It is obvious the writer has done his homework on an oft-times strange part of the climate story.
From The Baffler, July 9:
Climate conspiracies anticipated both right-wing denialism and the new end times
Matt Lauer announced on the January 11, 2000, broadcast of NBC’s The Today Show:
Sixty-degree weather in New York City just last week. Violent storms across Europe two weeks ago. And now the government says the 1990s were the hottest decade in a thousand years. It’s enough to make us all wonder what’s going on.
Joining Lauer on air that morning were Art Bell—the host of Coast to Coast AM and godfather of late-night paranoid radio—and Whitley Strieber—a ufologist and author, whose 1987 book Communion was a nonfiction account of his own alleged alien abduction. They were there to promote their coauthored new book, The Coming Global Superstorm. Billed as both “speculative fiction based on fact” and “documented reality” by its authors, the book predicted climate change would soon produce a catastrophic storm with civilization-destroying potential. Lauer pressed the authors, gesturing first toward Bell, “Not a meteorologist?” And then Strieber, “Not a meteorologist?” No, they were “informed amateurs,” Bell quipped. “Who are not climatologists,” Lauer clarified again.
Their lack of expertise aside, Bell and Strieber wanted their book to be a warning. Strieber deflected Lauer’s critiques, arguing that while “[maybe] this won’t happen . . . the point is that we need science to be able to tell us what’s going on right now” because of the clip at which they believed the winds were changing. As Bell said, “It should scare people!” (Coming Global Superstorm was adapted to film in 2004 in the mega-disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow.) But in the year before their Today appearance, Bell had spent a lot of airtime signaling Y2K’s impending doom. With this new book, Lauer asked, did he not run the risk of “sounding like the radio host cried wolf?” After a beat, Bell responded:
We spent, worldwide, $250 billion on [preventing] Y2K, so it was an event that was warned about and was mitigated. I assume that you own a home, you probably pay insurance. When your house doesn’t catch on fire and burn down, do you feel like you have egg on your face when you pay the insurance premium?
Lauer laughed, concluding that he “better go out and pay [his] insurance on this one.”
Today, when you think of conspiracy theories and climate change, your first thought is likely of skeptical cranks sparring with scientists over the veracity of data about rising sea levels and surface air temperatures. Recent studies suggest that anywhere between 15 and 40 percent of respondents reject the scientific consensus that climate change is both real and the consequence of human actions. The common wisdom is that conspiratorial ideation and denialism go hand in hand and, moreover, are directly linked to the far right.
But a more idiosyncratic, even sinister, form of environmental awareness lurks in many conspiracy theories. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the conspiratorial zeitgeist teemed with ideas about anthropogenic climate change and so-called “Earth changes.” Across airwaves and early computer message boards there was a growing sense that something was going on. By the mid-1990s, Art Bell’s radio show, with between ten and fifteen million nightly listeners, was a flashpoint for all things conspiratorial. Of the many theories concerned with the climate, two of them typified the climatic conspiracy theorizing of the time.
On the one hand were fears that the American government was deliberately altering the climate. To win the Cold War, yes, but that victory expanded the state’s draconian power. The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), originally a joint initiative by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research in rural Alaska, was the catalyst for much speculation (and in the shadow of real experiments in militarized weather modification, speculation wasn’t necessarily so far-fetched). On the other hand, a Y2K-inflected, millenarian contingent believed that the world teetered on the precipice of biblical cataclysm. Present-day prophets tethered natural disasters to human folly, warning that humanity writ-large had lost the plot.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have documented, the American political establishment was contesting the legitimacy of climate change. In previous decades, the environment was largely a bipartisan issue; Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth report was a serious, if misguided, touchstone for ecologically curious policymakers. But with the Cold War’s end, climate policy was perceived less as a national issue worked out for the sake of the world, and instead as a world issue imposed upon nations. Without the Soviet Union, anxiety about socialism was directed at the U.S. state itself, intensifying criticisms of government overreach and further shifting the Republican’s party line. Fred Singer, a prominent scientist and fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s, played a key role in dismissing ozone depletions as “localized and temporary,” insisting that chlorofluorocarbons had nothing to do with the “natural [variations]” in Earth’s atmosphere. Singer and a handful of other scientists—referred to by George H.W. Bush as “my scientists”—repeatedly teamed with think tanks and private corporations to refute the scientific evidence in the mainstream while “merchandising doubt.” The fact was that their efforts were inseparable from the United States’ resistance to being bound by external treaties in a moment of unipolarity. Together, these so-called experts sowed the seeds of politicized denialism that are now coming to fruition.
Yet the conspiracies flowing from the halls of power did not always square with peoples’ experiences. Radio waves cast into the dead of the night carried a strange, collective political behavior. Theories of intentional weather modification and looming apocalypse pushed back on officially ordained consensus reality. They also reimagined what it meant to be a public: these ideas reflected the growing divide between the people and the state at the turn of the century and the alienation in which Americans learned to bowl alone (the titular emblem of Robert Putnam’s eulogy for the nation’s communal and democratic participation). The environment has always been political, just not always in ways that are legible today.
“I’m going to characterize [HAARP] in two different ways,” Nick Begich Jr. told Bell on a December 1, 1995, broadcast of Coast. “First, let’s talk about what the military says it is, and then let’s talk about what our research indicates that it is.”....
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If interested see also the U.S. Air Force's paper: ""Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025"—U.S. Air Force" and:
- "Manipulating the Climate: What Are the Geopolitical Risks?
- U.S. Army Mad Scientist Blog: "Shén fēng: Military Use of Weather Modification Technology"
The head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization claims Israel is 'working to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain,' insisting this was confirmed by an Iranian scientific study; but head of Iran's meteorological service says 'it is not possible for a country to steal clouds.'...MORE
