Abstract:
This thesis is organised around two questions: how do we explain planned weather-modification's shifting scientific status, and how do we explain public opposition to weather-modification programmes? The last four decades have seen weather-modification oscillate wildly between pseudo-science, orthodox science, and now apparently, bad science. Paradoxically, widespread private scientific scepticism towards weather-modification has been matched by wholesale public belief in its efficacy. Weather-modifiers have been accused of causing drought instead of creating rain, of ruining harvests rather than encouraging cultivated wealth. Public groups have objected to this most social science on aesthetic, cultural, economic, environmental, legal and theological grounds.
Far from being an interesting aside in meteorological history, weather-modification lurks perpetually on the policy horizon. To therefore ignore the circumstances under which weather-modification was first legitimised is foolish, since the recurrence of these material conditions could reinstate its scientific position despite scanty evidence of its efficacy. Not only is the current practice of weather-modification a waste of time and money, it postpones pressing decisions regarding water allocation and conservation, and it annoys a lot of people in the process.
In the final analysis, attempts at weather-modification illustrate many key issues surrounding the relationships between and among science, technology and society, for the weather-modification story tells us important things about the problems that arise when there is no time lag between a supposed breakthrough and its subsequent application, the difficulties which scientists encounter when working in politically charged atmospheres, and the problems that follow when such work intrudes upon the public domain.