Climate—disordered

This 1948 gem imagines a world where weather is just another commodity to be traded, manipulated, and weaponized in the battle for tourist dollars. Wiley Cordes, a hotshot publicity man, is hired to save the struggling resort town of Wheedonville by the Sea. His solution: manufacture snow over rival Burden Bay, making their ski slopes look like a frozen wasteland while Wheedonville basks in its artificially maintained sunshine. The satire bites hard, Merwin understood that advertising is about perception, and that business competition can metastasize into something far uglier. When Burden Bay figures out what happened and fires back with their own weather machines, both towns end up buried in the snow they created. It's a neat little parable about escalation and the fragility of competitive advantage, and it reads now like an uncanny preview of arguments we'll be having for decades.