Weather Makers Given Enormous Sums to Charter Schools, Facilities That Are Publicly Funded, Privately Administered and Sometimes For-Profit
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS One of the most contentious targets METEOROLOGY of activist philanthropy is education. Among others, the Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — Zuckerberg and hedge-fund maestro Bill Ackman have Weather makers given enormous sums to charter schools, facilities that are publicly funded, privately administered and sometimes for-profit. Jim Fleming assesses a history of US governmental Illustrating how fraught this philanthropic intervention in the atmosphere. involvement is, in Newark, New Jersey, a top-down school-reform strategy disre- garded community priorities, generated ake it rain,” commanded provided a diversion wide resentment, exacerbated inequity choleric US bureaucrats who and a cover story for and defunded public schools. sought to control the weather the testing of silver Despite his lament that increasingly “Min the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. iodide cloud seeding, powerful philanthropy engenders civic Yet their decrees carried little weight in slated to be used in the inequality, Callahan pays inadequate the aerial realm: the atmosphere does not Vietnam War. Here, attention to philanthrocapitalism. This respond to state control. an interesting cast of model, which infuses business principles In Make It Rain, historian Kristine Harper characters from the into philanthropy (proffering handsome treats weather control as a political agent in 1960s appears, made investment returns), essentially justifies the hands of the American state. Politicians Make It Rain: up of big government wealth accumulation on the backs of at local, state and national levels issued edicts State Control of figures not typically ordinary people. He mentions various in pursuit of their political ends to bring the Atmosphere in included in histories structural enablers of gargantuan for- enhanced ‘sky water’ to their thirsty districts, Twentieth-Century of science: Bureau of tunes, from tax shelters to weak securities or to mobilize the clouds for diplomatic or America Reclamation director KRISTINE C. HARPER laws and corporate pressure to cut taxes military ends; “entrepreneurial scientists” University of Chicago Floyd Dominy, US and shrink regulation. Yet he retreats to took their money and produced technical Press: 2017. ambassador to India mild critique, calling for a “balancing reports. But in the long run, the weather did Chester Bowles, secre- act” of middling reforms around phil- what the weather does. tary of state Dean Rusk, agriculture secretary anthropic accountability, transparency, In an overextended metaphor belying the Orville Freeman, national-security adviser partnerships and political lobbying. complexity of her narrative, Harper asks Walt Rostow and CIA director Allen Dulles. If philanthropy indeed poses a grave us to imagine the state as “a shadowy male Yet Harper includes no parallel analysis threat to egalitarian values, Callahan’s figure” lurking at the edges of technical and of earlier bureaucrats and no mention of prescription may amount to tinkering at environmental histories: “Do we invite him president Richard Nixon’s continuation of the margins. Why should self-anointed in, take his money, let him ‘meet the parents’, weather-modification programmes over philanthropic elites, who already exercise acknowledge that he is calling the shots, and Vietnam. She provides a helpful list of inordinate power, have carte blanche to then continue checking in with him to make weather-control bills passed by Congress in steer public policy? As former US labour sure he hasn’t trotted off with a more attractive the period 1947–53, and a list of weather- secretary Robert Reich has noted, gov- partner…?” Her work is informed by politi- control research projects conducted in more ernments once collected billions from cal scientist James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State than a dozen countries in the 1950s — but tycoons, then democratically redistrib- (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), which criticizes the these lack detailed analysis. uted these revenues. Many would argue administrative ordering of nature and society Harper indicates, in several places, that that it is high time to rein in the mega- by the state. It also echoes sociologist Theda weather control is actually possible. Most billionaires, whether they are wielding Skocpol’s admonishment to “bring the state meteorologists would disagree. She cites the influence from the boardroom, the White back in” — in the book of the same name, “earliest success” as occurring in 1921, “when House or philanthropic perches. ■ co-edited with Peter B. Evans and Dietrich an airplane dispersing [electrically] charged Rueschemeyer (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) sand into clouds triggered a snow flurry”. Anne-Emanuelle Birn is professor of — when describing efforts to control nature. This was an Army Air Corps-sponsored critical development studies and social The strongest sections of Make It Rain project in Dayton, Ohio, that produced no and behavioural health sciences at the include an account of GROMET, the code reliable scientific results. Later, she writes University of Toronto in Canada. Her name for a secret agricultural rainmaking that “as a result” of silver iodide seeding in latest book is Oxford University Press’s project run by the United States in India 1961, Hurricane Esther’s barometric pressure Textbook of Global Health. during the administration of US presi- “stopped deepening and maintained a relative e-mail: [email protected] dent Lyndon Johnson, in 1967. GROMET constant pressure thereafter”. She also cites From Dust to Life The Eternal Darkness John Chambers & Jacqueline Mitton (Princeton Robert D. Ballard & Will Hively (Princeton Univ. Univ. Press, 2017) Press, 2017) In this grand chronicle of the science behind the Globally, just 1% of the sea floor has been origins of our 4.6-billion-year-old Solar System, explored in detail. Robert Ballard and Will Hively’s John Chambers and Jacqueline Mitton peruse exploration of that unforgiving environment everything from the giant collision thought to have reveals how divers reach it, and uncovers amazing formed our Moon to the nature of meteorites. beasts, such as blind white crabs and giant clams. 32 | NATURE | VOL 544 | 6 APRIL 2017©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT by chemist William Ramsay.) The Bergeron– Findeisen ice-crystal process — a theoretical explanation of the growth of precipitation particles made of both ice and liquid water — is active in clouds in many seasons and latitudes, producing rain in mid-latitude sum- mer and tropical convective systems, not, as Harper indicates, only in mid-latitude winter. Harper’s exclusive focus on state-run projects unfortunately prevents examina- tion of the plethora of private rainmaking efforts in the United States and elsewhere during the twentieth century. And the book’s US‑centrism means no mention of the successful British fog-clearing project FIDO during the Second World War. In my book Fixing the Sky (Columbia University Press, 2010; cited in Harper’s first footnote), I covered rainmaking by concus- sion, electrified sand, chemical agents, dry 143mm X 174mm ice and silver iodide; weather warfare; and climate engineering. Many of my protago- nists (and even some of the cartoons) are the same: Dyrenforth, James Espy, Wilder Bancroft, Tor Bergeron, Henry Houghton, Vladimir Zworykin, John von Neumann, Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer, Bernard Vonnegut and Edward Teller. The two books are best read in parallel. Near the end of Make It Rain, Harper lists the current challenges of climate change, wondering whether rainmaking will make a comeback to alleviate water shortages. But her claims that all weather-control efforts are local and pertaining to water prevent her from any meaningful follow-up on technological fixes for climate warming, such as carbon dioxide removal or albedo modification. The state can indeed influence, and in many ways control, water resources. The “qualitative data” reported by military pilots Council study Critical Issues in Weather hydrological and hydroelectric regimes and observers that clouds seeded over Viet- Modification Research (National Academies controlled by the great Hoover Dam, for nam “grew six to ten times taller and wider Press, 2003) warned that “weather modifica- example, far exceed in capacity and reliabil- within ten minutes of seeding and doubled tion has largely been relegated to the realm of ity the puny results produced by any politi- the precipitation of unseeded clouds”. None promises unfulfilled”. It noted, too, that fur- cian who commanded rain to fall from the of these observations is verifiable, in my view. ther research may reveal that the “intentional sky. It is important, however, that historians Intervention is not control. In 1946, modification of a weather system is neither of science begin to bring the state back into Kathleen Burr Blodgett, a physicist at the currently possible nor desirable”. their stories, and this book is a start. ■ General Electric Corporation, advised chem- Harper’s book contains some errors. For ist and weather-modification enthusiast instance, US government agent Robert Jim Fleming is the Charles A. Dana Professor Irving Langmuir that altering a cloud was a far Dyrenforth, who in 1892 sent explosives and of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby cry from controlling its subsequent motion, balloons into the air to produce rain, used College in Maine. His latest book is Inventing growth or characteristics