In January this year, just days after Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2014 the hottest year recorded on Earth, the US Senate rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. In her book Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett argues that those “who dismiss science in the 21st century are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the Brits who called ship-forecasting black magic in a time when shipwrecks took the lives of thousands of sailors”. She predicts that the gas and oil companies currently sabotaging efforts to limit carbon emissions will go down in history like the ship-salvagers of Cornwall and Devon who complained the Met’s forecasts were putting them out of business.
Barnett’s book spans 4bn years, beginning with the torrents that filled the oceans. The story of Earth-as-exceptional-blue-marble is out of date. Earth did not develop as the sole watery orb in our solar system. Mars and Venus had water, too, but their oceans vaporised into space while Earth held on to its life-giving water: “Luckily for us, the forecast called for rain.” To help imagine our earliest ancestors in pluvial times, Barnett recommends a long soak in the bath followed by close examination of our shrivelled fingers and toes. Neurobiologist Mark Changizi’s work suggests these temporary wrinkles are “rain treads” and “clues to an ancient adaption for gripping in the rainy forests where human ancestors lived some 10m years ago”.
Bad weather has long bred superstition. In 1589, King James VI of Scotland believed witches had summoned the storms that prevented his bride, Anna of Denmark, reaching Scottish shores. Witchcraft persecutions peaked in Europe between 1560-1600 – decades of climate extremes including floods, freezes and harvest failures. Thomas Jefferson, an avid weather-watcher, devoted himself to the triumph of reason over superstition, yet built his home at Monticello, where a crew of slaves dug through the mountaintop for 46 days to find water. “The founding forecaster was high and dry at Monticello – wishing for rain.”
During the desperate drought of the 1890s, the US Congress was persuaded to invest in rainmaking experiments. Barnett argues that, then as now, Congress was “less moved by its own scientists than by the influential uninformed”. In 1890, Senator Charles Benjamin Farwell pushed through a bill to approve a budget of $9,000 for the Midland rain-concussion trials, already discredited by scientists, which involved bombing the skies. All the Midland trials proved was that the American public had been misled and the federal government was partly to blame for not listening to its own scientists.
Barnett points out that little has changed. Congress today resembles its would-be rainmaking predecessor of the 1890s, “ears open to the influential uniformed rather than its own scientists”. Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a prominent national opponent of legislation to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, has said humans cannot 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.”
