He scoffed at the pluviculturists who preceded him as he set his brew of twenty three chemicals aflame on the tower to the East of San Diego. They had no idea what they were doing with their canons and exploding balloons... they were more likely to start prairie fires than bring rain. He claimed to be beyond such pseudo-science.
In December of 1915 San Diego's long drought continued with no end in sight. The expanding city relied mostly on the Morena Reservoir about fifty miles to the East. A reservoir that was getting dangerously low. A worried civic club pressed the local government for action and brought in Charles Hatfield - a sewing machine salesman who had a rain-making business on the side.
Hatfield had some successes and failures. It wasn't science - his real ability was timing storms and knowing how to publicize success and downplay failure. He played customers like lottery players.. hearing a few successes convinced them they'd win too. He offered to raise the reservoir level by ten inches for a thousand dollars an inch .. payable after the rains fell. It seemed like a reasonable deal and before the end of the year he shock hands with city officials.
By the beginning of 1916 he had a twenty foot tower near the reservoir and started to burn what observers described as "smelling if a Limburger cheese factory had set on fire". What no one knew was a weather pattern was setting up that would bring a river of water - over forty inches - to the mountains of Southern California over the next month.
In a few days light rains began to fall. Hatfield continued burning his chemicals. By mid-month the rains had become intense. The reservoir passed the agreed upon goal - at least for awhile until the dam broke with a wall of water killing dozens of people. Separately the San Diego river left its bank with the flood destroying homes, businesses, railroad tracks and stock and farmland.
Hatfield couldn't understand why the city didn't want to pay. After all, he had met his goal. But the agreement was just a verbal handshake. The city offered a counter proposal.. damage was estimated at over ten million dollars. He could take credit and they'd pay him the ten thousand, but he'd have to pay the ten million in damages. It went to the courts. Weather, they ruled, was an act of God.
Except it isn't.
The human-caused component of global warming has been on a dramatic rise for the past forty years and is now pushing past normal variation. The weird weather we've been seeing for the past few years is likely to only intensify. It raises an interesting question. Some of the poorest parts of the world have done the least to cause it, but will take the worst damage over the next few decades. Do we think about responsibility for individual events?
Until recently scientists have been careful to not link any single weather event to global warming. They talk in terms of variation with a rising mean - something lost on most people. But now it is possible to create attributions using historic data and computer models. Recently the German weather agency was able to show last month's heatwave was twice as likely to have been explained by global warming than by natural variation. The work was one in three days. The approach is sound and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts will attribute extreme events like heatwaves and floods to human caused global warming offering reports within a few days of the event.
Some of the attribution can be done with better than 90% confidence .. much better than many medical diagnoses. Localized events like tornadoes are too challenging at this point and many parts of the world lack rich enough histories, but we're on the edge of solid and sobering results. It could be very useful in countries that accept empirical results.
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