The Weather and the World

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 264, 3 August 1929, Page 19

The Weather and the World

Humanity’s Never-failing Topic of Conversation “Willy-nilly, man lives surrounded by the cogs and wheels of the great weather engine driven by the sun. To the extent that he understands these cogs and wheels is he able to. live comfortably among them, for only by understanding the weather is he able to escape the stigma of Mark Twain’s observation (‘nothing is ever done about the weather’). Only by adjusting himself to what the weather wants is man able to do anything about it.”—E E. Free and Travis Hoke in their book, “Weather: Practical, Dramatic and Spectacular Facts About a Little Studied Subject.”

C 6 < DMIRABLY illustrated with photographic pictures and with inX l ©. structive diagrams and weather maps, this well-written and ZLJa deeply-interesting treatise is sure of a cordial welcome from X JL readers who are students of weather wisdom generally, and

who are particularly interested in studying and considering the causes of the more ordinary phenomena of meteorology as they present themselves to observers in Europe, as well as the more spectacular effects produced by snowstorms, blizzards, fogs, floods, thunder and lightning, hailstorms, and other impressive and extraordinary manifestations of the changing seasons, and the sunshine or the clouds,” says the “Scotsman,” in a review of the above book.

“It discourses in picturesquely written chapters on dew and frost, on rainbows, sunsets, sunspots, healthy weather and unhealthy weathei, cyclones, and many other such appearances, and accompanies its always interesting descriptions with comments always engaging and not seldom thrilling to read, while its richly varied furnishing of graphic illustrations includes a prize photograph of a London fog and photographs of icebergs, many of weather instruments, one of a prairie tornado, and one of the devastation caused by the tornado at St. Louis in September, 1927. Interesting and instructive throughout, the work forms a noteworthy and valuable addition to the special literature of meteorology and climate.” “The famous reproach that nobody does anything about the weather does not apply to Nature. Every stream that helps to wear down the earths mountain ranges is doing its best to get rid of weather altogether,” write the authors in their opening chapter. “The best model of how the continents make weather,” they add, “is a burning house. The flames go upward in a great column of fire and smoke, not downward to spread out on the ground; a familiar fact, but one which holds the chief weather clue. Hot air is lighter than cold air. The fire heats the surrounding air and it rises, just as the old-fashioned hot air balloons used to rise at country fairs carrying aloft the aeronaut and his parachute. . . ™ “A continent heated by the sun’s rays acts like a gigantic fire, warms the air above it. This air tends to rise. When the continent cools off at night the air above it cools, too. Then this air tends to sink, precisely as the hot-air balloon conies down when its filling of heated air has cooled. Similar motions are generated by sunlight in the earth’s oceans; the surface water being heated by the sun’s rays in one part of the earth and left cooler in others. ' . “Thus are created great rising and falling motions both in the ocean and in the atmosphere; currents which the irregular distribution of the earth’s land and water convert into horizontal ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and similar air currents like the trade winds; currents so complicated that scientists have scarcely begun to undertand their details. “Cut up some tiny bits of tissue paper and stir them into a teakettle full of cold water. Put the kettle on the stove and heat it. You will see the bits of suspended paper begin to move up and down and around the kettle as the heat sets up a circulation of the water. That is very much what happens when the earth’s air is heated by a sun-warmed continent beneath it. . “Were it possible to watch the earth from some outside point of vantage as one watches a tea-kettle, and were balloons scattered through the air to serve as markers of the currents, all the gigantic circulation of the atmosphere could be seen precisely as one sees the water move in a kettle on the stove. But that is denied to man except in imagination. He is like a tiny animalcule creeping on the bottom of the tea-kettle. “Just as that animalcule might watch the floating bits of paper circulating above him, so man watches clouds or test balloons to learn the circulations of the air. Gradually he gathers facts about how this circulation is altered by day or night and by the seasons. That is the basis of the world’s increasing weather knowledge, for the fundamental cause of weather changes is the gigantic engine of the boiling atmosphere, driven by the heat of the sun.

“To understand the weather of any country or to predict it, what would be needed is perfect knowledge of all these circulations of the air. Unfortunately, that is easier asked for than obtained. A race of intelligent

animalcules on the bottom of the tea-kettle might spend many lifetimes in industrious research without learning all about the currents in the water above them. “The earth is even more difficult than the tea-kettle, for the multiplicity of mountains and plains and seas complicates enormously the effects of the sun’s heat on the air. Only in a very few places in the world where the air movements are exceptionally simple, like the western coast of India, are the movements of the atmosphere adequately known. . . . “In all countries and all seasons rain or snow, calm or storm, cold or heat are shuffled and dealt by the power of the sun. The amount of energy which the earth receives each minute is paid back at once into space from the outer layers of the earth’s air. Certainly our- planet s continual income of sunlight and sun heat is not less than the equivalent of one hundred million tons of coal each minute. While yon read this sentence sunlight falling on the earth will bring it as much new heat as though ten million tons of the best coal had burnt to ashes in the same time. “If you happen to be reading this at night the inhabitants of some other continent will be receiving the sunlight, but every continent has its turn. Every bi-eeze that ventures into your window, every rain-drop that patters on your roof is a gift from the sun. The gigantic power of hurricanes or tornados is but a tiny fraction of this energy from the sun. AU this has been going on, geologists believe, for at least a billion years, for there is evidence that sunlight was reaching the earth hundreds of millions of years ago very much as it arrives to-day. “The mere existence of this powerful atmospheric engine that deals out weather worries the average man less than the vagaries of it. The machine does not seem to be running smoothly. One can be reasonably sure when he goes to bed at night that air to breathe will still be there in the morning. Nobody would promise himself such constancy of the weather Virtually every language has its proverbs in which the weather stands as simile for all that is most fickle. Every one of these proverbs is richly deserved. The whole machine seems vastly erratic and unreasonable. “This is undoubtedly an illusion of size and ignorance. A mosquito riding on a locomotive might find himself assaulted from moment to moment by showers of water or clouds of steam or frightful waves of heat and cold. It all would seem, doubtless, quite wild and meaningless. Even an intelligent mosquito, with brains beyond his proboscis, might be puzzled. “A creature about as large as the locomotive is needed to gain some easy glimmering of what it is all about. The weather engine is too large for men to understand it easily or quickly, but that is no reason to doubt its being understandable. As some of the fast travelling mosquitoes might cling to their locomotive and hold a congress, agreeing to try to learn what manner of thing had hold of them, so man proposes the science of meteorology. . . .

“It is probably unfortunate,” the authors state, towards the close of their very interesting volume, “for weather science—at least, for its publicreputation—that the duty of day by day country-wide forecasting was wished on it too soon. This is not saying that the weather forecasts now issued in numerous countries are useless, for they are sometimes very valuable indeed. The point is that when some service is rendered regularly by an agency which makes a business of that service, people expect it to be accurate. Especially are mistakes resented when agency and service are labelled with the magic name of science, for however much the scientists themselves protest, people continue to regard science as a kind of benevolent magic which can fail only if the magicians be incompetent.

“In simple truth, neither a true weather service nor logical weather forecasting is yet a possibility. We human mosquitoes have not yet studied closely enough or comprehensively enough the gigantic weather engine which sprinkles us and fans us. Present weather forecasts are merely guesses. guesses made, it is true, by able men on the basis of knowledge which slowly grows more suitable and complete, but which is still woefully lacking. The weather is always a subject of discussion —the one sure topic to open a conversation with a stranger or a friend. There should be many who will welcome a comprehensive book on such a universal theme as the weather.