Andrew Revkin - Weather: An Illustrated History: From Cloud Atlases to Climate Change

Here, in one hundred moments, is a chronicle of humanitys evolving relationship with, and understanding of, Earths climate system and the extraordinary weather events that swirl chaotically, and sometimes destructively, within it. For nearly all of human history, the relationship worked in one direction. Climate patterns shifted. Ice sheets, deserts, and coastlines advanced or retreated; extremes of drought, precipitation, wind, or temperature struck and communities thrived, adapted, moved, or faded away. Now, a growing body of science has demonstrated that we are increasingly in a two-way relationship with climate. That momentous transition started as the worldwide spread of agriculture and other human activities changed landscapes sufficiently to alter weather patterns millennia ago. The pace and extent of climate changes in decades to come remains unclear. But the atmosphere and oceans have already measurably responded to the heating influence of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions accompanying what Earth scientists have called the Great Acceleration in human numbers and resource appetites since around 1950. These gases, most notably carbon dioxide, are transparent to sunlight but absorb some outgoing radiant heat energy.

A full climate chronology would fill volumes. This is more of an exploration, touching on sobering, surprising, even humorous moments in a long and continuing journey of discovery. The goal is to display the range and types of events, insights, and inventions that have punctuated the coevolution of climate and our lives. It is also implicitly a snapshot in timeour generations moment in this running story. Some of the knowledge gained so far will be upended or rebooted in years and decades to comejust as notions of weather as an expression of the gods wrath or glee long ago gave way to the understanding of a remarkable system that has both clear patterns (climate) and implicit randomness (the vagaries called weather). As J. Marshall Shepherd, a past president of the American Meteorological Society, likes to put it, Climate is your personality; weather is your mood.

Youll learn about remarkable insights of brilliant figures with familiar names, like Galileo Galilei and Benjamin Franklin, and discoveries made by obscure but fascinating people, like Mary Anderson, the real estate developer who invented the first windshield wiper, and Wasaburo ishi, a Japanese meteorologist who discovered the high-altitude, high-speed jet stream in the 1920sonly to have Japan turn it into a weapon, lofting thousands of explosive fire balloons toward the United States during World War II.

An aquatic rescue unit from the South Carolina Army National Guard was among an array of search teams rescuing people stranded by Texas flooding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

In examining the full sweep of whats been learned, and unlearned, about weather and climate through human history, theres one constant: knowledge is forever evolving. It took more than a century of methodical research, measurement, and evolving technology for scientists to move from a basic understanding that some atmospheric gases trap heat to the realization that centuries of warming and sea-level rise could lie ahead should carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the burning of fuels and forests not be reduced.

In generations to come, human lives may be so insulated from the weather by technology that it will be considered odd to think people once routinely checked forecasts before venturing out. But, for now, the elements are the one aspect of our environment that nearly every person considers, or is affected by, every single day.

We decided early on to build the chronology around the full sweep of human understanding of the history and workings of the climate system. In going back billions of years, through eras for which evidence is indirect or smeared over millennia by geological wear and tear, we sometimes had to abandon the precision of a conventional chronologyas is most evident in the moment between 2.4 billion and 423 million years ago. Those early milestones, while set in a year marked BCE, for before the Common Era, are of course about stretches of time vastly longer than can be comprehended by the human mindand not marked with the precision of carbon isotopes or other direct evidence. And of course the final entry, about the end of ice ages, is a speculation on history yet to be written. In most of the chosen milestones, we tried to convey some of the broader significance of discrete events. For instance, the segment about the investigations that undid a longstanding high-temperature record set in Libya in 1922 is as much about the limits of precision in meteorological history as it is about heat.