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