Saturday, February 02, 2019

The Weather Experiment: Book Review - Partly Sunny, Partly Cloudy

The Weather Experiment from petermoore on Vimeo.


There have been through the years a fair number of books that take some bit of arcana and build it into a novel history - often with a dollop of whimsy. They discuss the roots of Longitude, the historical search for ideal Actuarial Tables, surprising links between a Fish and commerce, and so on. To me, they tend to owe a debt to Connections, James Burke’s 1970s BBC/PBS series -- the one in which his deft narratives moved from the Jacquard Loom to the Hollerith Census machine to the 360 mainframe. Made you think about differently about the world in transit before you.

Connections’ descendant books include surprising cul de sacs, curious associations - like one might find talking with an odd but interesting academic sauced at a dreary cocktail party. While there is much to learn in The Weather Experiment by Peter Moore, it truly hails from the genre, and, tho it stands as a well-researched exposition on the journey to better understanding of climate and weather, I don’t think the Weather Experiment quite successfully joins Longitude, Cod or Against the Gods – much less Connections  -- in the pantheon of whimsically dolloped  historical accounts.

Perhaps the writer looked to go beyond the temptingly rote formula – or the topic didn’t lend itself in the exercise. I guess my gauge would have it that there were too many characters, subtopics and jumps in time in The Weather Experiment. Or, more to the point, that the connections between the characters was slight. These are such as Constable, Foster, Beaufort, Anderson, Reid, Franklin, Redfield and Viscount Merrill - but they seemed to be alone in the world, tho that may have been how communications in the world worked at the time, a point Moore makes regularly.

At times, one, Robert FitzRoy, the captain of Darwin’s fabled H.M.S. Beagle, seems to anchor the story. Like other men of the sea he intently studied the natural phenomena of currents, winds and precipitation; especially, he kept prodigious logs of barometric readings and carried on his studies diligently between voyages. By the end of the book, FitzRoy is settled in as head of the Met Office - pledged to chart weather and sea, but which he turned into a weather service aimed at predicting weather and informing seamen and fishermen of impending storms. Weathermen came in for criticism then as now, and FitzRoy was by  intellectual betters upended.

Perhaps author’s difficulty stems from the fact that there really was no one “Father Of Weather Forecasting.” In a rambling coda to The Weather Experiment included is FitzRoy’s own list of men that together in fits and starts contributed to the sciences of meteorology.

There is much to learn about the days when the weather was an impossibly dark swirl, when its causes were mostly imagined, and when modern society took the path toward reasonable, repeatable predictions. But it is not an easy tramp. Its themes are good to keep in mind in our time, as AI wizards promise prediction beyond our dreams. Who can't say that their measurements of demographics and happenings are no less naive than those of sailors, shepherds or millers before the anemometer.

Certainly a book for weatherists and science history buffs. Beyond that, it's suitability wider audiences, is hard to predict. - Jack Vaughan

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