The catalog of techniques on the third page just looks like a list of environmental disasters nowadays.

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Climate Control Is Coming

If Spain could have subdued the devastating storm that swept its Armada from the English Channel in July 1588. would all the Americas be speaking Spanish today?

If Napoleon’s proud legions could have neutralized Russia’s secret ally, “General Snow” how would the map of Europe look now?

If the Nazis could have ordered gales to batter Gen. Eisenhower’s vast invasion force off Normandy on June 6, 1944, what would historians now be writing about World War II?

Armchair strategists have long de- bated the tantalizing “ifs” introduced into history by the vagaries of weather. In military operations, weather is usually a potent foe or a mighty ally. Read the rest of this entry »

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BUBBLE TROUBLE ON TAP

By Volta Torrey

We use 320 billion gallons of water a day but by 1970 pollutants may cut our ration NOT LONG AGO, a woman in Long Island, N.Y., was filling a cooking pot with water from her kitchen tap. Suddenly the pot foamed over with crisp, white suds.

These suds, she knew, were caused by synthetic detergents that had drifted over from neighborhood septic tanks and were adulterating her well. Since the sudsy water is distasteful, she uses tap water only for cooking and washing. She buys drinking water in bottles in another town for herself and her family.
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HOW SCIENCE WILL HELP US GET RID OF Our Mountain of Junk

Researchers are developing astonishing ways to deal with one of man’s stickiest problems—taking out the garbage
By C. P. GILMORE
ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAY PIOCH

Some of the most exciting ideas and devices I’ve seen and heard of lately are designed to deal with one of the least exciting substances in existence —garbage. Thousands of top scientists and engineers around the country are turning their talents toward just one goal: getting rid of the tidal wave of junk that threatens to drown us and, at the same time, salvaging at least some of the millions of tons of valuable materials that we toss into our garbage cans each year.
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“Fog-Drip” May Hold Key to Drought Relief

by CALVIN FRAZER

Scientists, spurred on by last summer’s disastrous drought, are still vainly seeking a method of controlling rainfall. In some parts of the world fog is a more important source of moisture than rain, and various methods, as described here by Mr. Frazer, have been proposed to make fog yield water during arid seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

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Will Polar Waves Swamp America?

Engineer Brown fears the vast Antarctic icecap may upset the world and drown us in a great flood at any moment!

By West Peterson

FARMER Williams was plowing the field back of his red barn in central Indiana shortly before noon. A few more furrows and he could quit for lunch. Then above the regular clatter of his tractor he heard an ominous, ground-shaking rumble. He turned on the tractor seat— and saw a towering mountain of water roaring down upon him.
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Spectacular Tests with Rubber Balls and Wax Show

How the Ice Age May Return

By Gaylord Johnson

WHEN we speak of the glacial period, or ice age, we are apt to think of it as over and done with for good—as unlikely to return on earth as the prehistoric dinosaur. When we see scratched and. grooved rocks showing the terrific grinding power of the mile-thick ice sheet that once covered the northern part of our temperate zone, we never think of what might happen to New York, Chicago, Boston, Leningrad, London, and all our other northern cities, if the conditions should return which produced the age of ice in the Northern Hemisphere.
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MIRACLES Worked by Engineers in Endless Fight for Water

By JESSE F. GELDERS

SEARING the fields of forty states, one of the worst droughts in the history of the Weather Bureau gripped the United States during the summer and fall of last year. Growing corn blistered to husks. Rivers ran dry. The contents of reservoirs, supplying great cities, sank lower day by day. Officials rationed water like war-time food and millions of people, who had taken this common fluid for granted, realized suddenly it was immensely precious.

In some places, miracles of engineering skill brought new supplies in the nick of time. Less fortunate were a number of smaller towns. With no water left anywhere within reach of their pipelines, they virtually had to have little lakes shipped to them by railway, the water coming in long trains of tank cars.
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Very interesting article about pollution in the nations bodies of water. It would be another 34 years before the clean water act was passed. No doubt if you dig deep enough you’ll find that it was Prescott Bush and his faithful advisor Pappy Rove who caused this problem with their “Healthy Rivers” act.

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Death Lurks in the River

by Huntington Stone

Cellulose and sawdust pollution in the North Atlantic, acid pollution in the Middle Atlantic, malaria in the Coastal plain, soil erosion in the Piedmont plateau, unpalatable water in the South East—this is the dangerous condition of our coastal and inland waterways. This story tells what the government’s special floating laboratory is doing about it

WE HEAR much about pollution. Conservationists inform us that the defiling of our inland and coastal water is causing a serious health menace to human as well as to aquatic life at an alarming rate. The life or death of every type of American fresh water fish is involved: bass, trout, pickerel, pike, perch, crappie, catfish, carp, sturgeon, salmon, whitefish and many others. Our own health, particularly that of our children, is involved.
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Can you guess what song is now stuck in my head?

“It’s raining trout. Hallelujah it’s raining trout!”

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It’s Raining Baby Trout

By Claude M. Kreider

LAST SUMMER almost 3,000,000 baby trout “rained down” over 662 blue lakes in California’s lofty Sierras.

This was not a miracle of nature brought about by the storm clouds hovering over the high peaks. It was a manmade phenomenon, the result of a long experiment in modern trout culture and the planting of fish by airplane.

For many years Sierra lakes, barren of fish life, and other lakes heavily fished, were stocked with trout by the use of pack mules, each carrying two 10-gallon cans of baby fish. Many were lost in transport, others injured. The packers had to stop often along the rough trails to replenish the water in the cans and thus provide the necessary oxygen to keep the fish alive.

Often there was no trail, even for the sure-footed mules, and the men had to complete the journey carrying the cans upon their backs. Several days were often required for one journey. And the cost was prohibitive, averaging almost $20 per thousand trout.
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Very interesting if somewhat optimistic article about weather prediction and control. Their secret weapon is a new computer with an very impressive (for the time) 20K of memory which will allow them to predict the weather and model the effects of any potential interventions.

To show just how off they were in terms of necessary processing power, check out the list of Weather Modeling machines on the the top 500 supercomputer list. The fastest has 1020 processors and 4TB of memory.

My favorite of their weather control techniques has to be creating giant oil slicks off the Florida coast and setting them on fire to deflect a hurricane.

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We CAN Control the Weather!

The electronic computer makes it possible, says Dr. Zworykin, scientist.

BY WILLIAM WINTER, based on an interview with DR. VLADIMIR K. ZWORYKIN, Vice President and Technical Consultant, RCA Laboratories

WHEN Mark Twain made his famous quip that everyone talked about the weather but that no one ever did anything about it, he had no way of knowing that the science of electronics, even then in its infancy, not only would promise a revolution in forecasting but would show the way to actually control the elements.

Yes, thanks to electronics we soon will be able to predict in a few minutes the weather for several days ahead. Even more important, man may be able to prevent the development of hurricanes and other violent storms, or divert them, prevent killing frosts, eliminate local fogs, and even cause rain to fall in regions of drought. The benefits to aviation and agriculture alone would be tremendous, to say nothing of the direct savings in lives and property.
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Yup, global warming is a just a crazy, new theory.

Carbon Dioxide Heats the Earth
DR. E. O. HULBURT, physicist of the naval research laboratory, Washington, has found conclusive mathematical evidence that the earth’s temperature is being warmed by the increased amount of carbon dioxide present in the air. Smoke stacks emit huge volumes of this gas, which is also found in the breath and waste products of humans and animals.

It’s been quite a while since a company would use an image of factories spewing carbon dust into the atmosphere in a positive context for one of their ads.

Of course at the CEI they just call it life.

These furnaces are a long way from a tire maker’s plant, yet they are an important part of the rubber industry. They’re at Ville Platte, Louisiana, and they are making carbon black to add toughness and mileage to the nation’s truck and automobile tires.

But Ville Platte’s carbon black represents only a part of Cabot production. From the pine timber country of Florida, to the alfalfa fields of the Rio Grande valley and the natural gas fields of Texas, Oklahoma and West Virginia, Cabot Companies are at work providing essential raw materials for American industry.
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