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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 26, 1958)
Meteorologists foresee day when the dreaded tornado becomes a thing of the past, 7 Weather - i '"L . DEADLY I WEAPON OR MAGIC WAND? Man's attempt to harness the forces of nature poses grave dangers as well as many predictable blessings. 11 I I-"' by James C. G. ConnifF Art by Jim Teason W, 'hile you sleep, faces in the green glow of instruments are watch ing through long arctic nights for answers. Some are American faces. Some are Russian faces. The answers they find may determine the kind of sleep you get for a long time to come. What is done with those answers may in the near future either fulfill a dream as old as Noah or put an end to things a lot more precious than jokes like "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." These are the task forces of an in credible assignment: nothing less than human control of the world's weather. The Reds, backed by unlimited funds, have been at it for 20 years. But on a starvation budget we have just gotten started with a number of "small re search projects." What are we after up there? The same thing the Russians are. By artificial manipulation of the arctic wastes, we hope to warm things up back home and put the weather on a predictable basis. That means guaran teeing next week's weather, next month's, and next year's. The responsibility we shoulder in the process is staggering. It is a pretty snug planet, after all, once you start tamper ing with the weather. There's more to controlling climate than assured vaca tion weather in Florida, palm trees and lower heating bills in Chicago, bikinis and orange blossoms for Duluth in December, less humid Summers coast-to-coast, and Spring arriving two months earlier in New England. In undertaking the gigantic projects required to bring about all these changes, any conscientious scientist must ask himself: but what about the neighbors? From 1946 on, we Americans have had part of the answer to that question. That year Dr. Vincent Schaefer of General Electric, with Dr. Irving Lang muir, inaugurated scientific weather control by seeding rainclouds, first with dry ice, then with silver iodide crystals, to make them precipitate. It worked fine and still does. But our courts continue to wrestle with lawsuits that result when one valley's needed rain becomes another's drought or deluge. Will that kind of grief, only magnified many times, complicate early tries at global weather control? Almost inevi--tably. We saw it two years ago in Russia's proposal to dam Bering Strait At first it looked good to everybody, The Reds counted on the project to warm Siberia for farming that would ease consumer shortages. They also looked for year-round ports on the Pacific, which got our hopes up. Im proved trade opportunities might soothe the Soviet itch for world domination. But on closer study, the plan revealed a number of adverse "side effects." An Arctic Ocean dam across Bering Strait would be an awesome engineering feat of undeniable benefit to Siberia, me teorologists agreed, but it would also invite long-range disaster for certain neighbors by boosting the flow of arctic water across the top of the North American continent. This would so intensify the bitterly cold Labrador Current that the Canadian maritime provinces' already short growing season would be cut sharply, with serious crop loss. A further effect would probably IV I fi th WW v ..... :..:-v.w:. t 4 -; " - K "'1 , - l S J3 saiii Will science provide perpetual weather like this for the entire temperate zone g Family Weekly, October 26. 19SS
