy flood of 1916 in San Diego affected weather else­where, like Ari­zona had no rain that win­ter or some­such. I know that
    El Nin~o years affect not just us, but change weather pat­terns around the world.

  7. lostlandscape on 28 Apr 2010 at 9:09 pm #

    EE, I’m def­i­nitely curi­ous about the South Atlantic exper­i­ment. I like your obser­va­tion about how there’s no “bio” in the name of this “solu­tion.” Those humans seem to want to treat the world as an inert object.

    Jean, yeah, it’s pretty scary stuff. Of course, we’ve been geo­engi­neer­ing the world in a big way for the last 150+ years since the Indus­trial Revolution.

    George, I’ll look for it!

    Wendy, I’ve had a chance to view more of the film. It’s a lit­tle con­vo­luted in spots, but it still raises some things I hadn’t thought about–still recommended.

    Brad, what really hap­pened in 1916 is a good ques­tion. It was a markedly wet­ter Jan­u­ary in Cal­i­for­nia when com­pared to the pre­vi­ous years. This was the month when Hat­field did his rain­mak­ing. The records for Ari­zona show an amount some­thing shy of dou­ble the pre­vi­ous year’s rain­fall, pro­por­tion­ally much smaller than the amount Cal­i­for­nia received. Those are state-wide pat­terns, so bet­ter gran­u­lar­ity is needed to really com­pare two cities affected by the same weather pattern.

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