🎧 Cloud Seeding and Climate Engineering
Latest Podcast Episodes 🎧 • 32m
Pyres on the Appalachian mountains. Planes spraying chemicals into clouds. Mirrors in space. “I can make it rain, I can make it rain, I can make it rain…by waggling my stick”.
For more than a century, scientists, soldiers and charlatans have tried to manipulate the weather, wildly exaggerating what is possible.
Does any of it actually work?
And even if we could control the climate, should we? Whose hand would be on the thermostat?
Today we’re joined by James Fleming, a leading historian of meteorology and climate change and author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.
James helps us chart the dubious history of attempts to control the weather from the 19th century meteorologist dubbed the ‘Rain King’, to Cold War efforts to drench opposing armies, to cloud seeding at the start of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The episode was produced by Freddy Chick
The editor was Anisha Deva
The senior producer is Charlotte Long
Up Next in Latest Podcast Episodes 🎧
-
🎧 Western Europe’s Age of Democracy
In the second half of the twentieth century, western Europe was shaped by a revolutionary political force: democracy. Or at least that's what Martin Conway has argued in his major new history. On this podcast, Martin - a teacher from my university days - interrogated the years following the Secon...
-
🎧 The Battle of Taranto
The Battle of Taranto took place on the night of 11–12 November 1940 during the Second World War between British naval forces, under Admiral Andrew Cunningham, and Italian naval forces, under Admiral Inigo Campioni. The Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in histo...
-
🎧 The Battle of Vimy Ridge with Paul ...
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was a military engagement fought primarily as part of the Battle of Arras, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France, during the First World War. Paul Reed is a military historian, battlefield photographer, and author. He's often on television talking about World War I a...
