After thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshipping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has managed to change the rain.
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When I visited the Met, Great Britain’s national weather service headquarters, the greatest winter rains seen in British meteorological records dating to 1766 were sopping England and Wales. Founded in 1854 by Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, the brilliant former ship captain who invented sea charts that could “forecast the weather” and later slit his throat amid denouncement of his valiant efforts, the office is located on Fitzroy Road in the historic city of Exeter.
Thanks to the rain obsessions of George James Symons, the Met’s scientists have remarkably complete rainfall records dating to the eighteenth century. A cavernous library downstairs holds many of the earliest weather diaries, old ship logs, a weather chart from the D-day landings, the weather records of Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expedition, and a sixteenth-century edition of Aristotle’s Meteorologica.
The climate scientist Mark McCarthy is science manager for the Met’s National Climate Information Centre, whose job is to help British government, industry, and citizens better understand weather and climate to manage their risks. As he showed me around the library, he explained that because the nation has been buffeted by violent Atlantic storms for all of its history, and endured so many climatic extremes, such as the storms of King James’s and Shakespeare’s time, it is difficult to convince people that a warming world is leading to more intense rainfall. That is basic meteorological science. The record-breaking winter of 2013–2014 was yet more telling.
The oldest rain-watching records show that in December through February, the British endured their wettest winter since at least 1766. New station records were set all over England and Wales, with southern England battered by more than double the rain that normally falls in winter. Exceptional gales carrying extreme rains ravaged the southern coastlines, breaching sea walls and turning historic villages into islands. Along the beaches of southwest England, so many severe storms hit the coast that they uncovered hundreds of unexploded shells, bombs, and mines buried on the beaches since World War II. In western Wales, storms stripped away a beach to unearth an ancient forest six thousand years old, said to be the origins of a mythical kingdom, the Welsh Atlantis of folklore and song.
The problem for climate scientists like McCarthy is attribution—figuring out the extent to which climate change drives any particular extreme, from heavy rains to drought—a step they hope will lead to better forecasting of extreme weather. They are getting closer all the time. Scientists from America’s NOAA and the United Kingdom’s Met brought together researchers from around the world to analyze a dozen extreme events from 2012, including Hurricane Sandy and the drought on the American plains. Increasingly detailed computer climate models crunch thousands of data points, from ocean currents to El Niño patterns, that let scientists tease out the natural workings of the atmosphere from our alteration of it. The study found humans had little impact on the lack of rain in the plains; the climate was much as it had been when Uriah Oblinger migrated west in the nineteenth century. But human-induced warming clearly helped fuel Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with winds spanning more than a thousand miles across. Since 1950, sea-level rise caused by climate change has nearly doubled the Northeast’s annual probability of a Sandy-scale tempest, the study concluded. In all, six of the twelve extreme events carried the fingerprint of climate change.
When I interviewed McCarthy, he and his team were working on models to predict extreme rains and assess local flood risk on all timescales—hourly for weather alerts, by season for farmers and financial markets, by decade and century to inform planning for infrastructure and climate adaptation. They rely on mega-computers and an exhaustive global network of radars and satellites. And so I was surprised when McCarthy told me about his regular habit of unplugging from his various screens and wandering down to the Met’s library. There, he pulls one of the blue hardbound editions of G. J. Symons’s British Rainfall from the shelf, settles at a table, and loses himself in Symons’s obsessive rain recordings and occasional rants. As Symons reported the rainfall at Dublin, Manchester, rain-celebrated Seathwaite, and hundreds of other stations, he also pondered esoteric questions: What constitutes a rainy day? Or he’d go on a tear about observers who would set up their rain gauges near a small, unobtrusive tree, then fail to notice over years when it grew up to hamper accurate measurement.
As McCarthy works on the modern mysteries of British rainfall, Symons’s century-and-a-half-old rain musings sometimes jar a new idea or spark a new line of inquiry. What tree growing right in front of them might modern climate scientists have failed to notice?
“As well as looking forward,” McCarthy tells me, “there is a lot we can learn from the past.”
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So it is with the history of rain. The links to the past begin with our primitive ancestors, who survived pluvials and droughts to outlive all the other hominids. The prehumans evolved sizable brains, toolmaking smarts, and other survival skills as they adapted to dramatic climate swings in eastern Africa. A big part of what makes us who we are is that flexibility to readjust, revise, and acclimate. It would seem to bode well not only for adapting to the climate we have inadvertently changed, but also for learning to live in ways that don’t pull a Venus trick on Earth and its atmosphere.
The best lessons of our rainy past come from the times we made the most of our big brains and tools: when extremes of storm or drought sparked investment and bold new research into meteorological science, launching Fitzroy’s forecasts in the U.K. and Abbe’s nationwide Probabilities in the United States. It is impossible to estimate the millions of lives saved by forecasts and warnings since then.
Today’s weather watchers have come around full circle and back to Daniel Defoe, who read so much moral meaning in the great storm of 1703. The journalist Andrew Freedman writes like the best biographers—using the weather’s compelling moodiness to interpret the climate’s personality for his readers, the 35 million unique visitors to the popular digital news site Mashable. As the site’s first climate and weather reporter, Freedman covers hurricanes and floods with all the drama of Jim Cantore. But he explains almost every major story about the weather in the context of the changing climate. “Man-made climate change is the biggest weather story ever,” Freedman told me. “But I don’t want it to be all about the weather. It’s not just about a ninety-degree day. Fundamentally this is about sustainability and the global energy choices that we make.”
At Slate, another of the Internet’s new weather nerds, Eric Holthaus, is a meteorologist who built a following by relentlessly tweeting Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy. Holthaus made international news when, after reading the latest sobering report from the IPCC, he announced he would never fly again. The decision was deeply significant for a jet-set science writer with his own pilot’s license and a ton of frequent-flyer miles. “My wife and I realized that the ‘substantial and sustained reductions’ called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to start with us,” Holthaus wrote. “World governments will never agree in time to coordinate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. If anything is to change, it will have to come from individuals taking ownership of the problem themselves.”
Freedman and Holthaus were leading a new generation of weather watchers to not only report the chance of rain and explain the weather, but also educate readers on climate and their role in the future well-being of the atmosphere. They asked their readers to consider the same questions Defoe had asked of his more than three centuries before:
“What can all this be? What is the Matter in the World?”
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The science-hostile skeptics of human-caused climate
change point to past swings in climate as proof that today’s warming is part of a natural cycle. Every major scientific society and 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists say otherwise in their consensus that human greenhouse gas emissions are to blame for the current warming. The culture-killing drought of 4,000 years ago has been linked to a centuries-long failure of the Asian monsoon. Causes of other extreme climate events are better understood, such as the volcanic eruptions that marked the Little Ice Age. In contrast, the warming of the past century is not natural in origin; humans have become a dominant force.
To be sure, prior to modern industry and the emissions associated with it, people in the distant past suffered devastating climatic shifts. Given what we’ve learned about the lost cultures and the tragic times, it hardly seems advisable to plunge headlong into repeating them.
Those who dismiss climate science in the twenty-first century are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the Brits who called shipforecasting black magic in a time when shipwrecks took the lives of thousands of sailors. Likewise the modern gas and oil companies sabotaging efforts to limit carbon will come to be seen like the vulture ship-salvagers of Cornwall and Devon that claimed the Met’s forecasts were putting them out of business.
The history of rain offers hope that our political system is capable of overcoming such selfish interests and our divisions to work together on climate. Congress triumphed when it laid the foundation for the U.S. Weather Bureau to set up national forecasting through the telegraph lines in the wake of the Civil War. The political system worked again in 1990, when Congress amended the Clean Air Act to reduce the pollutants responsible for acid rain. In the quarter century since, the nation’s market-based cap-and-trade program has cut sulfur dioxide emissions in half at a fraction of expected costs, one of the most inspirational environmental turnarounds in history. Given its initial championing by Republican administrations and its success combating acid rain, it’s ironic to see cap-and-trade now so thoroughly rejected by conservative politicians.
Then there were the times when Congress ignored the advice of its scientists: John Wesley Powell, the first head of the U.S. Geological Survey, who predicted in his Lands of the Arid Region report of 1878 how yeoman farmers wouldn’t be able to make it on small, unirrigated homesteads in the arid West. Gifford Pinchot, the forestry chief who warned in the early 1920s against the Army Corps of Engineers’ “levees only” strategy on the Mississippi River.
In recent years, Congress has resembled the rainmaking 1890s more than the emissions-lowering 1990s—ears open to the influential uninformed rather than its own scientists. U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, perhaps the most prominent national opponent of meaningful legislation to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, has said that humans cannot possibly control the climate because only God can do that. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
The statement doesn’t jibe with Senator Inhofe’s vote in favor of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that have done so much to combat acid rain. It also ignores fellow Christians who view climate change as one of the great moral challenges of our time.
In addition to his religious convictions, Inhofe has a sense of duty to the energy sector, the largest industry in Oklahoma. The oil and gas industry has donated more than $1.5 million to his political campaigns—more than double the next-largest group of donors. Other evangelical Christians draw a stronger sense of duty from their conviction that humans are called to protect God’s creation—and also their neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. “It’s the poor and disadvantaged who are being hardest hit,” says Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical and one of the top climate scientists in the United States, “those very people the Bible tells us to care for.”
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Dust Bowl that followed just three years later were two of many disasters that proved rain does not fall equally on the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust. Neither disaster would have been so devastating for some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations had we paid closer attention to the earlier history of river flooding and the drought of Uriah Oblinger’s generation.
Whether bringing a river to flood stage or washing fertilizer into the Gulf of Mexico, there’s nothing destructive about the rain itself. Only we have made it so. We plowed up the native grasses, settled the floodplains, and built out our cities as if immune to the workings of rain. Today, flooding has become one of the foremost increasing risks of a warming climate.
A growing number of scientists believe we are approaching a climate catastrophe faster than we realize—and suggest it is time to consider large-scale intervention in the atmosphere, known as geoengineering. One scenario has scientists replicating the global cooling that the volcano Mount Pinatubo caused when it erupted in 1991. Ten million tons of sulfur pumped into the atmosphere caused temperatures to drop across the globe by an average 1 degree Fahrenheit. Deliberately pumping thousands of tons of particles into the sky to deflect sunlight would have the same effect, according to the geoengineers who want to research the idea. They liken it to chemotherapy for Earth: Artificial cooling is not something anyone wants to do, but if we have to save the planet, we should be ready with the best possible science. They acknowledge it is worth remembering the drawbacks of chemotherapy, too. The European Geosciences Union has come out with research showing the resulting loss of solar radiation could have troubling effects for people and Earth—including a significant reduction in the rain that falls upon Europe and North America.
As Powell said in his Arid Lands report so long ago, “the weather of the globe is a complex whole, each part of which reacts on every other, and each part of which depends on every other.” Who could have imagined, in the eighteenth century, a pollutant spewed into the air by Mr. Macintosh’s rain-cloak factory in Manchester could help cause a major human health disaster in the Great London Fog of 1952…and then destroy Germany’s beautiful Black Forest with invisible and deadly acid rain…and then alter the climate of the Earth?
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In the late nineteenth century, a western poet named Joaquin Miller, living in the mountains overlooking Oakland, California, loved rain so much that he created his own personal rain machine to make water roar down on his roof. Anytime he needed some writing inspiration, he could twist a spigot inside his house to summon a shower outside. In 1893, Miller wrote a utopian novel that looked askance at the “extreme selfishness” of a colony of dryland settlers who prayed for rain for their corn even though they knew they would be taking it from their neighbors’ thirsty crops of figs. What we now call geoengineering ultimately triumphed in his ideal future society. The impossible caveat was that weather control required utopia, writes the weather historian William B. Meyer—“for no society short of a perfectly just and harmonious one was sure to use that power for the better.”
In the story of rain and humanity, never entirely just and harmonious, the most shameful injustices took place amid fear and desperation during extreme drought and extreme storms: the sacrifice of children to the rain god Tlaloc, the burning of witches at the stake for conjuring tempests. As Earth throbs with the most extreme rains and droughts of the modern human experience, it is worth remembering those most irrational responses of our stormy past.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury wrote that the Martians “blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.” Whether from the standpoint of science or religion or the art of storm, rain, on balance, has been Earth’s blessing. Rain is not only part of our chaotic atmosphere, but part of our chaotic selves—connected in every holy book from the Bible to the Rig Veda, every human genre from cuneiform script to Chopin.
As scientists work to distill its physical mysteries, rain also calls us to breathe its vernacular scents, stamp in its puddles, and cool
off in its showers. I couldn’t finish the story without celebrating in the rainiest place on Earth, Cherrapunji.
EPILOGUE
WAITING FOR RAIN
The timing of my arrival in India’s state of Meghalaya—from Sanskrit, “abode of clouds”—could not have been more promising. The monsoons, which sweep up from the Indian Ocean on the country’s southeast and southwest coasts and fan north to often ecstatic welcome over June and July, normally take until July 15 to cover the nation. But India’s Meteorology Office was reporting an early and ferocious season. Monsoons had inundated the entire country as of June 15, the day I arrived in Meghalaya. The last time they had covered all of India this quickly was 1961—more than fifty years before.
So furious were the rains that flooding in the far north had just killed at least eighty pilgrims on their way to the Himalayan shrines near the Tibetan border. Those were the known dead; seventy thousand remained stranded or missing.
Besides the meteorological signs that I was about to experience the rains of my life, another kind of sign sat next to me on my Air India flight to Guwahati, a city in the northeastern Indian state of Assam and the nearest I could fly to reach Earth’s rainiest place, Meghalaya’s Khasi Hills. A little over halfway through our journey from Delhi, a young Assamese woman with shining black hair that hung to her waist blurted out, “Ma’am, I am not flattering you, but I cannot look away from your beautiful hands, writing and turning pages and highlighting your book.”
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