reading

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Peter Moore

List of Illustrations

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

The Weather Experiment

Dawn

PART ONE: Seeing

1. Writing in the Air

2. Nature Caught in the Very Act

3. Rain, Wind and the Wondrous Cold

Morning

PART TWO: Contesting

4. Detectives

5. Trembling Air, Whirling Winds

6. Liquid Lightning

Midday

PART THREE: Experimenting

7. Steady Eyes, Delicate Skies

8. Beginnings

9. Dangerous Paths

Afternoon

PART FOUR: Believing

10. Dazzling Bright

11. Endings

12. Truth Telling

Dusk

West Winds

Stars in FitzRoy’s Meteorological Galaxy

Abbreviations

Picture Section

Author’s Note

Notes

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Abbreviations

Select Bibliography

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Illustrations

3. Cloud formations above a rural landscape, with a key to the types. Engraving by E. Radcliffe (© Wellcome Library, London).

4. Sketch from Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena, by Thomas Forster, 1816.

5. Engraving from A Voyage Towards the South Pole, performed in the Years 1822–1824, by James Weddell (© The British Library Board, G2558 between p34−35).

8. ‘The distressed situation of His Majesty’s Ship Egmont’ in the West Indies hurricane of 1780 (PX8417 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London).

12. London from Blackheath, Illustrated London News, 1846 (with thanks to the Gladstone Library for permission to reprint).

14. Royal Charter Wreck, Illustrated London News, 1859 (with thanks to the Gladstone Library for permission to reprint).

15: Synoptic chart of the Royal Charter Gale, 1859, from The Weather Book, by Robert FitzRoy, 1863.

16. Cone signals, Illustrated London News, 1860 (with thanks to the Gladstone Library for permission to reprint).

17. James Glaisher’s instruments deck in the hot-air balloon, from Travels in the Air, by James Glaisher et al, 1871.

19. Flight profile of a balloon ascent in 1862, from Travels in the Air, 1871.

20. Air temperature observed in the balloon ascent and descent in 1864, from Travels in the Air, 1871.

2. Study of cirrus clouds by John Constable, c.1821/2 (© Getty Images); Spring: East Bergholt Common, by John Constable, c.1814, 1821 or 1829 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

3. Mount Sarmiento, Tierra del Fuego, showing the survey ship HMS Beagle (PW6229 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London); a meeting of the Royal Society at Somerset House (© The Royal Society).

4. Men of Progress, a group portrait of the great American inventors of the Victorian Age, by Christian Schussele, 1862 (© Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C./Bridgeman Images); the Arctic Council planning a search for Sir John Franklin, by Stephen Pearce, 1851 (© De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images).

5. (clockwise from top left) Robert FitzRoy, c.1864 (© Royal Astronomical Society/Science Photo Library); James Pollard Espy, by Thomas Sully, 1849 (© Photo National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian/Art Resource/Scala, Florence); Sir Francis Galton by Gustav Graef, 1882 (© National Portrait Gallery, London); James Glaisher c.1860s.

7. Isothermal Chart, or View of Climates & Production from William C. Woodbridge, school atlas, published by Oliver D. Cooke & Co., Hartford, 1823 (Graphic Arts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections © Princeton University Library); Chart of the Christmas Day snowstorm in 1836, by Elias Loomis, 1859 (© The David Goldsmith Collection).

Acknowledgements

While writing this book I was awarded a residency at Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden in Flintshire. For a month in early spring 2014 I lived in the library, an exquisite Gothic Revival building just across the River Dee into Wales. I worked every day on a creaking first-floor gallery surrounded by 32,000 of Gladstone’s own annotated books – famously transported to the library in a wheelbarrow by the Grand Old Man himself. For me there could have scarcely been a better place to dream, read or write about Victorian society. To Peter Francis, for the award and several conversations about weather and religion, I am enormously grateful. For help navigating the collections, which yielded several undiscovered FitzRoy letters, and for permission to republish illustrations, I’m indebted to Louisa Yates and Gary Butler. Thanks is also due to the indomitable trio of Siân Morgan, Phillip Clement and Ceri Williams, as well as the library’s always cheerful, always helpful, other employees.

For permission to consult and quote sources I would like to acknowledge the British Library, the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Society (Keith Moore), the Huntington Library (Vanessa Wilkie), the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale (Sandra Markham and Anne Marie Menta), the Wellcome Library and the National Meteorological Library and Archives in Exeter. For access to his set of Elias Loomis’ weather charts of the 1836 storm and for his enthusiasm for the subject, I’m grateful to my intrepid friend David Goldsmith, whose own weather project is eagerly anticipated.

I would also like to thank Sheila Newman, Jo and Ben in Wexford, Dame Julia Slingo, David Whiting, Julie Wheelwright, and, for all her sagacity and good humour, Sarah my fellow Dolphinite. Dr Christopher Prior of the University of Southampton has once again endured an early draft and returned with valuable advice. Professor John Thornes of the University of Birmingham was also an enormous help. In an age when cloud spotting has been elevated in popularity to the levels of two centuries ago, and people are again faced with the dilemma of distinguishing altocumulus from stratocumulus, his book on John Constable’s skies provides a superb introduction to meteorological science. Ever since a serendipitous meeting in 2012 John Thornes has played a valued part in this project – both as a mine of information and a source of encouragement. While he has rescued me from the odd meteorological blunder, any that remain are my own responsibility.

I’m fortunate to have the support and terrific expertise of all at Peters Fraser & Dunlop. Particularly my literary agent, Annabel Merullo, but also Rachel Mills, Laura Williams, Marilia Savvides, Kim Méridja, Silvia Molteni and James Carroll. At Faber & Faber I’d like to thank Mitzi Angel, Jeff Seros, Stephen Weil, Daniel del Valle and Will Wolfslau, as well as Katja Scholz at Mareverlag.

The greatest debt is due to Juliet Brooke, my wonderful editor at Chatto & Windus, who has nurtured this book from the beginning and challenged me at all the right times. I am also grateful to Clara Farmer, Susannah Otter, Kate Bland and Mikaela Pedlow, and to Kris Potter for the fabulous jacket design.

A special thanks to Claire for tolerating a home crammed with nineteenth-century journals and other weather paraphernalia. Alongside everything else, her unquenchable optimism and editorial instincts have remained prized commodities. When London becomes too much I am lucky to have a Staffordshire hideaway with a quiet desk and a familiar bed to escape to, not forgetting a father who often seems as encyclopaedic as Francis Beaufort.

My mother, raised on the raw east Yorkshire coast, still watches the sky with a knowing eye. She would often call me up from the comfort of the sofa in my childhood to savour a red sunset or to glimpse a curious cloud. This book, dedicated to her, is my riposte.

Afternoon

AS THE AFTERNOON wears on the cloud base begins to thicken. Strong convective currents propel parcels of moist air higher into the atmosphere where they start to sublime into ice crystals. The cumulus clouds with their cauliflower tops have coalesced and a cumulonimbus is growing fast. In the right conditions a cumulonimbus capillatus can tower for many miles over the landscape, its anvil top scraping along the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. As the tallest structure on earth, the cumulonimbus gives meaning to the expression ‘to be on cloud nine’, – the nine being the number assigned to the cloud by the International Cloud Atlas in 1896.

In supercooled air inside the cumulonimbus, ice crystals like those found in cirrus clouds extend outwards in an enormous canopy. On days like this raindrops can be sucked inside the cloud by powerful updraughts from below and sent see-sawing up and down, creating concentric rings of ice that tumble to earth as hail. But today the ice crystals fall straight. They melt as they descend into the warmer air below. It is the start of a rain shower.

The largest raindrops fall fastest, colliding and splintering as they go. We sometimes notice these, the outriders, splashing on the pavement, acting as a warning sign before the bulk of a shower arrives. The size of a raindrop varies. The smallest can be just a fraction of a millimetre in diameter; the biggest are juggernauts of five millimetres that fall at speeds of nine metres per second.

As the raindrops fall they pass through a shaft of sunlight, refracting it, and on the ground half a mile away someone standing with their back to the sun looks up at an angle of 42°. They see a rainbow.

No two people see the same rainbow. Each one is dynamic and unique to the viewer, while its colours, like the blue of the sky, are an ephemeral blend governed by the size of the raindrops that the light passes through. No pure rainbow has ever comprised the seven celebrated colours – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet; instead blends of colour are seen and rainbows can change as you watch them.

Large raindrops of 1–2mm make rainbows with very bright and vivid greens, vibrant reds but hardly any blue. Average-sized raindrops of 0.5mm produce bows with less red but greater pinks, while tiny raindrops of 0.08–0.10mm create broad bows with hardly any coloration. These are called White Rainbows and are rarely seen.

A second bow is almost always visible over the primary rainbow, at an angle of 51°. Much fainter and not always visible, the colours in a secondary bow are in reverse sequence to the first, beginning with violet on the outside and progressing to red. Once, looking at a rainbow during a storm, a man saw that the boundaries of the colours disappeared every time it thundered, as if the rainbow was being rattled. Whether the vibrations caused the raindrops to coalesce for a split second, destroying the atmospheric palette, no one has been able to say.

Also by Peter Moore

Author’s Note

In the nineteenth century temperature was measured in Fahrenheit. Ice melted at 32°F (0°C), water boiled at 212°F (100°C), and the temperature of the human body was 98°F (37°C). In Britain and the United States barometers measured atmospheric pressure in inches of mercury. The length of a column of mercury at mean sea level would be just beneath 30 inches (1013 millibars). 30.5 inches of mercury was typical high pressure. 29.5 inches was typical low pressure.

I have used original weights and measures throughout. Most will be familiar to readers, except perhaps a fathom, which is approx-imately 6 feet or 1.83 metres, and an Irish Mile which is 1.27 statute miles.

Göttingen Mean Time was adopted as a standard for simultaneous magnetic observations in the 1830s and was used on occasion in the 1840s for meteorology before it was replaced by Greenwich Mean Time.

Dusk

AS THE AFTERNOON stretches on the strength of the sun diminishes, the thermals fade away. There will be no more cumulus clouds today. The clouds weaken as their energy source disappears. At sunset the sky is clear once again.

The sun has dipped towards the horizon. It blazes from a shallow angle across the atmosphere, softening its rays into the golden hour, a time treasured by landscape photographers when the earth is bathed in rich yellow light and the texture of objects is revealed. The sun is now 5° above the horizon and different colours are starting to appear. The milky-white lip over the horizon of daytime is replaced by a yellowy red. Zones of red and orange and purple appear over it, almost in horizontal bands. As the sun sets in the west, in the east the earth’s shadow comes into view, a bluish-grey horizontal band, rising as high as 6° over the horizon.

On a clear day like this, the drama intensifies after sunset. Although the sun has gone, twilight fills the skies for several hours. Eventually the distinct bands of colour even into a purple hue of striking opalescence, ‘more pink and salmon coloured than true purple’¹. This light remains for about an hour after sunset, until it is replaced by a cool blue glow 20° above the horizon. This is the twilight glow.

The further away from the equator, the longer twilight lingers. In the Orkney Islands north of Scotland twilight fills all the night hours from the middle of April to the middle of August and it is quite possible to read from a book or to garden at midnight. For twilight to properly end and night begin, the sun must be 19° beneath the horizon. Until this final tipping point light continues to be scattered, and it glows over the landscape. Soon, though, stars of different magnitudes are visible. High up in the mesosphere, fifty miles above ground, noctilucent clouds made up of ice crystals glimmer and twinkle like chandeliers. These are the highest of all clouds.

By now the heat of the day has faded away. The atmosphere is cold and clear. Down below in a meadow, blades of grass are cooling fast. On the stem of a dandelion, in a space so infinitesimally tiny that even James Glaisher or Francis Beaufort could never glimpse it, a tiny fleck of dew is forming. The start of another day.

West Winds

IT HAD BEEN on the news all day, the storm was on its way. As I shut the door of my west London home it was somewhere out in the Channel, perhaps blowing up great waves like those FitzRoy and Sulivan had encountered two hundred years before on the Thetis. It was a quarter to nine in the evening on Sunday 27 October 2013. By Christian custom the next day would mark the ancient feast of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Someone had noticed this and begun a trend that had gathered momentum on social media. Even before it crossed the coast it was St Jude’s Storm.

In the street the wind was already lively. Clusters of brittle, golden leaves were twirling from the plane tree outside, adding to the mound of several hundred that had accumulated on the pavements over the last few days. There were a few hours left of this uneasy calm. I pulled up the hood of my battered parka and set off for the river.

It was three days since the Met Office had first put out a forecast for potentially damaging winds across the south of England. On Friday they had upgraded this to an amber warning, to be ‘prepared for potentially hazardous conditions’. Over the weekend we had watched the satellite images as the clouds began to swirl in their ominous anticlockwise spiral out in the Atlantic. The forecasters’ demeanour changed, their easy playfulness gone. They stared gravely into the camera, repeating the maxim that this storm was one ‘you would not see every year’. On Sunday, tension had built. Railway companies were anticipating delays during Monday morning’s rush hour. Firemen and paramedics had been put on standby. To emphasise the message to anyone still not listening, erstwhile BBC weatherman Michael Fish, famous for missing a violent extra-tropical cyclone in 1987, had been fetched out of retirement to broadcast his own personal warning. ‘This is totally amazing,’ Fish said in an interview on BBC News. ‘The modern computers are literally able to invent these things in thin air. No human being could have done this.’¹

Down by the Thames at Fulham Reach the atmosphere was thick, wet and cold. I couldn’t see far in the gauzy light – I could just make out the green outline of Hammersmith Bridge a hundred metres upstream. I sheltered beneath a white willow and listened to the breeze. Orange tunnels of sodium light illuminated individual, fine drops of rain that were falling at an angle. There was a smell of musk and the river seemed swollen. From somewhere above the iron lid of sky came the metallic whirr of an aeroplane descending towards Heathrow. A jogger bounced by with his headphones in. Then a dog walker, his Labrador tugging impatiently at his hand.

Before St Jude came I had wanted to feel this moment for myself. The unsettling mix of anticipation and suspense. This is the power of weather. It is what Constable experienced in the East Bergholt windmill, a wide-eyed boy of fifteen watching the horizon as scudding clouds flew overhead. It is the sense of anxious tension FitzRoy must have felt during that night in the Strait of Magellan in 1846, on his passage home from New Zealand, with Captain Cable gone below and his barometer dropping fast.

I waited under the willow for half an hour. Then the wind began to rise, so I turned for home.

St Jude swept across the south of England four hours later, and we woke the next morning to news of its effects. Winds of 99mph had been recorded on the Isle of Wight. Six people had died, mostly from the hundreds of fallen trees. At Heathrow 130 flights had been cancelled; 850,000 homes were without electricity. The Port of Dover had been shut for three hours, as had Dungeness nuclear power station.

But that was not the end of it. St Jude turned out to be the opening volley in one of the most unsettled winters in recorded history. As I sat inside reading about Reid and Redfield and Espy and FitzRoy, one storm after another was flung by a jet stream that seemed locked like a missile on the south coast of England. Six major storms struck in January and February 2014, with volumes of rainfall that broke all records. Not since 1766 – two years before Cook set sail for the South Seas in the Endeavour – had the recorded rainfall been so high. As it had during the Royal Charter Gale, the Dawlish railway collapsed. At Milford on Sea in Hampshire thirty-two diners had to be rescued from a seafront restaurant when gigantic waves sent shingle from the beach flying through the windows. The floods stretched east from the Somerset Levels to the Thames Valley. By the middle of February Eton’s playing fields were underwater.

The weather thrust the Met Office centre stage. With its IBM Power7, one of the most powerful computers in the world – able to calculate 1,000,000,000,000,000 sums a second – it could track and forecast each storm. Almost a hundred and fifty years after he died it was the realisation of FitzRoy’s vision. Rather than being cast aside as a costly extravagance, the Met Office was at the heart of the action – briefing politicians, businesspeople, the media and the public.

Today the Met Office has a budget of more than £80 million; it employs around fifteen hundred staff, five hundred of them scientists.^fn1 Although the weather, particularly British weather, retains its potential for surprise, we now live in a world where forecasts are predominantly trusted. By the Met Office’s latest statistics 94.2 per cent of its maximum temperature forecasts are accurate within 2°C and 85 per cent of minimum temperatures to within 2°C; 73.3 per cent of rain forecasts turned out correct while storms are almost never – apart from the rare Michael Fish case – missed.²

The value of the Met Office was illustrated by a 2007 consultancy report. It concluded that it delivered ‘an exceptional return on investment’, that it saves lives, protects properties and provides wide-ranging social and environmental benefits; all told, it brings £353.2 million of savings to the British economy. Although much has changed since the early fractious days of the 1850s and 1860s, its initial vision has not. FitzRoy’s ideal of a public weather service, provided by government for the good of all, has not only survived but has become integral to our way of life.³

For his foresight FitzRoy is fondly remembered by those at the Met Office today as their founding father. Its headquarters is located on FitzRoy Road in Exeter and, in a wonderfully apt tribute, back in 2002 one of the BBC’s fabled shipping-forecast regions was renamed from Finisterre to FitzRoy. He has been well served by three excellent biographies and in 2005 FitzRoy’s life was turned into thrilling fiction in Harry Thompson’s Booker-nominated This Thing of Darkness – proving beyond any doubt that history loves a rebel. Far away from Britain’s shores soars the awe-inspiring Monte Fitz Roy in southern Patagonia. Named in FitzRoy’s honour in 1877 by Francisco Moreno, the Argentine explorer, the summit juts up above a spectacular landscape like a fang. The weather at Monte Fitz Roy is often wild. For climbers it is the ultimate ascent, and few have ever stood on its summit.

Today FitzRoy is chiefly remembered for the part he played in the story of evolution as Darwin’s taciturn captain on the Beagle. This history has always overshadowed FitzRoy’s later life and his meteorological work. To be labelled ‘Darwin’s captain on the Beagle’ is a fate FitzRoy would have hated. A much better epitaph is inscribed on his gravestone at All Saints Church, a breezy passage from Ecclesiastes:

The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. (Eccles. 1:6)

Among those who know the story of FitzRoy’s days at the Meteorological Department, there remains a sense of injustice. ‘FitzRoy was treated very badly by the scientific community,’ Dame Julia Slingo, the Chief Scientist at the Met Office, said when I spoke to her. I asked her, with the benefit of hindsight, whether she thought what he had done was unscientific? ‘No,’ she replied. ‘He was just at the start of a very long journey.’⁴

And if Robert FitzRoy was at the start of one journey, then Dame Julia Slingo is at the beginning of another.

On 7 February 1861, the evening before FitzRoy issued the first ever British storm warning to the north-east ports, John Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, stood to deliver the prestigious Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society. Forty-one-year-old Tyndall was an Irish scientist and one of the rising stars on the London scene. He was a gifted experimenter, communicator and popular author, well known for his written accounts of his climbing exploits in the Alps, where he had summited many of the hardest peaks. Already he had been at the Royal Institution for about a decade and his reputation as a lecturer was well established. In a year’s time he would be invited to serve alongside FitzRoy, Glaisher, Herschel and Airy on the British Association’s Balloon Committee, but this night he had other things on his mind.

Tyndall’s lecture was titled ‘On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gasses and Vapours’, the latest update on a scientific enquiry that had been occupying him since 1859. Like Glaisher, Tyndall had developed an interest in the transfer of heat throughout the global system. And just as Glaisher had tracked the flow of radiation through solid bodies, Tyndall had resolved to do the same – but this time with gases. His interest was born of the realisation that for the earth to be hot enough to support life some of the gases had to trap and retain some of the sun’s heat. This seemed obvious but, as Tyndall realised, the question had been almost completely ignored by science. It was, he announced, ‘perfectly unbroken ground’.⁵

For two years Tyndall had sought to answer the question, testing which gases were the strongest absorbers of radiant heat – what we today call infrared radiation. He had constructed his apparatus at the British Institution, a rig which let him pass heat through tubes of gas and monitor the amount of absorption. The task had been difficult but he had stuck at it and from 9 September 1860 until 29 October he had ‘experimented from about eight to ten hours daily’. Now Tyndall was ready to reveal his results. He told his audience it seemed that a negligible amount of heat was soaked up by the typical atmospheric gases: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. Other gases, however, had dramatic absorptive powers, as did water vapour. One of his discoveries related to carbonic acid (carbon dioxide). He was eager to correct a misapprehension:

In the experiments of Dr Franz, carbolic acid appears as a feebler absorber than oxygen. According to my experiments, for small quantities the absorptive power of the former (carbonic acid) is about 150 times that of the latter (oxygen); and for atmospheric tensions, carbonic acid probably absorbs nearly 100 times as much as oxygen.⁶

No one could have guessed that February night at the Royal Society, as FitzRoy was issuing his first ever storm warning, that Tyndall was laying the theoretical foundation stone for one of the most contentious scientific disputes in history. The implications of Tyndall’s discoveries were clear. The more water vapour, carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ present in the atmosphere, the warmer the atmosphere would be. In the weeks that followed the lecture Tyndall put out a press release in the London papers. ‘All past climate was now understood, and all future climate changes could be predicted simply from a knowledge of the concentrations of these “greenhouse” gases.’⁷

For years Tyndall’s research remained little more than a neat, if somewhat obscure, foray into the properties of gas, remembered by some, forgotten by most. In the late nineteenth century the Swedish meteorologist Svante Arrhenius dabbled with the riddle, producing calculations on the correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and surface temperature on earth. It was not until 1938 that the subject was revisited again, this time by G.S. Callendar, a British steam engineer, who wondered what the consequences of a high-carbon atmosphere would be. By then Britain was producing about 250 million tonnes of coal a year, the burning of which along with other hydrocarbons was emitting increasing volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Callendar calculated the upshot in temperature that should result from a 20 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels and concluded that it was probably a good thing: rising temperature helping to stave off another ice age.

For a few decades scientists occasionally speculated about this quirk of atmosphere – known to them casually as the Callendar Effect – while all the time the volumes of carbon dioxide continued to rise. The increase in concentrations was dramatic. From about 1805 when FitzRoy was born to the end of the twentieth century the level of carbon dioxide rose from 280 parts per million to 380 parts per million. In the last decades of the twentieth century there was a rejuvenation of interest in the problem. No longer was Tyndall’s discovery a scientific curiosity or mathematical puzzle. Politicians realised that the experiments Tyndall had performed in a sealed tube at the Royal Institution were now being played out on a massive scale in the earth’s atmosphere. The problem was given a title – global warming – and it became the defining scientific issue of the age.

The issue hit the political mainstream in 1988. That year saw Margaret Thatcher give an anxious address on global warming to the Royal Society, cautioning that humanity had ‘unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself’.⁸⁹

BL	Beineke Rare Books & Manuscript Library, Yale University
FB	Francis Beaufort
GL	Gladstone’s Library
HC Deb.	House of Commons Debates
HL	Huntington Library
NA	National Archives
NLI	National Library of Ireland
NMA	National Meteorological Library and Archive
RLE	Richard Lovell Edgeworth
RS	Royal Society Archive