Repress a childish hope long enough and it returns in disguise. The official line I took with myself was that I went to the Fuller show because I’d become interested in weather-modification ideas, specifically hurricane-modification ideas, and the show seemed, contextually, relevant enough. Hurricane modification—which is more or less what it sounds like—is, like Fulleriana, a nice mix of straight-up science and armchair fantasies of disaster aversion and total world control.

In large part because weather-modification projects in this country have such a carnival-barker past, they’ve received virtually no federal funding for the past thirty years. But an increase in weather disasters is unearthing some once-dead notions. The spectrum of pieties around Hurricane Katrina, for example, ran from see-the-just-destruction-of-a-city-of-sin to here’s-another-fine-mess-you-selfish-gas-guzzlers-have-gotten-us-into. There’s a ponderable kernel in the misguided logic that finds divine justice in the amoral workings of nature. Our decades of heedlessly dumping CO₂ into the atmosphere have proved to be the largest (and, for what it’s worth, least intentional) weather-modification experiment ever imagined. Among the unanticipated progeny of this unstewarded project are superhurricanes: stronger, more destructive, premium-fueled by warmer sea-surface temperatures. We’re considerably past the point of deciding whether or not to steal fire from the gods.¹

1. Or maybe stronger and more destructive hurricanes don’t exist. As is the admirable way with science, arguments still abound over just how to read the data, how to understand the holes in the data, etc. But an expectation of future superhurricanes is the way the scientific community is leaning, and research published in the August 3 issue of Nature shows that the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes at present is greater than at any other time in the past millennium.

Intentionally modifying the weather—desanctifying as “natural” the doped-up Spaceship Earth’s current veerings—might not be so doomed and ludicrous an idea after all. Trying to weaken a superhurricane would be treating the symptom rather than the cause, but seeing as most scientists agree that even if we didn’t emit a single molecule more of CO₂ into the atmosphere we’d still see continued warming for decades, a grain or two of aspirin for the fever is at least tenable as part of a long-term treatment plan. Of course, familiar as we are with Frankenstein, that most hearkened to of our technology fables, we fear the bumbling creation of monsters even more hideous than those we’ve already got. Our Earth, captained by scientists? Even my kind and relatively levelheaded dad—or so I like to think of him—often ate his ice cream with a fork. When showering he never remembered to put the shower curtain inside the tub, and it was always my mom who would notice, and clean up, the resultant flood. Again and again.