WAS MARK TWAIN ON THE TAKE FROM STANDARD OIL ?

ANTHROPOCENE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR  EXPOSES VICTORIAN WRITER'S GEOENGINEERING INVESTMENT 

Kudos to Alan Robock for identifying the first climate change activist, Mark Twain, who wrote in

The American Claimant :

 An American Claimant  character
  adjusts his analog climate model:

[B]ased upon hard, practical scientific laws… I have conceived the stupendous idea of reorganizing the climates of the earth according to the desire of the populations interested. That is to say, I will furnish climates to order, for cash or negotiable paper, taking the old climates in part payment, of course, at a fair discount...

My studies have convinced me that the regulation of climates and the breeding of new varieties at will from the old stock is a feasible thing. Indeed I am convinced that it has been done before; done in prehistoric times by now forgotten and unrecorded civilizations. 

Everywhere I find hoary evidences of artificial manipulation of climates in bygone times. Take the glacial period. Was that produced by accident? Not at all; it was done for money. I have a thousand proofs of it, and will… take up all the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland... while they are cheap. 

It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature... I have said enough to give you an idea of the prodigious nature of my scheme and the feasible and enormously profitable character of it.”

 Twain foresaw the rise of  Climate Model Intercomparison Projects with equal clarity. In Life On The Mississippi  he observed that given the radical adjustment of the river's course by the Yankee Corps of Engineers:

“Any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token, any person can see that 700 and 42 years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo & New Orleans will have joined their streets together & be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor & a mutual board of aldermen. 

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”