December 1, 2022 • 44 mins
The story of weather forecasting is the story of how humans came to think they could predict the future. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at the history of meteorology, and the story of a revolutionary cloud scientist who tried to control the weather.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. Calculations, weather maps, old barometer readings, strange
weather lately right tragic weather, catastrophic weather, Snowmageddon, heat apocalypse.
(00:42):
It always makes me think of something attributed to Mark Twain.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Better check the forecast tonight a dangerous what your storm
is bearing down on the East Coast with blizzard warnings
issued for the New York City area and Boston? Would geez?
I hope people would be okay. I might as well
(01:04):
catch up on my reading. I've been going through old
issues of Poor Richard's Almanac. Let's see seventeen fifty three.
In the preface, Benjamin Franklin looks back at twenty years
of publishing his Poor Richard's Almanacs, and it makes this
pretty corny joke about how no matter what weather he
predicted day to day, year after year, his prediction was right.
(01:26):
At least he predicted the right weather. Somewhere in the world.
In the eighteenth century, no one could really predict the weather,
not like today. Tens of millions are in the path
of this nor easter, that could bring record snowfall and
coastal flooding. Time to Betten down the hatches and then
escape over the threshold to a radio booth in New
(01:48):
York during another terrible snowstorm more than half a century ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, A good morning to you. This is
John Cameron's ways in the NBC news room in New
York over to the deal of the storm area. Today,
the forecast is for better weather, which is encouraging news
to many. Thousands of people will have the tales of
this top subject during the broadcast. The Great Blizzard of
(02:10):
nineteen forty seven hit New York the day after Christmas.
If you were in its path, you likely lost power
and couldn't listen to the radio or watch television. Life
magazine printed photographs of people skiing through the streets. Movie
theaters ran news ural reports very much in the style
of the newsural reports from the Second World War, which
(02:31):
it only just ended. Friday, December twenty six, nineteen forty seven,
It's a blank white Friday in New York City. As
a snow plot burst, as it's officially called, dumps two
inches of snow an hour on the top. I've always
been fascinated by how much weather reporting has in common
with war reporting, as if the weather were an enemy
(02:52):
to be battled, but so formidable that the weather nearly
always wins. This time, the enemy had conducted a sneak attack.
New Yorkers were blindsided. As many as thirty thousand cars
had to be abandoned by their drivers. It was a
six million dollar object to make New York streets passable again.
The storm extended from the nation's capital to northern Maine,
(03:14):
but it was New York and its suburbs that or
the brunt of the fall. He officially recorded twenty six inches,
was five more inches than the historic blizzard. For most
of human history, people would wake up in the morning,
look up in the sky, have a good idea, a
reasonable idea about what the day might bring, but no
idea what tomorrow would bring. Today, I look on my phone.
(03:37):
I can see the weather anywhere in the world, hour
by hour, for the next week. I have an oracle
in my back pocket, a tiny god. It's a kind
of thing, a form of technology, a type of knowledge
that I tend to put in a category in my
head that says, brought to you by NASA or a
product of the space race, and partly that's true. The
(03:58):
weather app on my iPhone is a product of war,
of all the wars of the twentieth century. I'd like
to know what does it mean that I carry around
in my back pocket this little instrument of war. What
does it mean to have at my fingertips the knowledge
of what weather is going to happen next everywhere? How
has it changed the world to have this knowledge, to
(04:21):
take it for granted even and there was one statistic
that will probably stand ninety nine million tons of snow
fella New York in sixteen dollars. Welcome to the Last Archive.
The show about how we know what we know and
why it seems lately as if we don't know anything
at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season is all about
(04:43):
common knowledge, what everyone knows or thinks they know, knowledge
people share in common. This episode the weather. Everyone's always
talking about it, but nobody ever does anything about it,
or do they. It's a big, messy, uncertain world, looking
up to the skies, to the heavens and trying to
(05:04):
read in the clouds signs of what might happen next.
Snow rain, a beautiful day it's an elemental curiosity. It's
also an urgent one. You can see why forecasting the
weather is a lynchpin of wartime planning. The weather can
determine if you live or die, whether your crops fail,
your boat sinks, you run out of water, you lose
(05:25):
your home in a flood. Then there are the more
ordinary matters Janet an umbrella today. I I love the
idea that I can know what's coming next. It's a comfort,
but it's also strange, as if we could find such
certainty in such an uncertain world. In the US, weather
(05:45):
records go pretty far back. For centuries, farmers, factory workers,
all sorts of ordinary people recorded the weather, little jottings
and diaries. Mostly people also consulted farmers almanacs to look
for weather predictions. There, something bigger started to happen, though,
in the eighteen forties, a national data collection project headed
(06:05):
up by a new national institution, the Smithsonian. I've got
a graduate student, Adelaide Mandeville, working on a history dissertation
about all of this, and I called her up and
she explained to me what the Smithsonian had been trying
to do and how it depended on the telegraph system.
Working with the telegraph companies, they enlist one hundred and
(06:28):
fifty volunteers in the first year to start sending in
their local weather observations, and then the Smithsonian takes all
of that and maps it, and then eighteen seventy I
think they make the first national weather agency. So that's
when it becomes a federal project. For a long time,
(06:51):
that project relied on hundreds, even thousands of volunteers who
sent in their local weather observations. And as one meteorologist
said in eighteen seventy nine, anyone could do it. There
is one science which is within the grasp of every mine,
and which to be successfully cultivated requires no pre operation,
the science of rain and fine weather, but which now
(07:13):
received the higher title of meteorology. By the end of
the nineteenth century, experts were taking over. Eventually, the work
of predicting the weather moved to the US Signal Service,
and then in eighteen ninety one Congress created the Weather Bureau.
It was a division of the Department of Agriculture. The
(07:34):
chief of this new Weather Bureau, he didn't just oversee
the collection of weather records. He was supposed to forecast
storms and droughts and floods, anything that would affect agriculture
or industry or commerce. The whole scheme had a kind
of citizen science quality to it. The Weather Bureau wanted
to make meteorology common knowledge, to teach people about the
(07:55):
latest instruments. It installed little weather kiosks in twenty nine
cities out their own city sidewalks. There were these boxes
with maps and charts, thermometers and barometers. What the Weather
beer really wanted was newspapers to print weather maps, but
before that happened, the weather report went out in a
different way. As Adelaide Manville explained to me, the post
(08:19):
office in the early twentieth century, they were responsible for
delivering weather forecasts with the mail, but there was an
issue because they would go out at seven am, that's
when the mail was delivered, and the forecast. Each day,
new information came in at ten am, so it was
always a little delayed, and the weather forecasters sort of
(08:40):
got a reputation for not being super accurate. But then
they had these, you know, really really helpful and important
forecasts where they warned towns that there was going to
be a huge flood or hurricane and people were able
to evacuate then once radio started in the nineteen twenties,
you could hear the weather forecast over the wireless. We'll
(09:01):
give you that everywhether we put forecasting had by now
gotten more accurate than it had ever been before. That's
because of advances made just before the First World War,
when a Norwegian meteorologist recorded the weather across Europe. Then
(09:25):
during the war, his son, working for the military, discovered
the nature of the movement of masses of cold and
warm air. He called these fronts like battlefronts, except the weather.
An English mathematician also involved in the war effort, used
their data and those ideas to devise a mathematical model
(09:45):
to predict the weather. Unfortunately it didn't work. Still, the
idea too cold, that there should be a model, and
that if only you could do the calculations fast enough,
you could predict the weather. So right, Doing that got
a lot easier after computers were invented, and here's the
latest weather report. Nothing advances science like war. During the
(10:08):
Second World War, those mathematical models got better and better,
and by the end of the war you could use
computers to run those calculations, so finally you could make
your predictions faster than the speed of weather. If you
could get ahead of the storm, you could get ahead
of the enemy. Weather forecasting becomes critical to military strategy
(10:31):
during the war, and they're developing these new technologies to
syst them in doing that, so like radar and these
aircraft controls and more extensive data collection systems and all
that does make them better at forecasting. By nineteen forty seven,
Americans had gotten used to the idea that, especially if
(10:52):
there were a really big storm coming, they'd know it
in advance. Nearly twenty six inchines have fallen a record
unequal in the analyst of the Weather Bureau. But really
it wasn't the scale of that storm that was the
strangest thing about it. The strangest thing about it was
that it was so unexpected. When you wake up in
(11:13):
the morning and you open up an eye, if you
turn on the mark and you look through the sky
and won the weather who he is a weather or
dry who knows the weather man? And here's the latest
weather report? Extreme cold temperature below zero. In the nineteen fifties,
when Americans started buying televisions and real numbers, they could
(11:34):
flip a switch and hear a forecast, sometimes a goofy one.
A lot of early TV forecasts came in the form
of cartoons. Some of them involved puppets. One was sponsored
by Botany Neckties and featured a little wooly lamb. No
recordings of the song exists, so we found the lyrics
and made our own. It's cold, it's rain, it's fair,
(11:57):
it's all mixed up together. But I, as Botany's little lamp,
predict tomorrow's weather. I love how silly these early weather
reports were. But this goofiness didn't last long. Pretty quickly,
in those post war years, television weather forecasting left lambs
behind and settled into the style we still have today.
(12:22):
Weather today, Montana in a real state of deep breeze,
about forty eight degrees near Helena, stormy along the Gulf
of Mexico and Texas, A sober looking fellow in a
suit and tie, part sportscaster, part scientist. Generally, however, here
in New York and alt in Chicago, something resembling springtime.
Fifty eighth degrees here in New York this afternoon. It's
(12:43):
really a pretty big country after all, lots of weather.
The buttoned up weatherman and his straight up forecast. This
was a wartime offshoot products of the Army in the Navy.
The earliest national television weather forecast was made by Fellow
who had had training in meteorology during the war. A
lot of soldiers and sailors had gotten that kind of training.
(13:04):
And when you look at it even today, a modern
weather report, the map, the pointer, the symbols, the presentation,
it's like a military briefing. Right, let me get the
weather Bureau here, we said to the brother James, are there.
In nineteen fifty two, NBC launched The Today Show. That's
weather forecast. Do you understand? Right in the Weather Bureau
where they make the stuff? And already for you. Go ahead, Jim,
(13:26):
I'll put it on a map. The Today Show's anchor,
Dave Garroway in suit and bow tie. He's on the
phone with a guy from the Weather Bureau. He's in
a studio kitted out with all kinds of Jim crackery,
a giant telephone, a microphone the size of a broomstick
hanging down his front, a bank of blinking television monitors,
very high tech, nineteen fifty style. But then the telephone
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in one hand, he's got a piece of chalk in
his other hand, and he starts writing the weather on
a big chalkboard with a map of the country drawn
on it. Ar it turns to rain in Pennsylvania about
thirty two up here, crazing dribble. He's not God, this
guy here, he is every morning telling you what your
(14:11):
day will be like, and for the most part, earning
your trust. I think, having lived through some of this era,
there was also something so seemingly simple about it. You
get the weather report in the morning, you put on
your wind breaker, you had out expecting rain, You get
on with your day. There was a Cold War going on,
the world might end in a blink an atomic bomb,
(14:31):
the end of life on Earth. But hey, you knew
enough at least that you needed a wind breaker. Today.
I want to know your forecast is very good, because
it's raining right here in New York. All those long
years of the Cold War, though, the nineteen fifties, the
nineteen sixties, there was something else going on. For one thing,
the weather forecasting was pretty good, reliable, useful, but it
(14:53):
had stopped getting much better each war. The First World War,
the Second World War, the Cold War had advanced the
science of meteorology, but whether as folklore proverbs that goofiness
that started with poor Richard's Almanac went down to the
singing lamb that was still around two in a way.
You can see it. In one little town in America.
(15:16):
In nineteen seventy, the morning a long time once again
for the KRSBO got Report, the official for Rosebery. Yes
you heard that right, the Mount Nebo Goat Report. In
a city of Rosberg, Oregon. They went old school. The
local news started issuing forecasts by reporting on the position
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of a herd of goats up on a mountain outside
town Mount Nebo. And I know this sounds crazy, but
you really can use sheep and goats to predict the weather.
They're pretty accurate. There's no end of proverbs about this phenomenon.
When sheep gather in a huddle, tomorrow will have a puddle.
That's true. And so the KRSB Mount Nebo Goat reports
(16:03):
game this morning at about six thirty am. Man at
the moment, we have someone scattered goats under an intenthi
go to pressure system. Goats arranging this morning about the
mid mountain three quarters of the way upound people. Thus
we will have a beautiful Juan morning. Once you get
what I think is going on here is a kind
of back to nature vibe. But there's something else here too,
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an anti war vibe, the idea that maybe the weather
isn't brought to you by the military, Maybe the weather
isn't the enemy. Maybe the weather could also just be
goats up on a hill. Then too, there's a sense
here of the chaos of climate. By the nineteen seventies,
meteorologists we're talking about the butterfly effect, the idea that
a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the
(16:49):
world could have an effect on a weather system on
the other side of the world. That wasn't really a
new idea in the nineteen seventies. It had first appeared
in a meteorology journal in nineteen eighteen during the First
World War, about a different insect, a grasshopper in Idaho,
might conceivably initiate a storm movement which would sweep across
the continent and destroy New York City. It was a
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very scary thought. It got much scarier somehow in the
nineteen seventies, in the middle of the Vietnam War. The
weather is chaos. It's complicated, so formidably intricate. A set
of innumerable forces, intersecting and infinite ways. The system can
never be reduced to any mathematical model, not perfectly anyway.
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But what if we didn't have to understand all that complexity.
What if instead of trying to model or predict the weather,
we could just control it. That story after the break.
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This is an airport weather station here with our charts
and their instruments and trying to predict tomorrow's weather. Quite
often they succeed. In nineteen fifty eight, CBS News reported
on the latest research in the field of meteorology. The
fact is that we don't know very much about the
(18:19):
forces that create the weather. Therefore we can always predict
without proceed Consider some of the things we don't know.
Consider this cloud. The Cold War, the age of the
atomic bomb, had given rise to a revolution and atmospheric sciences,
and still no one really understood the workings of weather.
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What exactly produces high winds, a hurricane, a tornado, a blizzard?
Was it a butterfly on the other side of the world?
What causes rain? How to clouds form? At the time,
the field was on the verge of a major breakthrough
in the work of a scientist named Joanne Malchus. CBS
featured her research in its look at the Latest goings
(19:01):
on in Meteorology. Doctor Maltho was studying a tiny but
very important part of weather, a cloud. Joanne Melchis, better
known by a later married name, Joanne Simpson, was the
first woman in the United States to earn a PhD
in meteorology. Her whole career came out of the Second
(19:22):
World War. She was always interested in flying and sailing
and math, but didn't really have an interest in science
until she went to University of Chicago. And then she
describes her interest in meteorology as an accident of World
War Two. And she starts college in nineteen forty and
then Pearl Harbor happens, and she says, her whole worlds
(19:45):
in flames, and she really wants to contribute to the
war effort. That's Adelaide Mandeville again. Simpson's father had been
a reporter covering aviation, her mother a birth control activist.
Her parents won't let her join the military and say,
you have to stay in college, and so she finds
this aviation training program World War two training program at
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Verst of Chicago that was started by this meteorologist named
Carl Gustaf Rosby, who many people consider like the greatest
meteorologists of the twentieth century. If you've ever flown on
an airplane, you can think Carl Gustaf Rosby. He was
key in identifying the jet stream. He explained how atmospheric
(20:31):
circulation of the weather works like waves. He was Simpson's advisor.
He was a great meteorologist. Apparently he was not a
great person. He was really dismissive of her and her work.
He's like, clouds are completely insignificant. They just don't matter
you as a girl, and clouds, as passive and insignificant
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are a perfect match. She's like, okay, sir, and moves
on to a new advisor and continues working on it.
In spite of that, Simpson persevered. She finished her dissertation
in nineteen forty nine. She saw something few other meteorologies
had seen. That clouds weren't insignificant, and that they were
(21:13):
important to whether in all kinds of ways, that they
were worth investigating. It's almost as though, as a person
whose own power had been invisible to a lot of people,
including her adviser, she could see the power and something
that looked like fluff. Here's Simpson in that nineteen fifty
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eight CBS news story. We could understand what's happening in
this coffee cup. We could begin to learn about clouds.
There's heat and moisture in the coffee cup. Because Hattie arises,
we find motions. When I first watched this interview with Simpson,
it drove me crazy that this important scientist has to
introduce an idea using a coffee mug. I guess because
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she's a woman. But then it turns out it's a
really good explanation. The steam coming up from the cup
is water vapor, which is being condensed out into a
lot of tiny, little liquid water droplets. Something very similar
to this is happening over the tropical ocean. Simpson spent
much of her career of flying through clouds and airplanes
with cameras strapped to the nose, recording movements and taking measurements.
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There's the marine meteorologist. I began to wonder about clouds.
How to clouds grow? Where do they get the energy
to fade on? To find out, we have to go
to the places where the clouds are. We have to
chase after them in the sky. So she's up there
in airplanes, chasing clouds, making films, analyzing those films frame
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by frame, and building a mathematical model of the behavior
of clouds. To do all those things she needs was
at the time really expensive technology, and the best way
to get access to that technology was through the military,
which had long had a huge interest in understanding and
predicting the weather. By the nineteen fifties, at the beginning
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of the Cold War, what the US military would really
really like is to be able to control the weather.
This is what Adelaide Manville's research is all about. Earlier
scientists had wanted to understand things. Cold War era scientists
wanted to control things mind control, riot control, pain control,
weather control. We can fully harness nature, and so you know,
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we're one step closer to being able to move clouds
and make it rain, and turn a hurricane in a
different direction, mitigate lightning so forest fires don't happen. They
start coming up with all these ideas turning deserts into gardens,
and you know why not, because meanwhile, a bunch of
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other wartime technologies we're making it possible to control the weather.
Indoors mposures everywhere are today benefiting by weather made to
order by carrier. Instead of traveling away from business and
home to seek relief, you can obtain the same comfort
right in your own home moral office through air conditioning.
So we can control the weather inside. Wouldn't it be
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wonderful if you could just touch a button and fill
your home with warm spring sunlight. Now you can have
electric heating, the next best thing to sunshine. Next we'll
control the weather outside air conditioning, electric heating indoor weather
control for the outdoors. The equivalent was a discovery made
in nineteen forty six by three scientists a general electric
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They called it cloud seating, dropping dry ice from airplanes
onto clouds to make them rain weather to order. Cloud
seating men completely takes off and just becomes this national obsession.
A lot of veterans from the war who have learned
to fly and have a general sense of weather patterns.
(25:00):
They start doing it and selling their services to farmers
who are facing drought, to mayors who you need to
refill their public water supply, to Native American tribes who
have done their annual rainmaking ceremonies and didn't work that year,
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and they hire these rainmakers. Then it tumbles into the
Cold War period and just explodes. Suddenly. The idea of
controlling the weather seems so promising. You can force clouds
to rain. You can't really control how much or what
the consequences will be, but in a crude way, it
does work. In nineteen fifty one, Congress debated the Weather
(25:45):
Modification Act, providing for equitable distribution of precipitation among the states.
Think about that for a minute. The confidence. We are
talking about drafting legislation to ensure equal rainfall between the states,
and you thought my tree branch idea was screwy. In
(26:08):
nineteen fifty three, Congress established a National Weather Modification Commission.
As if you could jump from cloud seating to setting
the temperature every day, like with a thermostat in your
living room. Meanwhile, the military is awfully interested in the
secret stuff weather as a weapon. Think of the advantages
that would have brought in a war if you could
(26:29):
control the weather in your enemy's territory. So it's just
at this point, in the middle of the nineteen fifties
that Joanne Simpson has started to revolutionize the study of clouds.
She's an experimental scientist doing basic research, but she sure
yourself can't do it alone. So she got funding any
way she could, from any branch of the military, And
if she had to say, oh, yeah, this has a
(26:51):
military application, she'd say it. Simpson is looking for projects
that will let her do cloud seatings that she can
test her models. But the way Simpson talks about her work,
at least in public, it's always about basic research. These
clouds were passing, have a very short flight, they're born,
they grow, may die. It's quite moving the way she
(27:12):
describes clouds. I find it moving. You're almost there with her,
chasing them in the sky like UFOs or aliens. Then
we get a monster runaway cloud. It tools started as
a small, tiny fleecy thing, or a group of tiny
fleecy things, but then something permitted it to build and
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grow and defy its cool, dry surroundings. Once we find
out what that something is the tanks and breaks off
clouds and permits the runaway growth of large numbers of them,
well then perhaps we will have put in one more
link in the long chain of what forms and maintains
a hurricane. Ultimately, she develops the first ever cloud model
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and the first ever hurricane model, so her work becomes
foundational to the next up until now sixty seventy years
of thomospheric sciences. But in the mid nineteen fifties she
starts working in weather control. But then the idea of
weather control had gone so entirely mainstream. Then even President
(28:19):
Lyndon B. Johnson was talking about it. He who controls
the weather will control the world LBJ, sounding like a
James Bond supervillain. It was such a good line that
a screenwriter stole it a couple of years later for
a film. There was a spoof of a Bond movie.
(28:40):
It's called Our Man Flint and I've got to play
something for you. In this scene, a US general complains
about the supervillain's evil plan in the desert put icebergs
in the Mediterranean. You control the weather, and you control
the world. If you could control the weather, you could
also do something seemingly incredibly useful. You could weaken hurricanes
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before they hit land. In the mid nineteen fifties, or
a series of hurricanes that caused you mass amounts of damage,
hundreds of people die, and the government starts the National
Hurricane Research Project, and one of the methods they used
to research hurricanes is cloud seating. Joan Simpson served as
(29:26):
top advisor to what comes to be called Project storm Fury,
using cloud seating to modify a hurricane. But a hitch
with trying to modify a hurricane, as you first have
to wait for one to happen. So in the meantime,
Simpson and her team decided to run tests on promising
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storm clouds. You're not summer of nineteen sixty three and
they're in Puerto Rico at a US naval base, and
they go up and she chooses ten clouds near San Juan,
and they seed them, and then they're waiting to see
what happens. And the first cloud, in Simpson's telling, just balloon.
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It grows and grows. They think they're watching cloud seating work,
and they do end up seating a hurricane. That same year,
they publish a big paper about it. It gets a
lot of press attention. Then two years later, in nineteen
sixty five, when Simpson is serving as director of Storm Fury,
they decided to try to modify another hurricane named Betsy,
(30:31):
off the coast of Puerto Rico. They announced that plan
to the press dawn August twenty seven at Florida and
island bases, Navy, whether Bureau and Air Force planes are
warming up to their daily task, except at the last minute,
the hurricane changed course suddenly on Sunday night, Betsy runs
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head on into a high pressure ridge, then it turns
towards the mainline. Hurricane flags are flying now from Key
West to Keep Canada. Because of the course change, the
Storm Fury scientists called off their plan to try to
modify the hurricane. And then when Betsy hit Florida and
Louisiana had killed eighty people. Mentality list is as follows.
(31:14):
Twenty five year old missus and Mayou. Her body was
found in the Franklin Avenue ditch. She was swept away
by flood water. Floridians were furious. A lot of them
blamed Project Storm Fury, thought the scientists had made the
hurricane so severe. In truth, Storm Fury wasn't responsible. The
(31:36):
scientists had already abandoned the project, but people still blamed them.
Simpson resigned. What really spelled the end of this kind
of weather modification though, we're experiments going on at the
same time but very far away. So they were using
cloud seeding to disrupt flight patterns or to try to
(31:57):
do this disrupt flight patterns to flood the Ho Chiman
trails that they couldn't get supplies where they needed to go.
During the Vietnam War, the US government spent more than
twenty million dollars on this project, with a few conclusive results.
Much of the story didn't come out until the Pentagon
papers were leaked in nineteen seventy one. They don't admit
(32:18):
to using it until nineteen seventy four. There's huge public backlash.
The backlash against weather control was because it was associated
with the many atrocities committed by scientists in Vietnam agent
orange napalm. Years later, Simpson talked about this in an interview.
I thought it was terrible. I mean, all my life,
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I've tried to work for the betterment of the planet
and the people, even in a small way, and then
to use what I've done is some kind of military thing.
I obviously am very concerned and not happy about it.
Simpson had gotten involved in this research because of Pearl Harbor.
(33:02):
She'd gotten pretty much all her funding from the US
military during the Cold War and then after the Vietnam Wars.
Revealed have been a series of frauds and lies and atrocities.
She is shocked shocked to discover that her research has
been used to try to make it rain on the
ho Chi Min trail. Me I'm just not buying it.
(33:22):
I can't look inside Joe and Simpson's heart though, any
better than I can see into a cloud. But I
do know this. The revolution and atmospheric science that started
during the Second World War came crashing down in the
nineteen seventies in the aftermath of Vietnam. It wasn't only
Vietnam that led to this turning point, It was also
rising concern about another kind of weather modification, climate change.
(33:48):
It turned out people were not controlling the weather making
it better, making it easier for farmers to grow, averting
droughts and hurricanes and bad storms and heat waves. Instead,
people were making the weather worse. In nineteen eighty two,
(34:12):
the Weather Channel began broadcasting weather forecasts NonStop. Soon, private
weather forecasting became big business from Atlanta, Georgia, home of
the new Weather Channel network. This is the official inaugural
program of cable television's newest twenty four hour live network,
(34:33):
well Weather Channel. It wasn't only the Weather Channel. There
were dedicated weather reporting services you could subscribe to like
acue Weather, and in the nineteen nineties, once people were
able to use the Internet, they found new ways to
obsess about the weather, to make money off of it,
to seek out the latest, up to date forecast, minute
(34:55):
by minute accuracy promised. It was as if merely by
updating your weather report every second, you could imagine that
you were somehow in control, prevailing over the enemy. But
to sell a forecast as an illusion of control, you
have to sell people the idea that the weather is
out of control. TV weather reports, trying to compete with
(35:18):
online services, got zanier. The weatherman was no longer calm
and detached. The weatherman started panicking. I'm AccuWeather dot comedy
rologists Jim Kosik are paralyzing, crippling breaking storm CODs to day.
(35:41):
That was a forecast for a snowstorm in twenty ten,
like not the end of the world. A snowstorm. You
think you've heard the hypeest hype, and then along comes
hypeer hype. In nineteen ninety seven, meteorologists called a storm
the climate event of the century. Post nine to eleven
weather reports for the era of the Global War on Terror,
(36:04):
they had to start inventing new nouns. Some called it snowmake,
other snow apocalypse. It was a forecasting arms race for
the War on Terror, because, of course, it was also
a ratings race. In two thousand and six, the Weather Channel,
trying to keep up, launched a series called It Could
(36:24):
Happen Tomorrow, featuring imaginary disasters. One day the fog clears
and the city by the Bay has changed forever. One
day traffic stops, and the city that never sleep stands still.
It hasn't happened yet, but it could happen tomorrow Sunday
night on the Weather Channel to witness unbelievable acts of
(36:46):
nature that could devastate our Forecasting never lost its military posture,
its wartime element. With a weather app on your phone,
you carry around with you an instrument of war that
earlier generations could only dream of. War approaches. Soldier, you
are prepared, and still it seems the enemy is gaining.
(37:10):
In Pakistan, the government says floods across the country have
now killed more than thirteen hundred people. Written's hottest day
ever recorded, with high temperatures potentially reaching at least one
hundred and three degrees fahrenheit that's not just above normal,
that is thirty degrees above normally, a record breaking drought,
the longest and most severe drought in rescent history. China's
(37:30):
largest river, Yanze, has dried. You're getting a frightening look
at this image of Hurricane Ida as she bears down
on the Gulf coast, those outer bands whipping the area
for hours overnight. It's not just the weather, of course,
it's the climate. Climate is a pattern of weather, the
typical weather in a particular place. Like if we were
(37:53):
talking about a person, your mood on any given day
would be like the weather on Tuesday. You're sad, but
your temperament, your disposition, you're generally cheerful. That would be
like the climate. The weather is having many more bad
days because the climate is getting worse, more extreme. As
global temperatures warm, the weather's getting less predictable. As Stanford
(38:15):
study argues that the hotter the climate becomes, the less
predictable the weather will be. That sense that you could
know what's coming next that might soon become a thing
of the past. The weather situation remains extremely rugged. The
entire state declared under a state of emergency by Governor Duco.
When I was a kid eleven years old. New England
(38:38):
was hit with what everyone got to be calling the
Blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. It was the first time
the local television stations ran continuous weather coverage NonStop for days,
the kind of coverage that inspired the start of the
Weather Channel. You'd look out the window, the blizzard, you
turn on the TV, the blizzard. Snow battered. Boston is
(38:59):
in the middle of the worst winter storm it's probably
ever seen. And it's not over yet. The full fury
of the winter blast is still with us. It's going
to be all day to the latest word from the
United States Weatherville. I've never forgotten this storm. I went
to school that first day, a Monday, my parents went
to work. Weather forecasting in the nineteen seventies was already
(39:20):
so hyped up and hyperbolic that a lot of people
just ignored the forecast of a winter storm. Then everyone
got sent home. I remember riding on the school bus,
not certain we'd make it through the snow. We've asked
everyone to open their home so that if there are
any stranded aldous nearby, they have refused. The snow only
(39:44):
fell for two days, but people were trapped for a
lot longer winds, blue snow drifts fifteen feet high. Hundreds
of thousands of people lost power. In Massachusetts alone, eleven
thousand homes were destroyed. Coming in at the moment for
the word from Boston, Edison particularly, it's not good. Oh,
(40:04):
we were hoping from report we had earlier that we would.
People everywhere tried to help out, rescue workers, homemakers, anyone.
Movie theaters stayed open as shelters. Do they have to
pay to get in? No? Free and free admission? Now
these people were just people stranded in the area. Right right,
(40:24):
We're taking them all up there shelter farm. It can
be numbing talking about the weather and climate change, But
then I think about why I'm so haunted by the
blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. In a town nearby, a
boy about my age had gone missing. Every day the
radio gave updates on the search for him. That day
(40:47):
we'd got sent home from school, he'd gone out to
play in the snow, and he never came in. The
Whole neighborhood, half the town was out in the blizzard
for hours looking for this boy. They didn't find his
long dead body until well after it was all over
his mitten sticking up from the melting snow. He'd tried
to get back inside, fell over, just got buried under
(41:10):
it. It It was falling so fast. It's not some idle
interest wanting to predict the weather. It's life or death,
and it's not crazy wanting to control it. We are
bags of water and bone, vulnerable to every wind, drought,
heat wave and rain storm. But under the fury of
(41:32):
each snow apocalypse lies a certain salvation and bearing witness
to our common frailty, and in the helping, the rescuing,
the fortifying one another against the storm something the best
weather beaten newscasters now. At the height of the storm,
Massachusetts Governor Michael Ducoccus appeared on television, not in a
(41:53):
suit and tie, but in a sweater, looking strained and exhausted.
You see the weatherman too, shaking, shuddering with the knowledge
of it. Even as storms come to an end, all
our efforts to control our environment must inevitably four short.
We've learned that society is a pretty recent experiment. At
Commonwealth Avenue with five am on the morning of a
(42:15):
blizzard with a power blackout can be frightening, But we've
also learned that what we mostly do is help each
other out when on living quietly looking in on the
neighbor just in case. I think it was a good moment,
and I think that's something to remember till the next time.
And I do try to remember that, and I have
(42:36):
more occasion every year because the blizzards are getting worse
because the climate is changing. Nine of Boston's ten worst
on record snowstorms have happened since nineteen seventy eight, six
of them since two thousand and three twenty ten, with
Snowmageddon twenty sixteen, snow Zilla happening today somewhere near you.
(42:59):
We're all going through one big ongoing storm, hunkered down
but also poking out to see who needs help most.
And there's still time pulled together by our panic to
dig out from this storm. The Last Archive is written
(43:20):
and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane,
Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are
Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is
Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by
Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans
of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta.
(43:45):
Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider
subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
(44:05):
for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember
to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. Calculations, weather maps, old barometer readings, strange
weather lately right tragic weather, catastrophic weather, Snowmageddon, heat apocalypse.
(00:42):
It always makes me think of something attributed to Mark Twain.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Better check the forecast tonight a dangerous what your storm
is bearing down on the East Coast with blizzard warnings
issued for the New York City area and Boston? Would geez?
I hope people would be okay. I might as well
(01:04):
catch up on my reading. I've been going through old
issues of Poor Richard's Almanac. Let's see seventeen fifty three.
In the preface, Benjamin Franklin looks back at twenty years
of publishing his Poor Richard's Almanacs, and it makes this
pretty corny joke about how no matter what weather he
predicted day to day, year after year, his prediction was right.
(01:26):
At least he predicted the right weather. Somewhere in the world.
In the eighteenth century, no one could really predict the weather,
not like today. Tens of millions are in the path
of this nor easter, that could bring record snowfall and
coastal flooding. Time to Betten down the hatches and then
escape over the threshold to a radio booth in New
(01:48):
York during another terrible snowstorm more than half a century ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, A good morning to you. This is
John Cameron's ways in the NBC news room in New
York over to the deal of the storm area. Today,
the forecast is for better weather, which is encouraging news
to many. Thousands of people will have the tales of
this top subject during the broadcast. The Great Blizzard of
(02:10):
nineteen forty seven hit New York the day after Christmas.
If you were in its path, you likely lost power
and couldn't listen to the radio or watch television. Life
magazine printed photographs of people skiing through the streets. Movie
theaters ran news ural reports very much in the style
of the newsural reports from the Second World War, which
(02:31):
it only just ended. Friday, December twenty six, nineteen forty seven,
It's a blank white Friday in New York City. As
a snow plot burst, as it's officially called, dumps two
inches of snow an hour on the top. I've always
been fascinated by how much weather reporting has in common
with war reporting, as if the weather were an enemy
(02:52):
to be battled, but so formidable that the weather nearly
always wins. This time, the enemy had conducted a sneak attack.
New Yorkers were blindsided. As many as thirty thousand cars
had to be abandoned by their drivers. It was a
six million dollar object to make New York streets passable again.
The storm extended from the nation's capital to northern Maine,
(03:14):
but it was New York and its suburbs that or
the brunt of the fall. He officially recorded twenty six inches,
was five more inches than the historic blizzard. For most
of human history, people would wake up in the morning,
look up in the sky, have a good idea, a
reasonable idea about what the day might bring, but no
idea what tomorrow would bring. Today, I look on my phone.
(03:37):
I can see the weather anywhere in the world, hour
by hour, for the next week. I have an oracle
in my back pocket, a tiny god. It's a kind
of thing, a form of technology, a type of knowledge
that I tend to put in a category in my
head that says, brought to you by NASA or a
product of the space race, and partly that's true. The
(03:58):
weather app on my iPhone is a product of war,
of all the wars of the twentieth century. I'd like
to know what does it mean that I carry around
in my back pocket this little instrument of war. What
does it mean to have at my fingertips the knowledge
of what weather is going to happen next everywhere? How
has it changed the world to have this knowledge, to
(04:21):
take it for granted even and there was one statistic
that will probably stand ninety nine million tons of snow
fella New York in sixteen dollars. Welcome to the Last Archive.
The show about how we know what we know and
why it seems lately as if we don't know anything
at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season is all about
(04:43):
common knowledge, what everyone knows or thinks they know, knowledge
people share in common. This episode the weather. Everyone's always
talking about it, but nobody ever does anything about it,
or do they. It's a big, messy, uncertain world, looking
up to the skies, to the heavens and trying to
(05:04):
read in the clouds signs of what might happen next.
Snow rain, a beautiful day it's an elemental curiosity. It's
also an urgent one. You can see why forecasting the
weather is a lynchpin of wartime planning. The weather can
determine if you live or die, whether your crops fail,
your boat sinks, you run out of water, you lose
(05:25):
your home in a flood. Then there are the more
ordinary matters Janet an umbrella today. I I love the
idea that I can know what's coming next. It's a comfort,
but it's also strange, as if we could find such
certainty in such an uncertain world. In the US, weather
(05:45):
records go pretty far back. For centuries, farmers, factory workers,
all sorts of ordinary people recorded the weather, little jottings
and diaries. Mostly people also consulted farmers almanacs to look
for weather predictions. There, something bigger started to happen, though,
in the eighteen forties, a national data collection project headed
(06:05):
up by a new national institution, the Smithsonian. I've got
a graduate student, Adelaide Mandeville, working on a history dissertation
about all of this, and I called her up and
she explained to me what the Smithsonian had been trying
to do and how it depended on the telegraph system.
Working with the telegraph companies, they enlist one hundred and
(06:28):
fifty volunteers in the first year to start sending in
their local weather observations, and then the Smithsonian takes all
of that and maps it, and then eighteen seventy I
think they make the first national weather agency. So that's
when it becomes a federal project. For a long time,
(06:51):
that project relied on hundreds, even thousands of volunteers who
sent in their local weather observations. And as one meteorologist
said in eighteen seventy nine, anyone could do it. There
is one science which is within the grasp of every mine,
and which to be successfully cultivated requires no pre operation,
the science of rain and fine weather, but which now
(07:13):
received the higher title of meteorology. By the end of
the nineteenth century, experts were taking over. Eventually, the work
of predicting the weather moved to the US Signal Service,
and then in eighteen ninety one Congress created the Weather Bureau.
It was a division of the Department of Agriculture. The
(07:34):
chief of this new Weather Bureau, he didn't just oversee
the collection of weather records. He was supposed to forecast
storms and droughts and floods, anything that would affect agriculture
or industry or commerce. The whole scheme had a kind
of citizen science quality to it. The Weather Bureau wanted
to make meteorology common knowledge, to teach people about the
(07:55):
latest instruments. It installed little weather kiosks in twenty nine
cities out their own city sidewalks. There were these boxes
with maps and charts, thermometers and barometers. What the Weather
beer really wanted was newspapers to print weather maps, but
before that happened, the weather report went out in a
different way. As Adelaide Manville explained to me, the post
(08:19):
office in the early twentieth century, they were responsible for
delivering weather forecasts with the mail, but there was an
issue because they would go out at seven am, that's
when the mail was delivered, and the forecast. Each day,
new information came in at ten am, so it was
always a little delayed, and the weather forecasters sort of
(08:40):
got a reputation for not being super accurate. But then
they had these, you know, really really helpful and important
forecasts where they warned towns that there was going to
be a huge flood or hurricane and people were able
to evacuate then once radio started in the nineteen twenties,
you could hear the weather forecast over the wireless. We'll
(09:01):
give you that everywhether we put forecasting had by now
gotten more accurate than it had ever been before. That's
because of advances made just before the First World War,
when a Norwegian meteorologist recorded the weather across Europe. Then
(09:25):
during the war, his son, working for the military, discovered
the nature of the movement of masses of cold and
warm air. He called these fronts like battlefronts, except the weather.
An English mathematician also involved in the war effort, used
their data and those ideas to devise a mathematical model
(09:45):
to predict the weather. Unfortunately it didn't work. Still, the
idea too cold, that there should be a model, and
that if only you could do the calculations fast enough,
you could predict the weather. So right, Doing that got
a lot easier after computers were invented, and here's the
latest weather report. Nothing advances science like war. During the
(10:08):
Second World War, those mathematical models got better and better,
and by the end of the war you could use
computers to run those calculations, so finally you could make
your predictions faster than the speed of weather. If you
could get ahead of the storm, you could get ahead
of the enemy. Weather forecasting becomes critical to military strategy
(10:31):
during the war, and they're developing these new technologies to
syst them in doing that, so like radar and these
aircraft controls and more extensive data collection systems and all
that does make them better at forecasting. By nineteen forty seven,
Americans had gotten used to the idea that, especially if
(10:52):
there were a really big storm coming, they'd know it
in advance. Nearly twenty six inchines have fallen a record
unequal in the analyst of the Weather Bureau. But really
it wasn't the scale of that storm that was the
strangest thing about it. The strangest thing about it was
that it was so unexpected. When you wake up in
(11:13):
the morning and you open up an eye, if you
turn on the mark and you look through the sky
and won the weather who he is a weather or
dry who knows the weather man? And here's the latest
weather report? Extreme cold temperature below zero. In the nineteen fifties,
when Americans started buying televisions and real numbers, they could
(11:34):
flip a switch and hear a forecast, sometimes a goofy one.
A lot of early TV forecasts came in the form
of cartoons. Some of them involved puppets. One was sponsored
by Botany Neckties and featured a little wooly lamb. No
recordings of the song exists, so we found the lyrics
and made our own. It's cold, it's rain, it's fair,
(11:57):
it's all mixed up together. But I, as Botany's little lamp,
predict tomorrow's weather. I love how silly these early weather
reports were. But this goofiness didn't last long. Pretty quickly,
in those post war years, television weather forecasting left lambs
behind and settled into the style we still have today.
(12:22):
Weather today, Montana in a real state of deep breeze,
about forty eight degrees near Helena, stormy along the Gulf
of Mexico and Texas, A sober looking fellow in a
suit and tie, part sportscaster, part scientist. Generally, however, here
in New York and alt in Chicago, something resembling springtime.
Fifty eighth degrees here in New York this afternoon. It's
(12:43):
really a pretty big country after all, lots of weather.
The buttoned up weatherman and his straight up forecast. This
was a wartime offshoot products of the Army in the Navy.
The earliest national television weather forecast was made by Fellow
who had had training in meteorology during the war. A
lot of soldiers and sailors had gotten that kind of training.
(13:04):
And when you look at it even today, a modern
weather report, the map, the pointer, the symbols, the presentation,
it's like a military briefing. Right, let me get the
weather Bureau here, we said to the brother James, are there.
In nineteen fifty two, NBC launched The Today Show. That's
weather forecast. Do you understand? Right in the Weather Bureau
where they make the stuff? And already for you. Go ahead, Jim,
(13:26):
I'll put it on a map. The Today Show's anchor,
Dave Garroway in suit and bow tie. He's on the
phone with a guy from the Weather Bureau. He's in
a studio kitted out with all kinds of Jim crackery,
a giant telephone, a microphone the size of a broomstick
hanging down his front, a bank of blinking television monitors,
very high tech, nineteen fifty style. But then the telephone
(13:49):
in one hand, he's got a piece of chalk in
his other hand, and he starts writing the weather on
a big chalkboard with a map of the country drawn
on it. Ar it turns to rain in Pennsylvania about
thirty two up here, crazing dribble. He's not God, this
guy here, he is every morning telling you what your
(14:11):
day will be like, and for the most part, earning
your trust. I think, having lived through some of this era,
there was also something so seemingly simple about it. You
get the weather report in the morning, you put on
your wind breaker, you had out expecting rain, You get
on with your day. There was a Cold War going on,
the world might end in a blink an atomic bomb,
(14:31):
the end of life on Earth. But hey, you knew
enough at least that you needed a wind breaker. Today.
I want to know your forecast is very good, because
it's raining right here in New York. All those long
years of the Cold War, though, the nineteen fifties, the
nineteen sixties, there was something else going on. For one thing,
the weather forecasting was pretty good, reliable, useful, but it
(14:53):
had stopped getting much better each war. The First World War,
the Second World War, the Cold War had advanced the
science of meteorology, but whether as folklore proverbs that goofiness
that started with poor Richard's Almanac went down to the
singing lamb that was still around two in a way.
You can see it. In one little town in America.
(15:16):
In nineteen seventy, the morning a long time once again
for the KRSBO got Report, the official for Rosebery. Yes
you heard that right, the Mount Nebo Goat Report. In
a city of Rosberg, Oregon. They went old school. The
local news started issuing forecasts by reporting on the position
(15:38):
of a herd of goats up on a mountain outside
town Mount Nebo. And I know this sounds crazy, but
you really can use sheep and goats to predict the weather.
They're pretty accurate. There's no end of proverbs about this phenomenon.
When sheep gather in a huddle, tomorrow will have a puddle.
That's true. And so the KRSB Mount Nebo Goat reports
(16:03):
game this morning at about six thirty am. Man at
the moment, we have someone scattered goats under an intenthi
go to pressure system. Goats arranging this morning about the
mid mountain three quarters of the way upound people. Thus
we will have a beautiful Juan morning. Once you get
what I think is going on here is a kind
of back to nature vibe. But there's something else here too,
(16:26):
an anti war vibe, the idea that maybe the weather
isn't brought to you by the military, Maybe the weather
isn't the enemy. Maybe the weather could also just be
goats up on a hill. Then too, there's a sense
here of the chaos of climate. By the nineteen seventies,
meteorologists we're talking about the butterfly effect, the idea that
a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the
(16:49):
world could have an effect on a weather system on
the other side of the world. That wasn't really a
new idea in the nineteen seventies. It had first appeared
in a meteorology journal in nineteen eighteen during the First
World War, about a different insect, a grasshopper in Idaho,
might conceivably initiate a storm movement which would sweep across
the continent and destroy New York City. It was a
(17:14):
very scary thought. It got much scarier somehow in the
nineteen seventies, in the middle of the Vietnam War. The
weather is chaos. It's complicated, so formidably intricate. A set
of innumerable forces, intersecting and infinite ways. The system can
never be reduced to any mathematical model, not perfectly anyway.
(17:35):
But what if we didn't have to understand all that complexity.
What if instead of trying to model or predict the weather,
we could just control it. That story after the break.
(17:57):
This is an airport weather station here with our charts
and their instruments and trying to predict tomorrow's weather. Quite
often they succeed. In nineteen fifty eight, CBS News reported
on the latest research in the field of meteorology. The
fact is that we don't know very much about the
(18:19):
forces that create the weather. Therefore we can always predict
without proceed Consider some of the things we don't know.
Consider this cloud. The Cold War, the age of the
atomic bomb, had given rise to a revolution and atmospheric sciences,
and still no one really understood the workings of weather.
(18:39):
What exactly produces high winds, a hurricane, a tornado, a blizzard?
Was it a butterfly on the other side of the world?
What causes rain? How to clouds form? At the time,
the field was on the verge of a major breakthrough
in the work of a scientist named Joanne Malchus. CBS
featured her research in its look at the Latest goings
(19:01):
on in Meteorology. Doctor Maltho was studying a tiny but
very important part of weather, a cloud. Joanne Melchis, better
known by a later married name, Joanne Simpson, was the
first woman in the United States to earn a PhD
in meteorology. Her whole career came out of the Second
(19:22):
World War. She was always interested in flying and sailing
and math, but didn't really have an interest in science
until she went to University of Chicago. And then she
describes her interest in meteorology as an accident of World
War Two. And she starts college in nineteen forty and
then Pearl Harbor happens, and she says, her whole worlds
(19:45):
in flames, and she really wants to contribute to the
war effort. That's Adelaide Mandeville again. Simpson's father had been
a reporter covering aviation, her mother a birth control activist.
Her parents won't let her join the military and say,
you have to stay in college, and so she finds
this aviation training program World War two training program at
(20:09):
Verst of Chicago that was started by this meteorologist named
Carl Gustaf Rosby, who many people consider like the greatest
meteorologists of the twentieth century. If you've ever flown on
an airplane, you can think Carl Gustaf Rosby. He was
key in identifying the jet stream. He explained how atmospheric
(20:31):
circulation of the weather works like waves. He was Simpson's advisor.
He was a great meteorologist. Apparently he was not a
great person. He was really dismissive of her and her work.
He's like, clouds are completely insignificant. They just don't matter
you as a girl, and clouds, as passive and insignificant
(20:51):
are a perfect match. She's like, okay, sir, and moves
on to a new advisor and continues working on it.
In spite of that, Simpson persevered. She finished her dissertation
in nineteen forty nine. She saw something few other meteorologies
had seen. That clouds weren't insignificant, and that they were
(21:13):
important to whether in all kinds of ways, that they
were worth investigating. It's almost as though, as a person
whose own power had been invisible to a lot of people,
including her adviser, she could see the power and something
that looked like fluff. Here's Simpson in that nineteen fifty
(21:34):
eight CBS news story. We could understand what's happening in
this coffee cup. We could begin to learn about clouds.
There's heat and moisture in the coffee cup. Because Hattie arises,
we find motions. When I first watched this interview with Simpson,
it drove me crazy that this important scientist has to
introduce an idea using a coffee mug. I guess because
(21:56):
she's a woman. But then it turns out it's a
really good explanation. The steam coming up from the cup
is water vapor, which is being condensed out into a
lot of tiny, little liquid water droplets. Something very similar
to this is happening over the tropical ocean. Simpson spent
much of her career of flying through clouds and airplanes
with cameras strapped to the nose, recording movements and taking measurements.
(22:22):
There's the marine meteorologist. I began to wonder about clouds.
How to clouds grow? Where do they get the energy
to fade on? To find out, we have to go
to the places where the clouds are. We have to
chase after them in the sky. So she's up there
in airplanes, chasing clouds, making films, analyzing those films frame
(22:46):
by frame, and building a mathematical model of the behavior
of clouds. To do all those things she needs was
at the time really expensive technology, and the best way
to get access to that technology was through the military,
which had long had a huge interest in understanding and
predicting the weather. By the nineteen fifties, at the beginning
(23:06):
of the Cold War, what the US military would really
really like is to be able to control the weather.
This is what Adelaide Manville's research is all about. Earlier
scientists had wanted to understand things. Cold War era scientists
wanted to control things mind control, riot control, pain control,
weather control. We can fully harness nature, and so you know,
(23:30):
we're one step closer to being able to move clouds
and make it rain, and turn a hurricane in a
different direction, mitigate lightning so forest fires don't happen. They
start coming up with all these ideas turning deserts into gardens,
and you know why not, because meanwhile, a bunch of
(23:52):
other wartime technologies we're making it possible to control the weather.
Indoors mposures everywhere are today benefiting by weather made to
order by carrier. Instead of traveling away from business and
home to seek relief, you can obtain the same comfort
right in your own home moral office through air conditioning.
So we can control the weather inside. Wouldn't it be
(24:14):
wonderful if you could just touch a button and fill
your home with warm spring sunlight. Now you can have
electric heating, the next best thing to sunshine. Next we'll
control the weather outside air conditioning, electric heating indoor weather
control for the outdoors. The equivalent was a discovery made
in nineteen forty six by three scientists a general electric
(24:37):
They called it cloud seating, dropping dry ice from airplanes
onto clouds to make them rain weather to order. Cloud
seating men completely takes off and just becomes this national obsession.
A lot of veterans from the war who have learned
to fly and have a general sense of weather patterns.
(25:00):
They start doing it and selling their services to farmers
who are facing drought, to mayors who you need to
refill their public water supply, to Native American tribes who
have done their annual rainmaking ceremonies and didn't work that year,
(25:22):
and they hire these rainmakers. Then it tumbles into the
Cold War period and just explodes. Suddenly. The idea of
controlling the weather seems so promising. You can force clouds
to rain. You can't really control how much or what
the consequences will be, but in a crude way, it
does work. In nineteen fifty one, Congress debated the Weather
(25:45):
Modification Act, providing for equitable distribution of precipitation among the states.
Think about that for a minute. The confidence. We are
talking about drafting legislation to ensure equal rainfall between the states,
and you thought my tree branch idea was screwy. In
(26:08):
nineteen fifty three, Congress established a National Weather Modification Commission.
As if you could jump from cloud seating to setting
the temperature every day, like with a thermostat in your
living room. Meanwhile, the military is awfully interested in the
secret stuff weather as a weapon. Think of the advantages
that would have brought in a war if you could
(26:29):
control the weather in your enemy's territory. So it's just
at this point, in the middle of the nineteen fifties
that Joanne Simpson has started to revolutionize the study of clouds.
She's an experimental scientist doing basic research, but she sure
yourself can't do it alone. So she got funding any
way she could, from any branch of the military, And
if she had to say, oh, yeah, this has a
(26:51):
military application, she'd say it. Simpson is looking for projects
that will let her do cloud seatings that she can
test her models. But the way Simpson talks about her work,
at least in public, it's always about basic research. These
clouds were passing, have a very short flight, they're born,
they grow, may die. It's quite moving the way she
(27:12):
describes clouds. I find it moving. You're almost there with her,
chasing them in the sky like UFOs or aliens. Then
we get a monster runaway cloud. It tools started as
a small, tiny fleecy thing, or a group of tiny
fleecy things, but then something permitted it to build and
(27:33):
grow and defy its cool, dry surroundings. Once we find
out what that something is the tanks and breaks off
clouds and permits the runaway growth of large numbers of them,
well then perhaps we will have put in one more
link in the long chain of what forms and maintains
a hurricane. Ultimately, she develops the first ever cloud model
(27:57):
and the first ever hurricane model, so her work becomes
foundational to the next up until now sixty seventy years
of thomospheric sciences. But in the mid nineteen fifties she
starts working in weather control. But then the idea of
weather control had gone so entirely mainstream. Then even President
(28:19):
Lyndon B. Johnson was talking about it. He who controls
the weather will control the world LBJ, sounding like a
James Bond supervillain. It was such a good line that
a screenwriter stole it a couple of years later for
a film. There was a spoof of a Bond movie.
(28:40):
It's called Our Man Flint and I've got to play
something for you. In this scene, a US general complains
about the supervillain's evil plan in the desert put icebergs
in the Mediterranean. You control the weather, and you control
the world. If you could control the weather, you could
also do something seemingly incredibly useful. You could weaken hurricanes
(29:03):
before they hit land. In the mid nineteen fifties, or
a series of hurricanes that caused you mass amounts of damage,
hundreds of people die, and the government starts the National
Hurricane Research Project, and one of the methods they used
to research hurricanes is cloud seating. Joan Simpson served as
(29:26):
top advisor to what comes to be called Project storm Fury,
using cloud seating to modify a hurricane. But a hitch
with trying to modify a hurricane, as you first have
to wait for one to happen. So in the meantime,
Simpson and her team decided to run tests on promising
(29:46):
storm clouds. You're not summer of nineteen sixty three and
they're in Puerto Rico at a US naval base, and
they go up and she chooses ten clouds near San Juan,
and they seed them, and then they're waiting to see
what happens. And the first cloud, in Simpson's telling, just balloon.
(30:09):
It grows and grows. They think they're watching cloud seating work,
and they do end up seating a hurricane. That same year,
they publish a big paper about it. It gets a
lot of press attention. Then two years later, in nineteen
sixty five, when Simpson is serving as director of Storm Fury,
they decided to try to modify another hurricane named Betsy,
(30:31):
off the coast of Puerto Rico. They announced that plan
to the press dawn August twenty seven at Florida and
island bases, Navy, whether Bureau and Air Force planes are
warming up to their daily task, except at the last minute,
the hurricane changed course suddenly on Sunday night, Betsy runs
(30:51):
head on into a high pressure ridge, then it turns
towards the mainline. Hurricane flags are flying now from Key
West to Keep Canada. Because of the course change, the
Storm Fury scientists called off their plan to try to
modify the hurricane. And then when Betsy hit Florida and
Louisiana had killed eighty people. Mentality list is as follows.
(31:14):
Twenty five year old missus and Mayou. Her body was
found in the Franklin Avenue ditch. She was swept away
by flood water. Floridians were furious. A lot of them
blamed Project Storm Fury, thought the scientists had made the
hurricane so severe. In truth, Storm Fury wasn't responsible. The
(31:36):
scientists had already abandoned the project, but people still blamed them.
Simpson resigned. What really spelled the end of this kind
of weather modification though, we're experiments going on at the
same time but very far away. So they were using
cloud seeding to disrupt flight patterns or to try to
(31:57):
do this disrupt flight patterns to flood the Ho Chiman
trails that they couldn't get supplies where they needed to go.
During the Vietnam War, the US government spent more than
twenty million dollars on this project, with a few conclusive results.
Much of the story didn't come out until the Pentagon
papers were leaked in nineteen seventy one. They don't admit
(32:18):
to using it until nineteen seventy four. There's huge public backlash.
The backlash against weather control was because it was associated
with the many atrocities committed by scientists in Vietnam agent
orange napalm. Years later, Simpson talked about this in an interview.
I thought it was terrible. I mean, all my life,
(32:40):
I've tried to work for the betterment of the planet
and the people, even in a small way, and then
to use what I've done is some kind of military thing.
I obviously am very concerned and not happy about it.
Simpson had gotten involved in this research because of Pearl Harbor.
(33:02):
She'd gotten pretty much all her funding from the US
military during the Cold War and then after the Vietnam Wars.
Revealed have been a series of frauds and lies and atrocities.
She is shocked shocked to discover that her research has
been used to try to make it rain on the
ho Chi Min trail. Me I'm just not buying it.
(33:22):
I can't look inside Joe and Simpson's heart though, any
better than I can see into a cloud. But I
do know this. The revolution and atmospheric science that started
during the Second World War came crashing down in the
nineteen seventies in the aftermath of Vietnam. It wasn't only
Vietnam that led to this turning point, It was also
rising concern about another kind of weather modification, climate change.
(33:48):
It turned out people were not controlling the weather making
it better, making it easier for farmers to grow, averting
droughts and hurricanes and bad storms and heat waves. Instead,
people were making the weather worse. In nineteen eighty two,
(34:12):
the Weather Channel began broadcasting weather forecasts NonStop. Soon, private
weather forecasting became big business from Atlanta, Georgia, home of
the new Weather Channel network. This is the official inaugural
program of cable television's newest twenty four hour live network,
(34:33):
well Weather Channel. It wasn't only the Weather Channel. There
were dedicated weather reporting services you could subscribe to like
acue Weather, and in the nineteen nineties, once people were
able to use the Internet, they found new ways to
obsess about the weather, to make money off of it,
to seek out the latest, up to date forecast, minute
(34:55):
by minute accuracy promised. It was as if merely by
updating your weather report every second, you could imagine that
you were somehow in control, prevailing over the enemy. But
to sell a forecast as an illusion of control, you
have to sell people the idea that the weather is
out of control. TV weather reports, trying to compete with
(35:18):
online services, got zanier. The weatherman was no longer calm
and detached. The weatherman started panicking. I'm AccuWeather dot comedy
rologists Jim Kosik are paralyzing, crippling breaking storm CODs to day.
(35:41):
That was a forecast for a snowstorm in twenty ten,
like not the end of the world. A snowstorm. You
think you've heard the hypeest hype, and then along comes
hypeer hype. In nineteen ninety seven, meteorologists called a storm
the climate event of the century. Post nine to eleven
weather reports for the era of the Global War on Terror,
(36:04):
they had to start inventing new nouns. Some called it snowmake,
other snow apocalypse. It was a forecasting arms race for
the War on Terror, because, of course, it was also
a ratings race. In two thousand and six, the Weather Channel,
trying to keep up, launched a series called It Could
(36:24):
Happen Tomorrow, featuring imaginary disasters. One day the fog clears
and the city by the Bay has changed forever. One
day traffic stops, and the city that never sleep stands still.
It hasn't happened yet, but it could happen tomorrow Sunday
night on the Weather Channel to witness unbelievable acts of
(36:46):
nature that could devastate our Forecasting never lost its military posture,
its wartime element. With a weather app on your phone,
you carry around with you an instrument of war that
earlier generations could only dream of. War approaches. Soldier, you
are prepared, and still it seems the enemy is gaining.
(37:10):
In Pakistan, the government says floods across the country have
now killed more than thirteen hundred people. Written's hottest day
ever recorded, with high temperatures potentially reaching at least one
hundred and three degrees fahrenheit that's not just above normal,
that is thirty degrees above normally, a record breaking drought,
the longest and most severe drought in rescent history. China's
(37:30):
largest river, Yanze, has dried. You're getting a frightening look
at this image of Hurricane Ida as she bears down
on the Gulf coast, those outer bands whipping the area
for hours overnight. It's not just the weather, of course,
it's the climate. Climate is a pattern of weather, the
typical weather in a particular place. Like if we were
(37:53):
talking about a person, your mood on any given day
would be like the weather on Tuesday. You're sad, but
your temperament, your disposition, you're generally cheerful. That would be
like the climate. The weather is having many more bad
days because the climate is getting worse, more extreme. As
global temperatures warm, the weather's getting less predictable. As Stanford
(38:15):
study argues that the hotter the climate becomes, the less
predictable the weather will be. That sense that you could
know what's coming next that might soon become a thing
of the past. The weather situation remains extremely rugged. The
entire state declared under a state of emergency by Governor Duco.
When I was a kid eleven years old. New England
(38:38):
was hit with what everyone got to be calling the
Blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. It was the first time
the local television stations ran continuous weather coverage NonStop for days,
the kind of coverage that inspired the start of the
Weather Channel. You'd look out the window, the blizzard, you
turn on the TV, the blizzard. Snow battered. Boston is
(38:59):
in the middle of the worst winter storm it's probably
ever seen. And it's not over yet. The full fury
of the winter blast is still with us. It's going
to be all day to the latest word from the
United States Weatherville. I've never forgotten this storm. I went
to school that first day, a Monday, my parents went
to work. Weather forecasting in the nineteen seventies was already
(39:20):
so hyped up and hyperbolic that a lot of people
just ignored the forecast of a winter storm. Then everyone
got sent home. I remember riding on the school bus,
not certain we'd make it through the snow. We've asked
everyone to open their home so that if there are
any stranded aldous nearby, they have refused. The snow only
(39:44):
fell for two days, but people were trapped for a
lot longer winds, blue snow drifts fifteen feet high. Hundreds
of thousands of people lost power. In Massachusetts alone, eleven
thousand homes were destroyed. Coming in at the moment for
the word from Boston, Edison particularly, it's not good. Oh,
(40:04):
we were hoping from report we had earlier that we would.
People everywhere tried to help out, rescue workers, homemakers, anyone.
Movie theaters stayed open as shelters. Do they have to
pay to get in? No? Free and free admission? Now
these people were just people stranded in the area. Right right,
(40:24):
We're taking them all up there shelter farm. It can
be numbing talking about the weather and climate change, But
then I think about why I'm so haunted by the
blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. In a town nearby, a
boy about my age had gone missing. Every day the
radio gave updates on the search for him. That day
(40:47):
we'd got sent home from school, he'd gone out to
play in the snow, and he never came in. The
Whole neighborhood, half the town was out in the blizzard
for hours looking for this boy. They didn't find his
long dead body until well after it was all over
his mitten sticking up from the melting snow. He'd tried
to get back inside, fell over, just got buried under
(41:10):
it. It It was falling so fast. It's not some idle
interest wanting to predict the weather. It's life or death,
and it's not crazy wanting to control it. We are
bags of water and bone, vulnerable to every wind, drought,
heat wave and rain storm. But under the fury of
(41:32):
each snow apocalypse lies a certain salvation and bearing witness
to our common frailty, and in the helping, the rescuing,
the fortifying one another against the storm something the best
weather beaten newscasters now. At the height of the storm,
Massachusetts Governor Michael Ducoccus appeared on television, not in a
(41:53):
suit and tie, but in a sweater, looking strained and exhausted.
You see the weatherman too, shaking, shuddering with the knowledge
of it. Even as storms come to an end, all
our efforts to control our environment must inevitably four short.
We've learned that society is a pretty recent experiment. At
Commonwealth Avenue with five am on the morning of a
(42:15):
blizzard with a power blackout can be frightening, But we've
also learned that what we mostly do is help each
other out when on living quietly looking in on the
neighbor just in case. I think it was a good moment,
and I think that's something to remember till the next time.
And I do try to remember that, and I have
(42:36):
more occasion every year because the blizzards are getting worse
because the climate is changing. Nine of Boston's ten worst
on record snowstorms have happened since nineteen seventy eight, six
of them since two thousand and three twenty ten, with
Snowmageddon twenty sixteen, snow Zilla happening today somewhere near you.
(42:59):
We're all going through one big ongoing storm, hunkered down
but also poking out to see who needs help most.
And there's still time pulled together by our panic to
dig out from this storm. The Last Archive is written
(43:20):
and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane,
Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are
Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is
Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by
Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans
of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta.
(43:45):
Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider
subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
(44:05):
for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember
to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.
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