Fixing the Sky: Rube Goldberg meets Dr. Strangelove

James Rodger Fleming, Colby College

4:30 pm, Thursday, October 13, 2011, Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)

Fixing the Sky (Columbia University Press, 2010), has been chosen as the winner of this year's Sally Hacker Prize by the Society for the History of Technology. The Sally Hacker Prize is awarded to recognize the best book in the history of technology directed to a broad audience of readers, including students and the interested public.

With geoengineers proposing to “fix” the climate system to reduce global warming, the number of wild proposals in this field has been proliferating. Shade the planet by launching a solar shield into orbit. Shoot sulfates or into the upper atmosphere, turning the blue sky milky white. Fertilize the oceans, turning the blue seas soupy green. Some proposals are idealistic, perhaps hopelessly so; others are quite humorous, many that use military equipment are quite ominous; but are any really feasible?

In this presentation I examine the history of geoengineering since the late nineteenth century and its role in public policy.  In addition to fixes proposed and actually attempted, I pay special attention to visual semiotics of imaginaries—William Gibson’s phantasmagoric “fragments of the mass dream”—as mediated today through the not-so-rosy lenses of climate angst and apprehension.

James Rodger Fleming is a historian of science and technology and professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003 and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2010.
 
He recently held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution and the AAAS Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship while in residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This year (2011) he is the Gordon Cain Conference Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the H. Burr Steinbach Visiting Scholar at the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science.
 
His books include Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, 2010), The Callendar Effect (American Meteorological Society, 2007), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Recent co-edited volumes include Intimate Universality (Science History/USA, 2006), Globalizing Polar Science (Palgrave, 2010), and Osiris 26 Klima (2011).
 
He enjoys fishing, good jazz, good BBQ, seeing students flourish, building the community of historians of the geosciences, and connecting the history of science and technology with public policy. He is currently writing a biography of the CO2 molecule and an account of the emergence of the modern atmospheric sciences.