We’re big fans here of Eli Kintisch’s new book Hack the Planet…and now you can read some of it, thanks to an exclusive online excerpt over at Wired.com. A brief excerpt of the excerpt:

The idea of deliberately manipulating the weather or the climate is an especially powerful notion. We equate weather with mood because our bodies are so affected by temperature and moisture and light. Storms trouble our minds as well as threaten our coasts. Climate is our experience of the weather over time and space, the way weather shapes our summers or our neighborhoods. To control climate — especially now, at a time when it seems so unpredictable — promises stability and peace for us and our children.

The seductive idea of weather and climate control has been a constant trope in the human imagination. The sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest conjures bad weather to drive his enemy’s boat ashore. In the 1985 film Brewster’s Millions, Montgomery Brewster, played by Richard Pryor, invests in a scheme to haul icebergs to the Middle East to provide water. Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air and rain, our control fantasies are strong….

Of course we can’t tame this planet. Not in the next few decades, when we might have to. We may have to try, but attempting to dictate how much solar energy strikes the planet is a dangerous endeavor, perhaps involving just as much chance as our current course. Being forced to geoengineer would be a dismal fate. It would be the solution we deserve, as a friend put it. One finds one’s ten-year-old son smoking a cigarette? Put him in the closet and make him smoke the whole pack.

You can read more here, and buy the book here….