Is the Antarctic the key to weather control?

[EightInchNails]

Whilst watching through a very informative video (one of the less high-brow videos by TruthStream on weather and climate control and the role that the polar areas have in this process, a thought struck me.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olJv2syNw9A

 

I'll quote you verbatim the part that interested me - "A 1959 Hartford Courant article discussed Dr. Harry Wexler's plan for clearing the Arctic Ocean of all ice and making travel from New York to the Orient much faster by detonating ten hydrogen bombs under the water and blowing enough steam into the polar sky to blanket the ocean with an ice fog that would drastically cut the amount of heat escaping the ocean and thus prevent new ice from forming there, but he was worried the plan would actually drown many famous ports across the world and throw the planet into a new ice age so they weren't sure if they wanted to do it or not."

 

The video also points a finger at military rocket tests for accelerating the process of global warming irrevocably.

"By 1962 however Dr. Wexler was singing a different tune on weather modification. His new calculations worried him that rocket fuels of the type that the world's militaries had been firing off into the atmosphere in all manner of experiments, weather and otherwise since the end of World War Two, was possibly permanently affecting the climate and irreparably changing the world's weather for the worst. Throughout 1962 he delivered a speech entitled 'On the Possibilities of Climate Control' to at least three different groups across the country on how the residues of rocket fuels, including chlorine and bromine compounds, were contaminating the upper atmosphere not just by destroying the Ozone Layer, but by punching holes in the ionosphere... In other words, Wexler was saying that these rocket fuel compound residues were causing what could eventually be permanent climate change. And by the way as Fleming points out, our modern history of Ozone depletion only really dates back to the 70's, that's when they started talking about that as being an issue and a problem that we were facing. It's also a good time to point out that by 1962 when Wexler was saying this, the US military, USSR and others had been not only detonating rockets in the atmosphere for various science and military experiments including hundreds of sounding rockets from Antarctica, but they were also reportedly blowing up nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere, including top secret high-altitude nuclear testing Operations Hardtack and Artists in 1958, and Operation Fishbowl which had just begun in 1962 when Wexler began making these claims. Wexler noted that the effects could be temporary but he also said these compounds could be left behind as a catalyst that could cause permanent climate and weather changes."

 

One more quote - "This was a man who was sitting on every relevant scientific advisory board on weather and weather research that the US had at the time. He was working alongside the likes of John Von Neumann and he'd been writing papers on weather control for JFK, so he knew what he was talking about or at least he should have. And now he was publicly warning against one of the US miltary's biggest state goals and biggest justifications for the scientific takeover of Antarctica, where the majority of rocket launches and weather experimentation was taking place at that time."

 

After convincing the DoD to perform an investigation into the effects of these rocket launches on the atmosphere, Wexler died August of that year, aged just 51, of a reported heart attack, while on vacation in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a paper on the subject crediting him as editor was published posthumously but curiously omits all mention of his findings, as does the First International Symposium on Rocket and Satellite Meteorology (which was published in April '62 while he was still alive, and organised in part by him, and bears a memorial to him in the opening). Reportedly the yearly symposium is opened by a paraphrase of Wexler's opening remarks regarding "man's endeavour to push higher into the atmosphere with his instruments". It seems unlikely that Wexler would go without trying to alert RAND to his findings about those very instruments and their effects on the climate. It could be speculated that Wexler was silenced and his findings suppressed but this isn't a thread for speculation about conspiracy. (Though it could be...)

 

Doing some further digging, I came upon some interesting documents about Dr. Wexler's weather control theories, because the thought occured to me that if the force of ten hydrogen bombs could cause a new ice age, then surely it would be possible to reverse the global warming effect using a slightly less powerful variant of Wexler's proposal.

http://www.colby.edu/sts/wexlerozone.pdf

http://www.colby.edu/sts/agu2007wexler.doc

[BTGBullseye]

I don't doubt that the information available at the time pointed towards those causes and effects, however there has been significant study into the physics of these things... At worst, the results are inconclusive, at best they indicate that humans aren't having that big of an effect on the environment from the technological side of things. Most of the 'environmentalist' 'scientists' don't take into account much of the research regarding astronomy or geology when saying that humans are destroying the planet, and many even advocate against truly clean energy practices in favor of even more polluting energy sources. (like being against nuclear, but for solar; I wouldn't take those 'scientists' word for anything)

 

No, I don't have links to share regarding this, so do your own research and find out for yourself.

[pachiderm]

This all reeks of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience. I am neither a climatologist nor a nuclear physicist but I can think of some serious problems with detonating enough nuclear weapons to create another ice age. I would assume it is possible to do, but I cannot even conceive of what the other consequences might be if we actually did it. I recommend reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and taking some environmental science courses to better understand the impacts that even small changes can have on the earth and its ecosystems.

[Templar Knight]

This sounds akin to one of Nikola Tesla's more zany ideas. Interesting in theory, but not really practical to actually test. I mean, he claimed with the right set of sufficiently powerful, properly placed, and precisely timed explosions one could split the Earth in two. Good luck to anyone trying to prove that one.

 

At the time, it may have sounded plausible give how obsessed so many were with the "Cult of the Atom", but based on our data today, you'd be more likely to get this sort of cooling effect more reliably if a Supervolcano were to go off and kick up enough ash and gases into the atmosphere to the point where it actually blocks some measure of solar radiation and heat and causes global cooling via that method. Its why the Earth has been a snowball planet at least a couple times in its history (as a species, we've never seen such a thing, but geologically the Earth has seen it).

 

As for the suspicious circumstances surrounding the research and it being silenced, this was also the height of the Cold War. Nobody in the US government, especially no the miltary, was going to be appreciative of an idea that actually promoted cutting back military spending, rockets tests, or nuclear development. Because even if this could be construed as a very mild and technical criticism of these kinds of tests, it would be criticism and possible advocation towards their shut down, nonetheless.

 

Or the DoD simply didn't care, they had bigger problems than to pursue research into what probably would have been looked at as an outlandish theory (or simply a theory that held little strategic value to them), even then. Especially since the main guy pushing for research of it died.