The Weather Vane

issued for the New York City area and Boston? Would geez? I hope people would be okay. I might as well catch up on my reading. I've been going through old issues of Poor Richard's Almanac. Let's see seventeen fifty three. In the preface, Benjamin Franklin looks back at twenty years of publishing his Poor Richard's Almanacs, and it makes this pretty corny joke about how no matter what weather he predicted day to day, year after year, his prediction was right.

At least he predicted the right weather. Somewhere in the world. In the eighteenth century, no one could really predict the weather, not like today. Tens of millions are in the path of this nor easter, that could bring record snowfall and coastal flooding. Time to Betten down the hatches and then escape over the threshold to a radio booth in New York during another terrible snowstorm more than half a century ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, A good morning to you. This is John Cameron's ways in the NBC news room in New York over to the deal of the storm area. Today, the forecast is for better weather, which is encouraging news to many. Thousands of people will have the tales of this top subject during the broadcast. The Great Blizzard of nineteen forty seven hit New York the day after Christmas. If you were in its path, you likely lost power and couldn't listen to the radio or watch television. Life

magazine printed photographs of people skiing through the streets. Movie theaters ran news ural reports very much in the style of the newsural reports from the Second World War, which it only just ended. Friday, December twenty six, nineteen forty seven, It's a blank white Friday in New York City. As a snow plot burst, as it's officially called, dumps two

inches of snow an hour on the top. I've always been fascinated by how much weather reporting has in common with war reporting, as if the weather were an enemy to be battled, but so formidable that the weather nearly always wins. This time, the enemy had conducted a sneak attack. New Yorkers were blindsided. As many as thirty thousand cars had to be abandoned by their drivers. It was a six million dollar object to make New York streets passable again.

The storm extended from the nation's capital to northern Maine, but it was New York and its suburbs that or the brunt of the fall. He officially recorded twenty six inches, was five more inches than the historic blizzard. For most of human history, people would wake up in the morning, look up in the sky, have a good idea, a reasonable idea about what the day might bring, but no idea what tomorrow would bring. Today, I look on my phone. I can see the weather anywhere in the world, hour

by hour, for the next week. I have an oracle in my back pocket, a tiny god. It's a kind of thing, a form of technology, a type of knowledge that I tend to put in a category in my head that says, brought to you by NASA or a product of the space race, and partly that's true. The weather app on my iPhone is a product of war, of all the wars of the twentieth century. I'd like to know what does it mean that I carry around

in my back pocket this little instrument of war. What does it mean to have at my fingertips the knowledge of what weather is going to happen next everywhere? How has it changed the world to have this knowledge, to take it for granted even and there was one statistic that will probably stand ninety nine million tons of snow fella New York in sixteen dollars. Welcome to the Last Archive. The show about how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything

at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season is all about common knowledge, what everyone knows or thinks they know, knowledge people share in common. This episode the weather. Everyone's always talking about it, but nobody ever does anything about it, or do they. It's a big, messy, uncertain world, looking up to the skies, to the heavens and trying to read in the clouds signs of what might happen next. Snow rain, a beautiful day it's an elemental curiosity. It's

also an urgent one. You can see why forecasting the weather is a lynchpin of wartime planning. The weather can determine if you live or die, whether your crops fail, your boat sinks, you run out of water, you lose your home in a flood. Then there are the more ordinary matters Janet an umbrella today. I I love the idea that I can know what's coming next. It's a comfort, but it's also strange, as if we could find such certainty in such an uncertain world. In the US, weather

records go pretty far back. For centuries, farmers, factory workers, all sorts of ordinary people recorded the weather, little jottings and diaries. Mostly people also consulted farmers almanacs to look for weather predictions. There, something bigger started to happen, though, in the eighteen forties, a national data collection project headed

up by a new national institution, the Smithsonian. I've got a graduate student, Adelaide Mandeville, working on a history dissertation about all of this, and I called her up and she explained to me what the Smithsonian had been trying to do and how it depended on the telegraph system.

Working with the telegraph companies, they enlist one hundred and fifty volunteers in the first year to start sending in their local weather observations, and then the Smithsonian takes all of that and maps it, and then eighteen seventy I think they make the first national weather agency. So that's when it becomes a federal project. For a long time, that project relied on hundreds, even thousands of volunteers who sent in their local weather observations. And as one meteorologist

said in eighteen seventy nine, anyone could do it. There is one science which is within the grasp of every mine, and which to be successfully cultivated requires no pre operation, the science of rain and fine weather, but which now received the higher title of meteorology. By the end of the nineteenth century, experts were taking over. Eventually, the work of predicting the weather moved to the US Signal Service, and then in eighteen ninety one Congress created the Weather Bureau.

It was a division of the Department of Agriculture. The chief of this new Weather Bureau, he didn't just oversee the collection of weather records. He was supposed to forecast storms and droughts and floods, anything that would affect agriculture or industry or commerce. The whole scheme had a kind of citizen science quality to it. The Weather Bureau wanted to make meteorology common knowledge, to teach people about the latest instruments. It installed little weather kiosks in twenty nine

cities out their own city sidewalks. There were these boxes with maps and charts, thermometers and barometers. What the Weather beer really wanted was newspapers to print weather maps, but before that happened, the weather report went out in a different way. As Adelaide Manville explained to me, the post office in the early twentieth century, they were responsible for delivering weather forecasts with the mail, but there was an issue because they would go out at seven am, that's

when the mail was delivered, and the forecast. Each day, new information came in at ten am, so it was always a little delayed, and the weather forecasters sort of got a reputation for not being super accurate. But then they had these, you know, really really helpful and important forecasts where they warned towns that there was going to be a huge flood or hurricane and people were able to evacuate then once radio started in the nineteen twenties,

you could hear the weather forecast over the wireless. We'll give you that everywhether we put forecasting had by now gotten more accurate than it had ever been before. That's because of advances made just before the First World War, when a Norwegian meteorologist recorded the weather across Europe. Then during the war, his son, working for the military, discovered the nature of the movement of masses of cold and warm air. He called these fronts like battlefronts, except the weather.

An English mathematician also involved in the war effort, used their data and those ideas to devise a mathematical model to predict the weather. Unfortunately it didn't work. Still, the idea too cold, that there should be a model, and that if only you could do the calculations fast enough, you could predict the weather. So right, Doing that got a lot easier after computers were invented, and here's the

latest weather report. Nothing advances science like war. During the Second World War, those mathematical models got better and better, and by the end of the war you could use computers to run those calculations, so finally you could make your predictions faster than the speed of weather. If you could get ahead of the storm, you could get ahead

of the enemy. Weather forecasting becomes critical to military strategy during the war, and they're developing these new technologies to syst them in doing that, so like radar and these aircraft controls and more extensive data collection systems and all that does make them better at forecasting. By nineteen forty seven, Americans had gotten used to the idea that, especially if there were a really big storm coming, they'd know it in advance. Nearly twenty six inchines have fallen a record

unequal in the analyst of the Weather Bureau. But really it wasn't the scale of that storm that was the strangest thing about it. The strangest thing about it was that it was so unexpected. When you wake up in the morning and you open up an eye, if you turn on the mark and you look through the sky and won the weather who he is a weather or dry who knows the weather man? And here's the latest

weather report? Extreme cold temperature below zero. In the nineteen fifties, when Americans started buying televisions and real numbers, they could flip a switch and hear a forecast, sometimes a goofy one. A lot of early TV forecasts came in the form of cartoons. Some of them involved puppets. One was sponsored by Botany Neckties and featured a little wooly lamb. No recordings of the song exists, so we found the lyrics and made our own. It's cold, it's rain, it's fair,

it's all mixed up together. But I, as Botany's little lamp, predict tomorrow's weather. I love how silly these early weather reports were. But this goofiness didn't last long. Pretty quickly, in those post war years, television weather forecasting left lambs behind and settled into the style we still have today. Weather today, Montana in a real state of deep breeze, about forty eight degrees near Helena, stormy along the Gulf of Mexico and Texas, A sober looking fellow in a

suit and tie, part sportscaster, part scientist. Generally, however, here in New York and alt in Chicago, something resembling springtime. Fifty eighth degrees here in New York this afternoon. It's really a pretty big country after all, lots of weather. The buttoned up weatherman and his straight up forecast. This was a wartime offshoot products of the Army in the Navy. The earliest national television weather forecast was made by Fellow

who had had training in meteorology during the war. A lot of soldiers and sailors had gotten that kind of training. And when you look at it even today, a modern weather report, the map, the pointer, the symbols, the presentation, it's like a military briefing. Right, let me get the weather Bureau here, we said to the brother James, are there. In nineteen fifty two, NBC launched The Today Show. That's weather forecast. Do you understand? Right in the Weather Bureau

where they make the stuff? And already for you. Go ahead, Jim, I'll put it on a map. The Today Show's anchor, Dave Garroway in suit and bow tie. He's on the phone with a guy from the Weather Bureau. He's in a studio kitted out with all kinds of Jim crackery, a giant telephone, a microphone the size of a broomstick hanging down his front, a bank of blinking television monitors,

very high tech, nineteen fifty style. But then the telephone in one hand, he's got a piece of chalk in his other hand, and he starts writing the weather on a big chalkboard with a map of the country drawn on it. Ar it turns to rain in Pennsylvania about thirty two up here, crazing dribble. He's not God, this guy here, he is every morning telling you what your day will be like, and for the most part, earning your trust. I think, having lived through some of this era,

there was also something so seemingly simple about it. You get the weather report in the morning, you put on your wind breaker, you had out expecting rain, You get on with your day. There was a Cold War going on, the world might end in a blink an atomic bomb, the end of life on Earth. But hey, you knew enough at least that you needed a wind breaker. Today. I want to know your forecast is very good, because

it's raining right here in New York. All those long years of the Cold War, though, the nineteen fifties, the nineteen sixties, there was something else going on. For one thing, the weather forecasting was pretty good, reliable, useful, but it

had stopped getting much better each war. The First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War had advanced the science of meteorology, but whether as folklore proverbs that goofiness that started with poor Richard's Almanac went down to the singing lamb that was still around two in a way. You can see it. In one little town in America. In nineteen seventy, the morning a long time once again for the KRSBO got Report, the official for Rosebery. Yes

you heard that right, the Mount Nebo Goat Report. In a city of Rosberg, Oregon. They went old school. The local news started issuing forecasts by reporting on the position of a herd of goats up on a mountain outside town Mount Nebo. And I know this sounds crazy, but you really can use sheep and goats to predict the weather. They're pretty accurate. There's no end of proverbs about this phenomenon. When sheep gather in a huddle, tomorrow will have a puddle.

That's true. And so the KRSB Mount Nebo Goat reports game this morning at about six thirty am. Man at the moment, we have someone scattered goats under an intenthi go to pressure system. Goats arranging this morning about the mid mountain three quarters of the way upound people. Thus we will have a beautiful Juan morning. Once you get what I think is going on here is a kind

of back to nature vibe. But there's something else here too, an anti war vibe, the idea that maybe the weather isn't brought to you by the military, Maybe the weather isn't the enemy. Maybe the weather could also just be goats up on a hill. Then too, there's a sense here of the chaos of climate. By the nineteen seventies, meteorologists we're talking about the butterfly effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world could have an effect on a weather system on

the other side of the world. That wasn't really a new idea in the nineteen seventies. It had first appeared in a meteorology journal in nineteen eighteen during the First World War, about a different insect, a grasshopper in Idaho, might conceivably initiate a storm movement which would sweep across the continent and destroy New York City. It was a very scary thought. It got much scarier somehow in the nineteen seventies, in the middle of the Vietnam War. The

weather is chaos. It's complicated, so formidably intricate. A set of innumerable forces, intersecting and infinite ways. The system can never be reduced to any mathematical model, not perfectly anyway. But what if we didn't have to understand all that complexity. What if instead of trying to model or predict the weather, we could just control it. That story after the break. This is an airport weather station here with our charts

and their instruments and trying to predict tomorrow's weather. Quite often they succeed. In nineteen fifty eight, CBS News reported on the latest research in the field of meteorology. The fact is that we don't know very much about the forces that create the weather. Therefore we can always predict without proceed Consider some of the things we don't know.

Consider this cloud. The Cold War, the age of the atomic bomb, had given rise to a revolution and atmospheric sciences, and still no one really understood the workings of weather. What exactly produces high winds, a hurricane, a tornado, a blizzard? Was it a butterfly on the other side of the world? What causes rain? How to clouds form? At the time, the field was on the verge of a major breakthrough

in the work of a scientist named Joanne Malchus. CBS featured her research in its look at the Latest goings on in Meteorology. Doctor Maltho was studying a tiny but very important part of weather, a cloud. Joanne Melchis, better known by a later married name, Joanne Simpson, was the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in meteorology. Her whole career came out of the Second

World War. She was always interested in flying and sailing and math, but didn't really have an interest in science until she went to University of Chicago. And then she describes her interest in meteorology as an accident of World War Two. And she starts college in nineteen forty and then Pearl Harbor happens, and she says, her whole worlds in flames, and she really wants to contribute to the

war effort. That's Adelaide Mandeville again. Simpson's father had been a reporter covering aviation, her mother a birth control activist. Her parents won't let her join the military and say, you have to stay in college, and so she finds this aviation training program World War two training program at Verst of Chicago that was started by this meteorologist named Carl Gustaf Rosby, who many people consider like the greatest meteorologists of the twentieth century. If you've ever flown on

an airplane, you can think Carl Gustaf Rosby. He was key in identifying the jet stream. He explained how atmospheric circulation of the weather works like waves. He was Simpson's advisor. He was a great meteorologist. Apparently he was not a great person. He was really dismissive of her and her work. He's like, clouds are completely insignificant. They just don't matter you as a girl, and clouds, as passive and insignificant

are a perfect match. She's like, okay, sir, and moves on to a new advisor and continues working on it. In spite of that, Simpson persevered. She finished her dissertation in nineteen forty nine. She saw something few other meteorologies had seen. That clouds weren't insignificant, and that they were important to whether in all kinds of ways, that they

were worth investigating. It's almost as though, as a person whose own power had been invisible to a lot of people, including her adviser, she could see the power and something that looked like fluff. Here's Simpson in that nineteen fifty eight CBS news story. We could understand what's happening in this coffee cup. We could begin to learn about clouds. There's heat and moisture in the coffee cup. Because Hattie arises,

we find motions. When I first watched this interview with Simpson, it drove me crazy that this important scientist has to introduce an idea using a coffee mug. I guess because she's a woman. But then it turns out it's a really good explanation. The steam coming up from the cup is water vapor, which is being condensed out into a lot of tiny, little liquid water droplets. Something very similar

to this is happening over the tropical ocean. Simpson spent much of her career of flying through clouds and airplanes with cameras strapped to the nose, recording movements and taking measurements. There's the marine meteorologist. I began to wonder about clouds. How to clouds grow? Where do they get the energy to fade on? To find out, we have to go to the places where the clouds are. We have to

chase after them in the sky. So she's up there in airplanes, chasing clouds, making films, analyzing those films frame by frame, and building a mathematical model of the behavior of clouds. To do all those things she needs was at the time really expensive technology, and the best way to get access to that technology was through the military, which had long had a huge interest in understanding and

predicting the weather. By the nineteen fifties, at the beginning of the Cold War, what the US military would really really like is to be able to control the weather. This is what Adelaide Manville's research is all about. Earlier scientists had wanted to understand things. Cold War era scientists wanted to control things mind control, riot control, pain control,

weather control. We can fully harness nature, and so you know, we're one step closer to being able to move clouds and make it rain, and turn a hurricane in a different direction, mitigate lightning so forest fires don't happen. They start coming up with all these ideas turning deserts into gardens, and you know why not, because meanwhile, a bunch of other wartime technologies we're making it possible to control the weather. Indoors mposures everywhere are today benefiting by weather made to

order by carrier. Instead of traveling away from business and home to seek relief, you can obtain the same comfort right in your own home moral office through air conditioning. So we can control the weather inside. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could just touch a button and fill your home with warm spring sunlight. Now you can have electric heating, the next best thing to sunshine. Next we'll control the weather outside air conditioning, electric heating indoor weather

control for the outdoors. The equivalent was a discovery made in nineteen forty six by three scientists a general electric They called it cloud seating, dropping dry ice from airplanes onto clouds to make them rain weather to order. Cloud seating men completely takes off and just becomes this national obsession. A lot of veterans from the war who have learned to fly and have a general sense of weather patterns.

They start doing it and selling their services to farmers who are facing drought, to mayors who you need to refill their public water supply, to Native American tribes who have done their annual rainmaking ceremonies and didn't work that year, and they hire these rainmakers. Then it tumbles into the Cold War period and just explodes. Suddenly. The idea of controlling the weather seems so promising. You can force clouds

to rain. You can't really control how much or what the consequences will be, but in a crude way, it does work. In nineteen fifty one, Congress debated the Weather Modification Act, providing for equitable distribution of precipitation among the states. Think about that for a minute. The confidence. We are talking about drafting legislation to ensure equal rainfall between the states,

and you thought my tree branch idea was screwy. In nineteen fifty three, Congress established a National Weather Modification Commission. As if you could jump from cloud seating to setting the temperature every day, like with a thermostat in your living room. Meanwhile, the military is awfully interested in the secret stuff weather as a weapon. Think of the advantages that would have brought in a war if you could

control the weather in your enemy's territory. So it's just at this point, in the middle of the nineteen fifties that Joanne Simpson has started to revolutionize the study of clouds. She's an experimental scientist doing basic research, but she sure yourself can't do it alone. So she got funding any way she could, from any branch of the military, And if she had to say, oh, yeah, this has a

military application, she'd say it. Simpson is looking for projects that will let her do cloud seatings that she can test her models. But the way Simpson talks about her work, at least in public, it's always about basic research. These clouds were passing, have a very short flight, they're born, they grow, may die. It's quite moving the way she describes clouds. I find it moving. You're almost there with her, chasing them in the sky like UFOs or aliens. Then

we get a monster runaway cloud. It tools started as a small, tiny fleecy thing, or a group of tiny fleecy things, but then something permitted it to build and grow and defy its cool, dry surroundings. Once we find out what that something is the tanks and breaks off clouds and permits the runaway growth of large numbers of them, well then perhaps we will have put in one more link in the long chain of what forms and maintains

a hurricane. Ultimately, she develops the first ever cloud model and the first ever hurricane model, so her work becomes foundational to the next up until now sixty seventy years of thomospheric sciences. But in the mid nineteen fifties she starts working in weather control. But then the idea of weather control had gone so entirely mainstream. Then even President Lyndon B. Johnson was talking about it. He who controls the weather will control the world LBJ, sounding like a

James Bond supervillain. It was such a good line that a screenwriter stole it a couple of years later for a film. There was a spoof of a Bond movie. It's called Our Man Flint and I've got to play something for you. In this scene, a US general complains about the supervillain's evil plan in the desert put icebergs in the Mediterranean. You control the weather, and you control the world. If you could control the weather, you could

also do something seemingly incredibly useful. You could weaken hurricanes before they hit land. In the mid nineteen fifties, or a series of hurricanes that caused you mass amounts of damage, hundreds of people die, and the government starts the National Hurricane Research Project, and one of the methods they used to research hurricanes is cloud seating. Joan Simpson served as top advisor to what comes to be called Project storm Fury,

using cloud seating to modify a hurricane. But a hitch with trying to modify a hurricane, as you first have to wait for one to happen. So in the meantime, Simpson and her team decided to run tests on promising storm clouds. You're not summer of nineteen sixty three and they're in Puerto Rico at a US naval base, and they go up and she chooses ten clouds near San Juan, and they seed them, and then they're waiting to see what happens. And the first cloud, in Simpson's telling, just balloon.

It grows and grows. They think they're watching cloud seating work, and they do end up seating a hurricane. That same year, they publish a big paper about it. It gets a lot of press attention. Then two years later, in nineteen sixty five, when Simpson is serving as director of Storm Fury, they decided to try to modify another hurricane named Betsy,

off the coast of Puerto Rico. They announced that plan to the press dawn August twenty seven at Florida and island bases, Navy, whether Bureau and Air Force planes are warming up to their daily task, except at the last minute, the hurricane changed course suddenly on Sunday night, Betsy runs head on into a high pressure ridge, then it turns towards the mainline. Hurricane flags are flying now from Key

West to Keep Canada. Because of the course change, the Storm Fury scientists called off their plan to try to modify the hurricane. And then when Betsy hit Florida and Louisiana had killed eighty people. Mentality list is as follows. Twenty five year old missus and Mayou. Her body was found in the Franklin Avenue ditch. She was swept away by flood water. Floridians were furious. A lot of them blamed Project Storm Fury, thought the scientists had made the

hurricane so severe. In truth, Storm Fury wasn't responsible. The scientists had already abandoned the project, but people still blamed them. Simpson resigned. What really spelled the end of this kind of weather modification though, we're experiments going on at the same time but very far away. So they were using cloud seeding to disrupt flight patterns or to try to do this disrupt flight patterns to flood the Ho Chiman trails that they couldn't get supplies where they needed to go.

During the Vietnam War, the US government spent more than twenty million dollars on this project, with a few conclusive results. Much of the story didn't come out until the Pentagon papers were leaked in nineteen seventy one. They don't admit to using it until nineteen seventy four. There's huge public backlash. The backlash against weather control was because it was associated with the many atrocities committed by scientists in Vietnam agent

orange napalm. Years later, Simpson talked about this in an interview. I thought it was terrible. I mean, all my life, I've tried to work for the betterment of the planet and the people, even in a small way, and then to use what I've done is some kind of military thing. I obviously am very concerned and not happy about it. Simpson had gotten involved in this research because of Pearl Harbor.

She'd gotten pretty much all her funding from the US military during the Cold War and then after the Vietnam Wars. Revealed have been a series of frauds and lies and atrocities. She is shocked shocked to discover that her research has been used to try to make it rain on the ho Chi Min trail. Me I'm just not buying it. I can't look inside Joe and Simpson's heart though, any better than I can see into a cloud. But I

do know this. The revolution and atmospheric science that started during the Second World War came crashing down in the nineteen seventies in the aftermath of Vietnam. It wasn't only Vietnam that led to this turning point, It was also rising concern about another kind of weather modification, climate change. It turned out people were not controlling the weather making it better, making it easier for farmers to grow, averting droughts and hurricanes and bad storms and heat waves. Instead,

people were making the weather worse. In nineteen eighty two, the Weather Channel began broadcasting weather forecasts NonStop. Soon, private weather forecasting became big business from Atlanta, Georgia, home of the new Weather Channel network. This is the official inaugural program of cable television's newest twenty four hour live network,

well Weather Channel. It wasn't only the Weather Channel. There were dedicated weather reporting services you could subscribe to like acue Weather, and in the nineteen nineties, once people were able to use the Internet, they found new ways to obsess about the weather, to make money off of it, to seek out the latest, up to date forecast, minute by minute accuracy promised. It was as if merely by updating your weather report every second, you could imagine that

you were somehow in control, prevailing over the enemy. But to sell a forecast as an illusion of control, you have to sell people the idea that the weather is out of control. TV weather reports, trying to compete with online services, got zanier. The weatherman was no longer calm and detached. The weatherman started panicking. I'm AccuWeather dot comedy rologists Jim Kosik are paralyzing, crippling breaking storm CODs to day. That was a forecast for a snowstorm in twenty ten,

like not the end of the world. A snowstorm. You think you've heard the hypeest hype, and then along comes hypeer hype. In nineteen ninety seven, meteorologists called a storm the climate event of the century. Post nine to eleven weather reports for the era of the Global War on Terror, they had to start inventing new nouns. Some called it snowmake, other snow apocalypse. It was a forecasting arms race for the War on Terror, because, of course, it was also

a ratings race. In two thousand and six, the Weather Channel, trying to keep up, launched a series called It Could Happen Tomorrow, featuring imaginary disasters. One day the fog clears and the city by the Bay has changed forever. One day traffic stops, and the city that never sleep stands still. It hasn't happened yet, but it could happen tomorrow Sunday night on the Weather Channel to witness unbelievable acts of nature that could devastate our Forecasting never lost its military posture,

its wartime element. With a weather app on your phone, you carry around with you an instrument of war that earlier generations could only dream of. War approaches. Soldier, you are prepared, and still it seems the enemy is gaining. In Pakistan, the government says floods across the country have

now killed more than thirteen hundred people. Written's hottest day ever recorded, with high temperatures potentially reaching at least one hundred and three degrees fahrenheit that's not just above normal, that is thirty degrees above normally, a record breaking drought, the longest and most severe drought in rescent history. China's

largest river, Yanze, has dried. You're getting a frightening look at this image of Hurricane Ida as she bears down on the Gulf coast, those outer bands whipping the area for hours overnight. It's not just the weather, of course, it's the climate. Climate is a pattern of weather, the typical weather in a particular place. Like if we were talking about a person, your mood on any given day would be like the weather on Tuesday. You're sad, but

your temperament, your disposition, you're generally cheerful. That would be like the climate. The weather is having many more bad days because the climate is getting worse, more extreme. As global temperatures warm, the weather's getting less predictable. As Stanford study argues that the hotter the climate becomes, the less predictable the weather will be. That sense that you could know what's coming next that might soon become a thing

of the past. The weather situation remains extremely rugged. The entire state declared under a state of emergency by Governor Duco. When I was a kid eleven years old. New England was hit with what everyone got to be calling the Blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. It was the first time the local television stations ran continuous weather coverage NonStop for days, the kind of coverage that inspired the start of the Weather Channel. You'd look out the window, the blizzard, you

turn on the TV, the blizzard. Snow battered. Boston is in the middle of the worst winter storm it's probably ever seen. And it's not over yet. The full fury of the winter blast is still with us. It's going to be all day to the latest word from the United States Weatherville. I've never forgotten this storm. I went to school that first day, a Monday, my parents went to work. Weather forecasting in the nineteen seventies was already so hyped up and hyperbolic that a lot of people

just ignored the forecast of a winter storm. Then everyone got sent home. I remember riding on the school bus, not certain we'd make it through the snow. We've asked everyone to open their home so that if there are any stranded aldous nearby, they have refused. The snow only fell for two days, but people were trapped for a lot longer winds, blue snow drifts fifteen feet high. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power. In Massachusetts alone, eleven

thousand homes were destroyed. Coming in at the moment for the word from Boston, Edison particularly, it's not good. Oh, we were hoping from report we had earlier that we would. People everywhere tried to help out, rescue workers, homemakers, anyone. Movie theaters stayed open as shelters. Do they have to pay to get in? No? Free and free admission? Now these people were just people stranded in the area. Right right,

We're taking them all up there shelter farm. It can be numbing talking about the weather and climate change, But then I think about why I'm so haunted by the blizzard of nineteen seventy eight. In a town nearby, a boy about my age had gone missing. Every day the radio gave updates on the search for him. That day we'd got sent home from school, he'd gone out to play in the snow, and he never came in. The Whole neighborhood, half the town was out in the blizzard

for hours looking for this boy. They didn't find his long dead body until well after it was all over his mitten sticking up from the melting snow. He'd tried to get back inside, fell over, just got buried under it. It It was falling so fast. It's not some idle interest wanting to predict the weather. It's life or death, and it's not crazy wanting to control it. We are bags of water and bone, vulnerable to every wind, drought,

heat wave and rain storm. But under the fury of each snow apocalypse lies a certain salvation and bearing witness to our common frailty, and in the helping, the rescuing, the fortifying one another against the storm something the best weather beaten newscasters now. At the height of the storm, Massachusetts Governor Michael Ducoccus appeared on television, not in a suit and tie, but in a sweater, looking strained and exhausted. You see the weatherman too, shaking, shuddering with the knowledge

of it. Even as storms come to an end, all our efforts to control our environment must inevitably four short. We've learned that society is a pretty recent experiment. At Commonwealth Avenue with five am on the morning of a blizzard with a power blackout can be frightening, But we've also learned that what we mostly do is help each other out when on living quietly looking in on the neighbor just in case. I think it was a good moment, and I think that's something to remember till the next time.

And I do try to remember that, and I have more occasion every year because the blizzards are getting worse because the climate is changing. Nine of Boston's ten worst on record snowstorms have happened since nineteen seventy eight, six of them since two thousand and three twenty ten, with Snowmageddon twenty sixteen, snow Zilla happening today somewhere near you. We're all going through one big ongoing storm, hunkered down but also poking out to see who needs help most.

And there's still time pulled together by our panic to dig out from this storm. The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Hafrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta.

Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please remember

to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.