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Business News/ Opinion / The great Victorian weather wars
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The great Victorian weather wars

Today's climate change debate has evolved much like the forecasting controversy of the 1860s

Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

The history of today’s climate change debate may have begun on 7 February 1861. That day, an Irish physicist named John Tyndall, a professor of natural philosophy, delivered the Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society in London.

Tyndall had news. He revealed that for two years he had been studying the heat-absorbing properties of gases. He realized that for the earth’s atmosphere to maintain its steady temperature, certain gases must be capable of trapping radiant heat. This inquiry, he said, was “perfectly unbroken ground".

His experiments had shown that gases like oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen retained very little heat. But others, particularly carbon dioxide, absorbed surprising amounts of radiation—“nearly 100 times as much as oxygen", he said.

For the sharp minds in the hall, the implication of Tyndall’s discovery was clear. The higher the concentrations of absorptive gases in the atmosphere, the higher atmospheric temperatures would be. Thus was laid the theoretical foundation for climate science.

Tyndall’s was not the only contribution that year to our understanding of earth’s climate and its threats. That bleak winter week in 1861 was a stormy one. As Tyndall spoke, Atlantic gales were tearing across England, from the Irish coast to the North Sea. A 10-minute walk from where Tyndall was giving his lecture in London, a veteran of the Royal Navy, Robert FitzRoy, was embarking on an audacious meteorological experiment.

He was an energetic, independent-minded man, who three decades earlier had captained the Beagle during its celebrated circumnavigation with the young Charles Darwin aboard. Around Cape Horn and the bleak coastline of Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy had studied weather patterns, learning to predict sudden atmospheric changes. Meteorological theory had progressed during his career, but to little practical effect. The sky was considered by many a divine realm, not a place for science. So, storms continued to blow over Britain without warning, sinking ships and fishing boats as they passed. In the 1850s, more than 1,000 sailors drowned off the British coast each year.

For the admiral, this was an outrage. By February 1861, he had the authority to act. At his office in Whitehall, he studied weather reports from the coast. If he detected a storm, he would relay a telegram to the relevant port, where a warning signal could be hoisted in the harbour. His first storm warning was sent within hours of Tyndall’s lecture.

Despite huge popular appeal, they remained highly controversial. Religious men doubted whether anyone could pretend to know the mind of god, while scientists attacked the admiral’s lack of theory and penny-pinching members of Parliament complained about the cost of telegraphy. He struggled with the diplomatic challenge of securing data from rival powers like France, and with the inevitable, sometimes costly, failures of his weather forecasting.

Today’s climate change debate has evolved much like the forecasting controversy of the 1860s. Similar questions arise: How can we trust scientists to warn of coming danger? What economic costs should we expect?

These climate disputes continue to resonate in part because meteorology is among the most difficult of sciences. It is one of the few fields of applied science that demands prediction. As any prediction involves uncertainty and uncertainty is anathema to scientists, meteorology seems condemned to exist in a fraught intellectual space. More than a century and a half after Tyndall’s greenhouse gas lecture and FitzRoy’s first storm warning, we again find ourselves in a time when meteorological work is often criticized as costly and inaccurate.

Yet, today’s climate scientists can take heart from FitzRoy’s story. His work is viewed as a triumph of practical science against fierce opposition. ©2015/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Peter Moore is the author of The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future.

Edited excerpts. Comments are welcome at otherviews@livemint.com

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Published: 10 Aug 2015, 11:53 PM IST
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