Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. By James Rodger Fleming. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xvi, 325 pp. $27.95, isbn 978-0231-14412-4.)

Global warming and proposals to respond to it by creating technologies to cool the planet are placed in a larger context in this important, well-researched, and clearly written book by James Rodger Fleming, a leading authority on the history of meteorology and climate. Fleming wastes no time in stating what he sees as the central point:

For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have hatched schemes to manipulate the weather and climate. This is not, in essence, a heroic saga about new scientific discoveries that can save the planet, as many of the participants claim, but a tragicomedy of overreaching, hubris, and self-delusion. . . . Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief, (p....