How's the Weather?

I used to think that old people talked about the weather all the time because they had nothing else to talk about. But now I am old and I talk about the weather all the time. Is it possible I have nothing else to talk about?

“What’s it like out today?” is a question I might ask.

“Gonna be hot today?” is another one.

“Is it supposed to rain?”

These questions would be far more relevant if I planned on spending time out of doors but, most of the time, I do not. I am not going outside except to drive to another indoor location. In other words, my interest in the world outside is belied by the fact that I will, more than likely, not experience the world outside.

My wife Martha takes this one step further, daily checking the weather not of places where we are but of places we have been. On her phone’s weather app, she keeps a list of cities and locations we have spent time nd regularly checks to see what it’s like in those places. “Going to be cold today in Amsterdam,” she might say. We haven’t been to Amsterdam in over twenty years.

Weather is the baseline question we ask when we seek to understand or experience another locale. “What’s it like there?” is the question we ask when inquiring about a new place. The first answer we receive is likely to be weather-related. After all, weather in one place is familiar to us someplace else. Snow there is like snow here. Sunshine there is like sunshine here. Picturing the weather in an exotic location is kind of like being there. Kind of.

For most of our human history, the weather was largely unpredictable. “Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky in the morning, sailor's warning” might be an appealing aphorism but its predictive powers are lacking. Bad weather might bring ruin to a sailor or farmer or a simple traveler venturing over uncertain terrain. Knowing the answer to what lay ahead for the day could be the difference between feast or famine, life or death.

Although weather-taking instrumentation existed for at least a hundred years before, it wasn’t until the mid 18^th century that American meteorology became organized and formalized with a “A Joint Congressional Resolution requiring the Secretary of War ‘to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent, and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern lakes and on the seacoast, by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms.’ The resolution passed in 1870, establishing the first American weather service.

Side note: like many farmers of the day, many of the Founding Fathers kept regular meteorological measurements. According to the National Weather Service website, “Thomas Jefferson purchased a thermometer from a local Philadelphia merchant while in town for the adoption of the Declaration of Independence… Incidentally, he noted that the high temperature in Philadelphia, PA on July 4, 1776 was 76 degrees.”

Fun, right?

Taking the measure of the day is a little taking the measure of one’s self. Checking in with the weather as a way of gauging the world and orienting ourselves in it. When we know the weather we know something about the world, however temporary, and in knowing something about the world we know something about ourselves. Even if we are not going to venture into it (as I am not) knowing the weather settles the self as we prepare for the day.

When I was younger, perhaps I didn’t feel the same connection to the world beyond that which extended past the tip of my nose. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in other people or other places, but my mind was too enwrapped with my own nonsense that I failed to take into account anything beyond my own immediate experience. Youthful myopia has many things going for it, but knowing whether to carry an umbrella is not one of them.

When we look to the skies, we are admitting that there are greater forces at work than those within our power. Asking what weather the coming day will bring is not so much different than praying. We recognize that there are things beyond our control and so we turn the augury of barometers and dew points. Yet, even with all of our resources and an entire cable network dedicated to keeping us apprised of the situation outside our front doors, we are still often surprised because the weather, like the rest of the human experience, sometimes proves uncooperative with even our best predictions.

Weather forecasting is hubris. The fact that science has made that business so accurate is a remarkable testament to human ingenuity. In the coming years, I expect we will go further; rather than predicting the weather, eventually we will control it. Instead of asking if it will rain tomorrow, somebody, or some AI, will determine that it will rain tomorrow.

Another fun side note: there is already a conspiracy theory that researchers at HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which studies the ionosphere, are able to manipulate the weather. This conspiracy theory alleges that HAARP uses chemtrails to create droughts, floods, blizzards, and hurricanes. Although it shouldn’t have to be said, I will say it: this is not true. We are unable to control the weather in any meaningful way. The best we can do is to seed clouds to stimulate rainfall, but “"If you make it rain one place then you reduce rain downstream," so says professor of applied physics at Harvard University David Keith. In other words, we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Which is, fundamentally, as true of life today as it was when people first wondered at the sound of thunder.

So I don’t know. Maybe I do have less to talk about as I get older. Maybe the weather is a way to fill the silence. But I prefer to think that devoting a few moments each day to contemplating the larger world makes me a more engaged, more vital, more fascinating older gentleman. Or maybe I just need to find something else to talk about, like my health.