91av

Sixty years ago, 91av considered exploding bombs in the Arctic Ocean

Sixty years ago, meteorologists were beginning to think about climate change. On 4 December 1958, 91av ran a short story on “a way in which man might drastically alter the weather”.

Harry Wexler was director of meteorological research at the US Weather Bureau and one of first to write about what we now call geoengineering. We reported on an article he wrote for Science (), which considered “what would happen if ten ‘clean’ 10-megaton bombs were detonated in the Arctic Ocean in winter”.

The bombs would “produce steam, which would then condense… and form a cloud of ice covering the entire region”. This would have a warming effect, Wexler thought: “Such a cloud might reduce by half the loss of heat by radiation from the Earth’s surface around the Pole.”

Another possible consequence of the giant ice cloud would be “to accelerate greatly the disappearance of the Arctic pack ice, and so open up the Arctic to shipping”. Sub-Arctic regions would see an increase in snowfall, and so “glaciers would grow in size and a new Ice Age might begin”.

Wexler was not advocating Arctic explosions, although 91av‘s story was too short to make this point. And while he did think that climate control was becoming ““, Wexler revealed one major motivation for his article in The New York Times. Nuclear weapons testing was at its height in 1958. There were , mainly carried out by the US and USSR, more than twice as many as the year before. Wexler worried that too many might lead to a nuclear winter and thus a new ice age.

And he understood even then that geoengineering would be suggested as a way of tackling climate change. His advice is worth repeating: “The full resources of knowledge… must be brought to bear in predicting the results so as to avoid the unhappy situation of the cure being worse than the ailment.”