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 | Categories: art • rambles | Tags: • • • | 7 Comments »