Under the Weather

part of the state experienced record snowfall. To say that the weather is unpredictable is to sum up our entire existence and to personify weather in this way, well, that is deeply entrenched in us. This is a mode of thinking with a very strong ancient pedigree. I mean, we have an extremely dominant predisposition to believe that weather events are aimed at us, and often in reaction to our behavior.

I mean, look at all the people throughout history who have thought that weather events are punishments for for sin. If you did something wrong, the gods are going to send a storm at you, Which is why we find solace in charting the chaos that is the weather. I was shipping forecast issued by the mess Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency at w O one five on Wednesday September. They are wanting for gales

in Dover, White Portland, Plymouth. John P. Swaddle, a professor of biology we talked to in an upcoming episode, fondly remembers these BBC shipping forecasts. I can't do it now, but when I was a kid, I could recite most of the shipping forecast areas in order because they go through them and almost a sort of sing song type of way, and they're all called things like the forties

and stuff like that. And um, they go round the coast basically clockwise, I think, um, And they'd say each one of the shipping zones and then what the weather would be like, and I just sort of rattled off. And when I was a kid, I listened on the radio because he used to come on basically after the news at nine or ten o'clock in the evening, stuff like that. These forecasts have been a tradition since the nineteen twenties, when citizens of storm lashed coastal cities in

the UK settled in for the evening. The theme music of the broadcast sailing by a serene backdrop for their thoughts as they sussed out what the following day might look like. This kind of weather prognosticating is one of the oldest human activities and persists as a topic for discussion, dissection, and even obsession. Good morning, It's March twelve, two thousand and nine, and it's a Thursday here in l a Mostly blue skies, some white clouds floating by muted golden sunshine,

very still, fifty two degrees fahrenheit eleven celsius. For a while, film director day with Lynch gave weather reports for the greater Los Angeles area. His Midwestern accent and the relatively stable conditions of the southern California climate give a sense of continuity that life might always be drenched in muted golden sunlight. While his forecasts aren't exactly an American counterpart to the UK shipping news, they do offer a sense of order in the face of roiling chaos and confusion

that bubbles under the surface of the American experience. Whether then becomes the metaphor for our existence, awe inspiring, unpredictable, mysterious, something we consciously and unconsciously organize our lives around, even coloring our emotions something author Lauren Redness Explorers and the weather phenomenon the Doldrums. That word just struck me because it's the doldrum seems to indicate a psychological phenomena as

much as the meteorological phenomena. The first let's take a detour into the ways in which weather makes a dent into our psyches. I'm Joe McCormick. I'm a writer and host at How Stuff Works, and you can find me on my other podcasts, Stuff to Blow your Mind and Forward Thinking. I'm Holly for I am an editor and I co host Stuff You Missed in History Class. I'm Dylan Fagan and I'm the photo researcher here at How Stuff Works. Um, and I have my hands and many

different pots around the office. Why there is so much a part of the story of our existence that when we step into an unfamiliar situation or maybe even a slightly awkward one, like say an elevator, it is our go to topic for discussion. I think it's the most surface level conversation that you can start with with a stranger. UM, And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean it and that it's a threat that ties us all together, we all go outside, we all see what's

going on. You know, we I'll have that common experience um. And it is cliche um, but it also could be a door opener and icebreaker, um to get to know someone a little better. You know. It could just be for the elevator, or it could be jeeves hot day out there, sure is, so what's your name? You know, it's a jumping off point if you look at it optimistically, It's how you start to get into somebody's head to do the long con what's your name? And social Security number?

The weather ain't what it used to be when it comes to safe topics, global warming, climate change. Weather is clearly having a moment. Were close here tonight with more unusual weather is in the grip of another descemb But hate life is part of the wild weather and recent wait forecast. There's a warning of more chaos a space. Storms and floods continue to battle the southern United States. Nobody that is living has ever seen anything like What do you guys think about the names we have for

all these storms and weather events? Now? Is that? I mean? So, we we've been naming hurricanes for a long time, but now we've had these winter weather events that get names in the media like Snowmageddon and snow apocalypse and the polar vortex, which I guess is a different thing because that's a real scientific term. But but you see these come up in the media a lot. Is that is

that new or have we always been doing that? Well, we haven't always been doing it because we didn't even always have like a weather service that you know, worked on these predictions. But I certainly think the I mean, I don't remember storms when I was a kid in the seventies and eighties having these cockamami like full on drama with a musical stinger under them names right like mom, this is the one, you guys, I don't know it's the one. What this leads Holly two News on a

unified theory of weather sensationalism. I mean, I have this whole thing completely separate from weather, where I feel like there's this perpetual competition in that our news cycle and the social media angle, where there's this perpetual competition to be the cleverest and so people all want to come up with the kicky name for everything that happens. And that's where Snowmageddon comes from once in a generation storm, a historic and deadly winter storm shuts down the southern

US that was so very scared outside. If I don't get home to life hands, I'm like, I'm going to freak out. State troopers sent in to rescue small children. And it's like they can't just say we're having this weather event. They're serious snow. There is a bad traffic situation because everyone released every school at the same time, and all offices shut down, and so all of these people got trapped on the interstate. They can't say that

they have to go. And Hey, if we're going to the trouble of giving weather systems dramatic names, we might as well go one step further and saddle these systems with the responsibility of our personal suffering. I feel like, um, sometimes weather is like a scapegoat for your problems. I mean, in my in my opinion. You know, when it's seventy at Christmas and you you think like, well, that's that anno, or that's climate change, or it's so cold, that's the

polar vortex. You know, whatever kind of weather phenomenon that you're hearing about on the news. It gives you something to blame for why things are abnormal. I should mention that we all live in Atlanta, Georgia, also known as Hot Atlanta. I want to pick up on something you said. They're about it being seventy on Christmas, because I always have this feeling that. I mean, I like nice warm weather.

I like nice sunny days when it's warm out, and especially when it's nice in the winter when it's otherwise been cold. But I hate it when it's hot on Christmas. And it's frequently hot on Christmas around here, and it's just awful. It just feels like it ruins the holiday, ruins the spirit of it. It's not really Christmas because you're sweating. It's just gross and you hate it. And I think it's weird that we give that kind of uh, we give that kind of emotional power and association between

certain feelings or events and how it's supposed to be outside. Yeah, I mean if it's hot during December, I refused to wear shorts because they're Christmas lights. You know, it's like, it just ruins the holiday feeling. When it's seventy outside and you see a dude and flip flops, You're like, no, No,

that's not that's not what I'm used to. That doesn't fit this ideal in my head that I have from you know, television and movies and when I was a kid, and I remember it's knowing I have to confess that hot Christmas isn't my thing either. I tend to think of winters is time to symbolically fold into yourself. So yeah, you know it just it's getting darker out earlier, and it's sort of this time to just mentally hibernate or you know that feels safest to me in the winter, Like, yes,

this is okay. I'm going to be depressed, probably because I always am over Christmas. And I also get angry when it's seventy degrees on Christmas because that just feels like it's underscoring all the weirdness that is an attention and stress that is Christmas. See now I feel guilty because when it's seventy on Christmas, I feel like it's a gift to me and everyone else is apparently miserable. You've done the human sacrifice that made that happen, and now Julie and I are just having to stew and

feel betrayed. I didn't think about that. I think you caught something interesting there. Um, Like when it's seventy on Christmas, it just adds the unpredictability and the tension and the weirdness that is getting together like that. It adds a certain weird level of anxiety here. Whether is disrupting the narrative that our Western culture has told us about how Christmas should be, but it goes deeper than that, Whether

it can actually shape our moods. I think it's interesting that, um, looking at like a five or seven day forecast on your phone for me personally, can determine what my mood is going to be, Like I can already predetermine how I'm going to feel that day, like, oh gosh, just gonna be cold and rainy on Sunday. That's going to be awful, you know, or it's gonna be it's gonna be really nice on Monday. I'm really excited about that. That's gonna make Monday better. Like it can. It can

drag you down or it can pull you up. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate being cold so much. I have winter rage disorder, not a real disorder when I made up, but people often think I'm like citing a doctor. When I say no, I went to rage disorder. Bring it on. I'll wear red and green shorts in the winter. I don't care if I need my holiday fix. I would rather be on fire than be cold. I live in the South

for a reason. Bring on seventy degree Christmas. All of us have, at one time or another, take him weather personally and shaking our fist to the sky. Some even feel like they could control the weather. We did an episode once on Crown Prince Sotto of Korea who was suffering with some very real mental illness, and he thought his clothing choices would affect the weather. Uh, which kind of He was already dealing with a lot of stuff

and he was prone to fits of violence. But he really felt the burden of that that, you know, if he wore color X or robe at Y on a certain day, it could potentially impact the entire world. And that's a lot to carry on your shoulders. So in a in a lighter way, thinking that the weather is mirroring us, does that happen to you or you like I made it rain with my sadness. There wasn't there a Georgia governor who there was a drought in the nineties and he put He's like said, Okay, we're going

to pray for rain. Ask and you shall receive. Just one day after, Georgia Governor sunny Ford let a prayer service for rain on the steps of the state capital. The rain fell. It sounded and felt pretty good last night. Here, I have to tell you, we do believe in miracles. We do believe that you are the miracle Creator, the creator that established the water and the land and the air and even us. God, we need you, we need rain.

So it's I mean, it's still in some form continues today. Um, this feeling that you can influence the weather based on an action or clothing or mindset. This influence is an ancient idea that we just can't seem to quit. Weather patterns that change over the seasons are definitely a cycle, and you can see it happen in real time, and that that is certainly reflected in ancient beliefs too, because lots of ancient gods are seasonal gods. You know that

their mythologies are derived from the seasonal changes. So you have gods that are killed and then reborn in the same way that your harvest. You know all the plants are killed by the winter and then reborn in spring, But whether the elements are the realms of gods or mortals, it all comes back to the sense that it's just

deeply personal. My great grandmother was still in her seventies when I was growing up, and she would be the one to pick me up from school in the afternoons, and uh usually on sunny days, I would go outside once I got home and play basketball for hours until my parents could pick me up. But on rainy days. My grandmother was a great cook, and she would always

have either leftovers or something she'd just made. And because she came from a time where food was scarce and their way of showing love was cooking, um, she always wanted me to eat when I got home. She didn't have cable. She had this little black and white TV and it got PBS, and I remember at three o'clock it was Mr. Rogers, but at three thirty it was

The Joy Painting with Bob Ross. And I would sit there and she would have made macaroni and cheese and green beans and turkey, and I'd sit there and I would watch Bob Ross as the rain fell, and in my mind. That is just like a blanket wrapped around me. It's the warmest memory I can think of from my childhood. Rain is the most emotionally evocative weather event that there

is in movies. It's a handy signifier for a heightened emotional state, whether it's a melancholy character staring out of a rain splattered window or a couple kissing under a deluge, you know, just completely oblivious to everyone else and bursting under their desire for each other. That is how effective of a metaphor. Rain is. So much so it's rainbow producing abilities. That moment when we get to briefly see white light split part into its brilliant component colors. That

moment of a rainbow could even inspire a book. I had finished my previous book, Radioactive, and m I was chatting with a friend and we were actually taking a walk one day one of those days where the weather changed really rapidly where it rained and then I think it even hailed and the sun came out and there was a terrific rainbow, and you know, kind of as a joke, I said, um, you know, I'm really burnt out the book I just finished, which for which I had to learn a lot of physics, and I'm not

a physitist by any stretch, and so I just thought my next book could be out clouds and Rainbows. As I heard myself say this, I realized that I wasn't kidding. And this spectacular panorama of this guy that you take for grant duties give me such an interesting ech other because it's hidden in plain sight. Lauren Redness is the author of three books. She's been a Guggenheim Fellow and Artist in Residence of the American Museum of Natural History,

and a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Parsons the New School for Design. Her newest book, Thunder and Lightning, Weather Past, Present, and Future, is an exploration of and meditation on the ways that humans cower, celebrate, profit from, and even try to control the weather. Her accompanying illustrations stir the senses that we associate with those elements of weather. The opening chapter, titled Chaos, spells out the ground rules for the book with a story about

a cemetery. So my mother in law told me this story. She was a minister in New Hampshire and she heard about a town not too far away from her where a friend of hersage of pasture and the floodwaters from Hurricane Irene had unearthed the grades from the cemetery. And I was so struck by that that idea that you know, this very most basic premise, you know, you die, you are buried, even whether can even up end that basic

assumption about life. So I wanted to start with that kind of unrattling and then through the book try to put the pieces back together. That weather disabuses us of the sense of continuity. Instability makes it that much more important for us to track and predict. And to that end, The Old Farmer's Almanac has been predicting the weather since sevent founder and editor Robert B. Thomas came up with

a secret forecasting formula. So the Old Farm of Dominac is, you know this publication that's been around since before George Washington was president. It's predates electric light. It's one of the very first books that a colonial American fami might have had in their home. The way that they predict weather is using a sacred formula that child in a black box, which they have at their headquarters in New Hampshire. This mysterious black tin box is the stuff of weather legend.

It's been passed down from editor to editor, and it was thought that that person, and that person alone would set eyes on it. I was talking to m. Judge and Hale, who was editor of the Almanac for many, many years, and I asked him, I said, you know, have have you ever seen this black box? And he said casualist could be Oh, yeah, here it is. You can look at it. And he picked it up off the phone and handed it to me, and I was just stunned. In thunder and lightning. Lauren documents this moment

describing the black box is quote dusty. It was black with gold trim, about the size of a tackle box or a makeshift coffer that might use for cash at a big sale. The lock was open. Inside were a few leathery spiral notebooks, two keys with clover shaped heads held together on a jumbo paper clip. There were a number of loose documents, some type, some handwritten, and one envelope.

This one envelope that was stamped confidential confidential. So I opened it up and they began to fade through this system for predicting weather, and it read like a riddle. Laura was given permission to copy the formula and share it with Greg Carbon, a meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said to me, the meteorologist, well, it's rather hard to follow, and it's a beautiful and document. It's you know, all about the moon cycles in the atmosphere,

in the solar system and suns. And what struck me, why is that actually to read this secret formula, to have the mystery unveiled, actually did nothing to destroy the mystery itself, because whether it is endlessly unpredictable and no formula can give us a key, and in fact reading this document I could I had that sense of a mystery only deaconed because the mystery of weather forecasting is bigger than the old farmer's almanac, and weather prediction will

always no matter how our science advances, it always seems to be just beyond our grasp, just beyond our grasp, and yet directly influencing us. As Lauren explains in her chapter on wind, specifically with the example of long distance swimmer Diana and Nayad, who in planned to swim from Cuba to Florida for three straight days and nights of a feat that would require a little or no wind.

I read something about Diana and Nyad preparing for her long distance swims, in particular from Cuba to Florida, and how she waited for a windless pocket of weather um which she referred to as a dull drums. She connected weather to climate and to these grand metaphysical questions. She talked to me about some of the thoughts that led her mind as she swims for days out on the open ocean. And she said, she said to me, it's a very small planet. I'm thinking about the melting of

the polar ice caps. Where are we in the universe? Will the Earth last forever? Will the human race last forever? And you can just picture her, this tiny, tiny body in this vast, vast ocean, you know. And she says that she pictures all the animals swimming beneath her, and she can see the stars sparkling above her while waiting for the easterly winds to change. In Key West, a sailor took Diana out on the deck. Kay. She says,

can you taste something gritty in your mouth? And so Diana, you know, he says, we're all standing there with our tongue is hanging out, and she says she does. She tastes something gritty, so she just assumes that she fault. You know, that makes sense. There they are on the edge of the water, but no, her friend tells her that this is actually sand from the Sahara that's blown

over clear from Africa across the Atlantic. And it just struck me that idea, these tiny tiny stecks of cross ocean, almost like you know, a butterfly making it some migrations, tiny speck of sand that made it from Africa all the way to the east coast of America. This moment crystallizes the link between ourselves and the rest of the world, removing a sense of distance. Time kind of collapses because like when did that wind blow over the Sahara And

suddenly the globe seems particularly small. When we talk about nature, we tend to think of all the things that we can see, trees, flowers, animals, and insects. But at its court, nature is the unseen, the forces that come together to allow our very existence in the first place. Think of the Sun's radiation beating down, driving life cycles, warming and cooling molecules until they become air movement. Then wind than gals.

Nature then is weather, and weather is brutal and riotous, but it also contains its own kind of symmetry and breathtaking beauty, the same kind of beauty that we gape at when we wonder about our existence. Where we are all under the weather, and now it's time to memory, definitely on behalf of all of us here at Broadcasting House in London to shore. Very safe and peaceful night, Good hind. The Stuff of Life is written and co

produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided by Head of Production Jerry Rowland. Thank you to Lauren Redness for discussing thunder and lightning, weather past, present and future. You can learn more about her work at Lauren Redness dot com. And thank you to Holly Fry, Dylan Fagan and Joe McCormick for sharing your thoughts on

the emotional life of weather. If you like what we do here at The Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter, and please consider supporting the show by reviewing us on iTunes. In the meantime, email us at the Stuff of Life at How Stuff Works dot com