Scientists viewed Mars: David Harry Grinspoon, Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet (New York: Perseus Publishing, 1997), 49–51.
Hawking newspapers: Sam Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 43. For Bradbury’s love of rain, see p. 90.
Earth, Mars, and Venus were born: Author interview with Dr. David Harry Grinspoon, NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, April 9, 2013.
This is the beauty: C. Donald Ahrens, Essentials of Meteorology: An Invitation to the Atmosphere (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012). Professor Ahrens’s Essentials of Meteorology and Meteorology Today: An Introduction to Weather, Climate, and the Environment (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012) are indeed essential for anyone who wants to understand weather and climate. For a primer on water vapor, see Essentials, pp. 5, 84–87.
Nature’s trustiest timepiece: Author interview with Dr. Paul A. Mueller, University of Florida Department of Geological Sciences, Gainesville, Florida, February 27, 2013.
The irony: Grinspoon, Venus Revealed, p. 31.
Mars, too, appears: Author interview with Grinspoon; and David H. Grinspoon, “Chasing the Lost Oceans of Venus,” in Michael Carroll and Rosaly Lopes, eds., Alien Seas: Oceans in Space (New York: Springer Publishing, 2013), 3–10.
Venus cooked: Author interview with Grinspoon; and Grinspoon, “Chasing the Lost Oceans of Venus,” 3–10.
“Sunshine abounds everywhere”: John Burroughs, “Is It Going to Rain?” Scribner’s Monthly Illustrated Magazine, July 1878, 399.
“The earth has enough”: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 23, 1806, Monticello. Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
Amid the worst drought: Hadley and Peter Arnold, “Pivot: Reconceiving Water Scarcity as Design Opportunity,” BOOM: The Journal of California, vol. 3, no. 3 (January 2013), 97.
Globally, the continents recently drew: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, Global Analysis, 2011. The 2011 globally averaged precipitation over land was the second-wettest year on record, behind 2010, with greatly varied rainfall across the world including severe drought in the Horn of Africa.
The rainy-day butterfly: Author interview with Paul M. Brakefield, November 25, 2013; and Paul M. Brakefield, Julie Gates, Dave Keys, Fanja Kesbeke, Pieter J. Wijingaarden, Antonia Monteriro, Vernon French, and Sean B. Carroll, “Development, Plasticity and Evolution of Butterfly Eye-spot Patterns,” Nature, vol. 384 (November 1996), 236–42.
As the drops hit: Xu-Li Fan, Spencer C. H. Barrett, Hua Lin, Ling-Ling Chen, Xiang Zhou, and Jian-Yun Gao, “Rain Pollination Provides Reproductive Assurance in a Deceptive Orchid,” Annals of Botany, vol. 110, no. 5 (May 2012), 953–58.
An exhaustive study: Brad T. Gomez, Thomas G. Hansford, and George A. Krause, “The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout, and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections,” Journal of Politics, vol. 39, no. 3 (August 2007), 649–63.
Les Misérables: Laura Lee, Blame It on the Rain: How the Weather Has Changed History (New York: Harper, 2006), 166–69.
“Providence needed only”: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1862), 112.
Once prospering in vast numbers from the riches of the rain: Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Vintage, 1990), 36.
An anti-noise-pollution organization: “One Square Inch,” a sanctuary for silence at Olympic National Park, http://onesquareinch.org/.
Connecting East and West: “The tide-beating heart of earth” is from Melville’s memorable description of the Pacific in the chapter of the same name in Moby Dick. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale (Originally published London: Richard Bentley, 1851. Quote is from Los Angeles: Arion Press, 1979), 491.
As the heavy ocean plate: Eugene P. Kiver and David V. Harris, Geology of U.S. Parklands (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 5th edition, 1999), 77–78; and “Olympic National Park,” National Geographic Travel, http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/olympic-national-park/.
After this warm, wet air: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 507.
In 1860: Ibid., 350.
A fast-growing haven: Author interview with Dr. Clifford F. Mass, University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, February 1, 2013; and Cliff Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 18.
They found the circulation: Clifford Mass and Carl Sagan, “A Numerical Circulation Model with Topography for the Martian Southern Hemisphere,” Journal of Atmospheric Science, vol. 33 (1976), 1418–30.
This rain shadow covers: Author interview with Mass; and Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 19–20.
The number of days: Author interview with Mass; and Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 20.
While Seattle experiences: Christopher C. Burt, “Thunderstorms: The ‘Stormiest’ Places in the U.S.A. and the World,” Weather Underground, June 21, 2012, http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/thunderstorms-the-stormiest-places-in-the-usa-and-the-world.
New Orleans and West Palm Beach: Data courtesy Scott E. Stephens, meteorologist, NOAA National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina. The top ten cities were derived from the 1981–2010 climate normal in NCDC’s Comparative Climatic Data spreadsheet. Including only those cities with populations greater than 50,000, the top ten are: Mobile; New Orleans; West Palm Beach; Miami; Pensacola; Baton Rouge; Port Arthur, Texas; Tallahassee; Apalachicola; and Wilmington, North Carolina.
The ascending clouds: Author interview with Mass; and Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 23–25.
An acre of corn: U.S. Geological Survey, “The Water Cycle,” Transpiration, http://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycletranspiration.html.
But Yuma is the rain-scarcest city: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina.
Known as rain streamers: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 473.
Scientists define the monsoon: Author interview with the geoscientist Peter D. Clift, November 7, 2013.
Almost two-thirds: Peter D. Clift and R. Alan Plumb, The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 197.
The monsoons: Ibid., vii.
The anthropologist: Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (New York: Basic Books, 2004), xiii–xiv.
Their subsequent research: Personal communication with Mark Changizi; and Mark Changizi, R. Weber, R. Kotecha, and J. Palazzo, “Are Wet-Induced Wrinkled Fingers Primate Rain Treads?” Brain, Behavior and Evolution, vol. 77, no. 4 (August 2011), http://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/328223#AC.
All in all, Changizi believes: Personal communication with Changizi; and Changizi, Weber, et al., “Are Wet-Induced Wrinkled Fingers Primate Rain Treads?”
Why would they need: Chip Walter, Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year-Old Story of How and Why We Survived (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2013), 9–10.
A new sort of primate: Ibid., 4.
Emerging paleoclimate: Gail M. Ashley, “Human Evolution and Climate Change,” in Vivien Gornitz, ed., Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2009), 448–50.
The major leaps: Interview with Dr. Rick Potts, “The Adaptable Human,” NOVA, October 26, 2009.
the largest predator: Christopher A. Brochu and Glenn W. Storrs, “A Giant Crocodile from the Plio-Pleistocene of Kenya, the Phylogenetic Relationships of Neogene African Crocodylines, and the Antiquity of Crocodylus in Africa,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 32, no. 3 (2012), 587–602.
Many archaeologists: Fagan, The Long Summer, 19.
Cores from the Arabian Sea suggest: David E. Anderson, Andrew S. Goudie, and Adrian G. Parker, Global Environments Through the Quaternary: Exploring Environmental Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2013), 127.
As Asian Ice Age hunters: Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2010), 33.
After millions of years of heave and ho: Fagan, The Long Summer, xii, 22–25.
Paleolithic people did endure: David G. Anderson, Albert C. Goodyear, James Kennett, and Allen West, “Multiple Lines of Evidence for Possible Human Population Decline/Settlement Reorganization During the Early Younger Dryas,” Quaternary International, vol. 242, no. 2 (October 15, 2011), 570–83.
Likewise in Asia: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 200.
Radiocarbon dating lets scientists analyze: A. M. T. Moore, “The Impact of Accelerator Dating at the Early Village of Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates,” Radiocarbon, vol. 34, no. 3 (1992), 850–58.
Many scientists believe the faltering rains: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 200–203; and Fagan, The Long Summer, 128–45.
Nearly 5,000 years ago, the Harappan people: Richard H. Meadow and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, “Recent Discoveries and Highlights from Excavations at Harappa: 1998–2000,” http://www.harappa.com/indus4/e1.html.
All of this life flourished on monsoon rains and rivers: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 210.
people began to abandon: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18.
The Hindu holy text: Author interview, Hindu scholar Vasudha Narayanan, April 18, 2013; and Vasudha Narayanan, unpublished manuscript, A Hundred Autumns to Live.
Appearing in the text more than seventy times: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 210–11.
Searching in an ancient rain-fed lake: Yama Dixit, David A. Hodell, and Cameron A. Petrie, “Abrupt Weakening of the Summer Monsoon in Northwest India 4,100 Yr Ago,” Geology, vol. 42, no. 4 (February 24, 2014), 339–42.
The public was captivated: “The Royal Graves of Ur,” British Museum, highlights, http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/r/the_royal_graves_of_ur.aspx.
They conceived the first written philosophy: University of Chicago Library, “This History, Our History: Ancient Mesopotamia,” http://mesopotamia.lib.uchicago.edu/mesopotamialife/index.php.
And then, after a hundred years of prosperity: H. Weiss, M. A. Courty, W. Wetterstrom, F. Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow, and A. Curnow, “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” Science, vol. 261 (August 20, 1993), 995–1003.
The city once so grand: Richard Conniff, “When Civilizations Collapse,” Environment Yale, http://environment.yale.edu/envy/stories/when-civilizations-collapse/.
With no rain to moisten the soil: Weiss et al, “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” 995–1003.
Lake-bed soils in Africa: H. M. Cullen, P. B. deMenocal, S. Hemming, G. Hemming, F. H. Brown, T. Guilderson, and F. Sirocko, “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology, vol. 28 (April 2000), 375–78.
In China, scientists note: M. J. C. Walker, M. Berkelhammer, S. Bjorck, L. C. Cwynar, D. A. Fisher, A. J. Long, J. J. Lowe, R. M. Newnham, S. O. Rasmussen, and H. Weiss, “Formal Subdivision of the Holocene Series/ Epoch,” discussion paper, Journal of Quaternary Science, vol. 27, no. 7 (2012), 649–59; and Weiss et al., “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” 995–1003.
More than 11,000 people were killed: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 453–54.
Persistently copious rains: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, 128–29.
Chroniclers of the day: Ibid., 104.
In 1315, the downpours began: Henry S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” Speculum, vol. 5, no. 4 (October 1930), 346.
Floodwaters ran so deep: Ibid., 346–48.
The Danube burst its banks: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate.
“The men stood knee-deep:” Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” 349.
The Flemings thanked God: Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 to 1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 31–32.
In England, the price of wheat: Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” 351–52.
In some rural areas: Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 32.
Families foraged: Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” 355–56.
“Horse meat was precious”: Johannes de Trokelowe, Annates, H. T. Riley, ed., Rolls Series, no. 28, vol. 3 (London, 1866), 92–95. Translated by Brian Tierney, Internet Medieval Source Book, Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/famin1315a.asp.
They solicited charity: Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 38.
“The people were in such great need”: Ibid. 41.
In Tournai: John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2013), 22.
In Holland, “rich and poor”: Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” 370.
In the rains, dead bodies: Ibid., 358.
Scholars estimate the Great Famine of 1315–1322 killed some 3 million people: Ibid., 361–63.
A musician in the papal court of Avignon: Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, 4.
But the “full world”: Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 81.
The stress of childhood hunger: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, 107–8.
What we know as: Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 81.
When a victim coughs: World Health Organization, “Plague,” fact sheet, http://www.who.int/topics/plague/en/.
Others who have examined it: Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal, vol. 8, no. 9 (September 2002), http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536.htm.
By 1349, it had crept north to Scotland: Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 82.
No event in European history: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, 109.
A global consortium of scientists: Nils Christian Stenseth et al., “Plague Dynamics Are Driven by Climate Variation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 103, no. 35 (August 2006), 13110–15.
At the same time, a good, hard rain: Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History (New York: Berkley Books, 2007).
In late August 1589: “Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, Volumes 46–47,” Great Britain Public Records, no. 5, Report on Royal Archives of Denmark. This record spells Peter Munch’s name as Munck.
King James VI of Scotland had seen the fair Anna: Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. VII (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), 323–25.
Munch thought the tempest uncommonly fierce: Ibid., 326.
The dastardly winds: Ibid.
After an awkward first embrace: Letters to King James the Sixth (Edinburgh: Library of the Faculty of Advocates, 1835), xvii.
The royal couple’s return: Donald Tyson, The Demonology of King James I (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2011), 22.
Historians who study witch hunts: Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004), 145.
About 80 percent of the victims were female: Ibid., 37.
A German woodcut from 1486: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, figure 4.2, 129.
A frontispiece from a 1489 pamphlet: Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, plate 5, 75.
A colored Swiss painting: Ibid., plate 6, 84.
The crime disappeared: Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, 128.
“Witches were the scapegoats”: Ibid.
In 1582, a similar sheet reported: Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 91.
In Scotland, the zeal for witch-hunting: Ibid., 6–7.
After humiliations and tortures: Tyson, The Demonology of King James I, 24.
She explained that Satan: Ibid., 4, 24.
No words could have rung: Ibid.
Its woodcuts show a storm: Newes from Scotland, Special Collections Exhibition, Special Collections Department, Library, University of Glasgow, Scotland, http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2000.html.
She said the witches: Tyson, The Demonology of King James I, 25.
King James and his council: Newes from Scotland.
Witch hunts and trials continued: Ibid.
He began writing with James in mind: Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, paperback edition, 2005), 349.
But he relied on storms: Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare: The Art of the Dramatist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), 216.
Archaeologists have found that the later Harappan: Camilo Ponton, Liviu Giosan, Tim I. Eglinton, Dorian Q. Fuller, Joel E. Johnson, Pushpendra Kumar, and Tim S. Collett, “Holocene Aridification of India,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39 (February 2012).
As a teenager, he’d been stricken: “Robert McAlpin Williamson,” Justices of Texas 1836–1986, University of Texas School of Law Tarlton Law Library Jamail Center for Legal Research, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/justices/profile/view/116.
His disability stopped him from nothing: “Robert McAlpin Williamson,” Justices of Texas 1836–1986; and “Williamson, Robert McAlpin (Three Legged Willie),” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fwi42.
As a brilliant orator: Ross Phares, Bible in Pocket, Gun in Hand: The Story of Frontier Religion (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962), 133–34.
Tree-ring researchers: Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Daniel K. Stahle, Todd H. Votteler, Richard C. Casteel, and Jay L. Banner, “Extended Chronology of Drought in South Central, Southeastern and West Texas,” Texas Water Forum, http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/ciess/files/Water_Forum_01_Votteler.pdf.
“O Lord, Thou Divine Father”: Phares, Bible in Pocket, Gun in Hand, 134.
At Texas A&M University: John Burnett, “Drought, Wildfires Haven’t Changed Perry’s Climate-Change Views,” NPR News, September 7, 2011; and Kate Sheppard, “Rick Perry Asks Texans to Pray for Rain,” Mother Jones, April 21, 2011.
His rain refrain: Timothy Egan, “Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers,” New York Times, August 11, 2011.
“trying to co-opt the most important three days of the Christian calendar,” Richard Connelly, “We Obey Rick Perry, Our Rain Prayer,” Houston Press, April 22, 2011.
In the arid American Southwest: Ann Marshall, Rain: Native Expressions from the American Southwest (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2000), 9, 18, 20.
Rain has been woven: Ibid., 32.
The cantor dons: Ronald H. Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998), 33.
Today, Muslims communally perform the prayer: Sarah Kate Raphael, Climate and Political Climate: Environmental Disasters in the Medieval Levant (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2013), 70.
In an unprecedented gesture: Judith Sudilovsky, “Holy Land Jews and Muslims Pray Together for Rain,” Ecumenical News International, November 17, 2010.
The rain god Iškur/Adad: Piotr Bienkowski and Alan Millard, Dictionary of the Ancient Near East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 1–2. You can see Iškur/Adad today in the Louvre. The small figure hardly looks fierce behind his glass pane, but proudly rides his bull across a stone tablet, poised to hurl one of his lightning bolts.
Rain and storm gods were around then, too: Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East, University of California San Diego Biblical and Judaic Studies, Volume 8 (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 76–83.
Some were considered divine kings: Daniel Schwemer, “The Storm-Gods of the Ancient Near East: Summary, Synthesis, Recent Studies, Part I,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, vol. 7, no. 2 (December 2007), 121–68.
Still thought of as paeans to fertility: Green, The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East, 76–83.
Bulls were a common rain-god motif: Stephen H. Schneider, Terry L. Root, and Michael D. Mastrandrea, eds., The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), “Religion and Weather,” 5.
The Aztecs had tried to please: Isabel De La Cruz, Angelica Gonzalez-Oliver, Brian M. Kemp, Juan A. Roman, David Glenn Smith, and Alfonso Torre-Blanco, “Sex Identification of Children Sacrificed to the Ancient Aztec Rain Gods in Tlatelolco,” Current Anthropology, vol. 49, no. 3 (June 2008), 519–26.
Jewish tradition identifies: Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology, 155.
In Sanskrit, the word for rain: Sir Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005 reprint; originally published in 1899 by Oxford University Press), 1013.
Hindus consider rivers female: Vasudha Narayanan, “Water, Wood, and Wisdom: Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Traditions,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 130, no. 4 (Fall 2001), 179–206.
The Australians also attributed: Schneider et al., The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, vol. 1: “Religion and Weather,” 5.
Other storm gods became known: David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 401.
One cuneiform tablet describes Iškur: Douglas R. Frayne, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods, vol. 4: Old Babylonian Period (2003–1595 BC) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 271–72.
“Above, Adad made scarce his rain”: Albert T. Clay, A Hebrew Deluge Story in Cuneiform and Other Epic Fragments in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Yale Oriental Series: Researches, vol. 5, part 3 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922), 17–18.
As Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, explained: John Wesley, Wesley’s Notes on the Bible, “John Wesley’s Notes on the Whole Bible, New Testament,” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, XXVI, 4 (full text at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/notes.html).
The newly settled Israelites: Daniel Hillel, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 157.
“And it shall come to pass”: Deuteronomy 11:13–15, 21st Century King James version, www.biblegateway.com.
“Take heed to yourselves”: Deuteronomy 11:16–17, ibid.
“The Lord shall open”: Deuteronomy 28:12, ibid.
As Rabbi Tanchum bar Chiyya put it: Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology, 159.
“In the wilderness of the desert”: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 226.
But it is often the wettest: Author interview, Clift; and Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 223.
Krishna’s skin is storm-blue: Author interview with Narayanan.
In 2001, the Indian government: Ishaan Tharoor, “The World of the Kumbh Mela: Inside the Largest Single Gathering of Humanity,” Time, January 15, 2013.
A crush of devotees waits: Kamakhya Temple, “Ambubachi Mela,” http://www.kamakhyatemple.org/Ambubachi.aspx.
Mythology surrounding the Saraswati: Author interview with Narayanan.
Woolley was not trying to make history: William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 53–54.
Rainbows exist as a sign of this pact: Genesis chapters 7 through 9, 21st Century King James Version, www.biblegateway.com.
He loved the work so much: Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 11–14.
Smith was “a highly nervous, sensitive man”: Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London: Richard Clay & Sons, 1925), 153.
He wrote of the moment: Ryan and Pittman, Noah’s Flood, 28.
According to a colleague’s written account: Ibid.
The telling is near-exact to Genesis: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 28.
The flood tale got around: Cohn, Noah’s Flood, 8–9.
His 1929 book, Ur of the Chaldees: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 55.
It describes a deluge: David R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 154; and Cohn, Noah’s Flood, 1.
For two decades, Ryan and Pitman have built evidence: Personal communication with William Ryan; Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood; and K. K. Eris, W. B. F. Ryan, et al., “The Timing and Evolution of Post-glacial Transgression Across the Sea of Marmara Shelf South of Istanbul,” Marine Geology, vol. 243 (2007), 57–76.
The geologists hypothesize: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 234.
“the Wind encreased”: Daniel Defoe and Richard Hamblyn, The Storm: Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Hamblyn (London: Penguin, 2005), 26.
Had he been killed: John J. Miller, “Writing Up a Storm,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2011.
Not a bad guess: Maximillian Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 138.
He was fined two hundred marks: Charlie Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine (London: Little, Brown, 2012), 209.
On the morning of the 27th: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 34.
Hardly anyone had slept: Ibid.
Defoe’s eyewitness account: Miller, “Writing Up a Storm.”
Defoe placed ads: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 211.
The heart of The Storm: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 64.
Emerging atmospheric science shows up alongside: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94.
“I cannot doubt but the Atheist’s hard’ned Soul”: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 7.
The earliest-known recorded rain science: Ian Strangeways, Precipitation: Theory, Measurement and Distribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.
“Was there ever a shower”: Aristophanes, “The Clouds,” 423 B.C., in Selected Writings on Socrates (London: Collector’s Library, 2004), 378.
Soaking into the earth: Malcolm Wilson, Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46, 60.
“In front of the storehouse”: Strangeways, Precipitation, 139.
Sejong wanted every village: Park Seong-Rae, Science and Technology in Korean History: Excursions, Innovations, and Issues (Fremont, Calif.: Jain Publishing Co. Asian Humanities Press, 2005), 100.
European weather watchers: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 27.
But it is no surprise: Strangeways, Precipitation, 141.
In Italy, Evangelista Torricelli: N. C. Datta, The Story of Chemistry (Hyderabad, India: Universities Press India, 2005), 86–87.
Torricelli also gave science: Gabrielle Walker, An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 8–11.
“All the clouds knew”: Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (New York: Del Ray Trade Paperback Edition, 2009), 10.
His least-favorite: Ibid., 8–9.
Some lexicographers suggest: Elizabeth Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2006), 593.
Linguists mapping dialect: William A. Kretzschmar Jr., The Linguistics of Speech (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 89–92.
Clouds “are commonly as good”: Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds (New York: Perigee/Penguin, 2006), 186.
Twice a day: Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 82–83.
Howard’s proposed classification: Ibid., 50.
As the British cloud enthusiast: Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, 53.
It is brilliantly simple: Scott Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 8.
The latter was often more thrilling: Lance Morrow, “The Religion of Big Weather,” Time, vol. 147, no. 4 (January 22, 1996), 72.
So it was with the man: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Great Britain, vol. 26, no. 114 (April 1900), 155.
Historians of science: Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 100.
The first issue: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” 174.
As they tried to save lives: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 15.
For one, the large ship-salvage companies: Malcolm Walker, History of the Meteorological Office (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvii.
By 1865, the British Rainfall Organisation: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” 155.
He ultimately gathered: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 41–42.
With kind, crinkly eyes: H. Sowerby Wallis, British Rainfall 1899: On the Distribution of Rain over the British Isles During the Year 1899 (London, 1900), 18.
He maintained a patient: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 100.
“Vulgar fractions should never be employed”: Hugh Robert Mill, British Rainfall 1905: On the Distribution of Rain in Space and Time over the British Isles During the Year 1905, 45th Annual Volume (London, 1906), 272.
Such a move would undermine: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 103.
Espy sold the notion: Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize the Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39.
Abbe designed: Ibid., 48.
Only thirty years old: W. J. Humphreys, “Cleveland Abbe, 1838–1916,” NOAA History, Giants of Science, http://www.history.noaa.gov/giants/abbe.html.
A petition from the Great Lakes: Monmonier, Air Apparent, 48.
Congress approved: Ibid., 49.
When he died in 1880: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 11, 1880, 19.
The real scientist behind: “Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory and Butterfly Effect, Dies at 90,” MIT News, April 16, 2008.
The satellites and supercomputers: Jason Samenow, “The National Hurricane Center’s Strikingly Accurate Forecast for Sandy,” Washington Post, November 1, 2012.
Yet rain continues to defy Big Data: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008.
National Weather Service statistics: Nate Silver, “The Weatherman Is Not a Moron,” New York Times, September 7, 2012.
On July 28, 1997: James Brooke, “Flash Flood at Colorado Trailer Parks Kills 5 and Injures 40,” New York Times, July 30, 1997.
Doesken has never forgiven himself: Author interview with Nolan Doesken, June 26, 2014.
Journalists were eager: Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2010), 150.
Niles’ Weekly ran: “Rain,” Niles’ National Register, vol. 75, no. 4 (January 24, 1849), 159.
The New York Times began: Paul Martin Lester, Visual Communication: Images with Messages (Boston: Wadsworth, 2014), 213.
Like most things in newspapers: Monmonier, Air Apparent, 160.
During the New Deal: Robert Henson, Weather on Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2010), 6.
One of the classics: James C. Fidler obituary, Austin American Statesman, May 5, 2007.
“By telephone, telegraph, teletype”: Henson, Weather on Air, 7.
New York City’s first television weathercast: Ibid.
Many of the first broadcasters: Nick Ravo, “Clint Youle, 83, Early Weatherman on TV,” obituary, New York Times, July 31, 1999.
“The result was TV weather’s wildest”: Henson, Weather on Air, 11.
Nashville poet-forecaster Bill Williams: Ibid.
Broadcasting the weather at his hometown station: Ibid., 3.
Before she became a movie star and sex symbol: Ibid.
She couldn’t tell whether: Nicola D. Gutgold, Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News (Plymouth, U.K.: Lexington Books, 2008), 146.
“A trained gorilla”: Henson, Weather on Air, 32.
He dreamed of a twenty-four-hour national cable network: Frank Batten with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 39.
For years, federal meteorologists: Ibid., 70.
Critics dismissed the channel: Alan Fields, Partly Sunny: The Weather Junkie’s Guide to Outsmarting the Weather (Boulder, Colo.: Windsor Peak Press, 1995), 40.
Landmark invested $32 million: Batten and Cruikshank, The Weather Channel, 127.
“Heat-wave alert”: Henson, Weather on Air, 11.
The idea was for the forecasters: Craig Wilson, “Sunny Skies over the Weather Channel,” USA Today, June 7, 2007.
Reporting from the field: Ibid.
“It was awesome”: Jim Cantore, interview by Karen Herman, Archive of American Television, April 24, 2013.
In 2008, NBC: Michael J. de la Merced, “Weather Channel Is Sold to NBC and Equity Firms,” New York Times, July 7, 2008.
The man with the twenty-four-hour weather dreams: Batten and Cruikshank, The Weather Channel, 127.
He called global warming: Charles Homans, “Hot Air: Why Don’t TV Weathermen Believe in Climate Change?” Columbia Journalism Review, January 7, 2010.
He joined an estimated quarter: Leslie Kaufman, “Among Weathercasters Doubt on Warming,” New York Times, March 29, 2010.
Wheel of Fortune’s host: Pat Sajak, “Manmade Global Warming: The Solution,” on Ricochet: Conservative Conversation and Community, July 25, 2010, http://ricochet.com/archives/manmade-global-warming-the-solution/.
In 2009, Sealls won a science-reporting award: Michael Malone, “Climate Change Debate: Locally, It’s Still Often Too Hot to Handle,” Broadcasting & Cable, March 3, 2013.
In his 1615 memoir: M. John R. Loadman, Analysis of Rubber and Rubber-Like Polymers (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 6.
His exhaustive report: Ibid., 6.
But neither he nor some of the best: The Rubber Age magazine, published by U.S. Rubber Co., July 10, 1917, 310.
He ended up with elastic: Thomas Hancock, Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Manufacture in England (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1857), 3.
Hancock had a mind for mechanics: Ibid., 2.
in 1795 Glasgow had a dozen: Thomas Martin Devine, Exploring the Scottish Past: Themes in the History of Scottish Society (East Lothian, U.K.: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 111.
He began traveling to Edinburgh: George Macintosh, Biographical Memoir of Charles Macintosh, Esq., F.R.S. (Glasgow: Private printing, W. G. Blackie & Co., 1847), 2–17.
Before Macintosh turned twenty: J. A. V. Butler, “John Maclean, Charles Macintosh, and an Early Chemical Society in Glasgow,” Journal of Chemical Education, January 1942, 43.
Macintosh had secret sources: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 17.
The elder Macintosh: Ibid., 118.
Thriving on Scotland’s rain and mist: Oliver Gilbert, Lichens: Naturally Scottish (Perth: Scottish Natural Heritage, 2004), 7.
Most cudbear manufacturers: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 81–82.
In 1819, Glasgow Gas Works: Ibid., 82.
Highly flammable, naphtha put the fire in “Greek fire”: Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2003), 241.
Macintosh heated the brew: Charles Macintosh, “Specification of His Patent for Water-Proof Double Fabrics,” Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine and Annals of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1824), 405.
In 1822, he obtained patent number 4,804: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 82.
Should he fail: Ian Miller, “Macintosh Mill, Manchester,” Oxford Archaeology, http://thehumanjourney.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61&Itemid=115.
Franklin wrote back requesting: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 23.
That would turn out to be Thomas Hancock: John Loadman and Francis James, The Hancocks of Marlborough: Rubber, Art, and the Industrial Revolution: A Family of Inventive Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
In 1825, Macintosh agreed: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 50.
It was not until Hancock’s articles began outselling Macintosh’s: Charles Slack, Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 65.
In 1831, he made Hancock a partner: Mechanics Magazine, no. 656, March 5, 1836, 470.
Men and women had worn cloaks, capes, and ground-sweeping mantles: Doreen Yarwood, Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Costume (London: B. T. Batsford, 1978), 91–94.
often oiled to deflect rain: “Clark’s Umbrella,” in Discovering Lewis & Clark (Washburn, N.D.: Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, 2003), http://www.lewis-clark.org.
Some doctors were convinced: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 84.
“Complaints arising”: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 54.
Each stitch acted like a tiny straw: Ibid., 53.
In the early eighteenth century: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 70–71.
Upper-crust women: “Clark’s Umbrella,” in Discovering Lewis & Clark.
The slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 73.
Seeing one “battered and ruined”: Ibid., 83.
Connelly celebrates Jonas Hanway: Ibid., 74–75.
Crusoe describes his umbrella: Daniel Defoe, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: S. O. Beeton, 1862), 134.
He died three days later: Nick Holdsworth and Robert Mendick, “Prime Suspect in Georgi Markov ‘Umbrella Poison’ Murder Tracked Down to Austria,” The Telegraph, March 23, 2013.
The earliest artifact of an actual umbrella: Julia Meech, Rain and Snow: The Umbrella in Japanese Art (New York: Japan Society, 1993), 36–38.
In Egypt, the umbrella was associated: Ibid., 37.
The umbrella was especially significant in China: Ibid., 37–38.
Meet Mary Anderson: Clarke Stallworth, “Southern Belle Invented Wiper for Windshield,” Birmingham News, February 20, 1977.
By 1916, most vehicles: James Scoltock, “Milestones: Mary Anderson,” Automotive Engineer, December 2011, 7.
Her patent, too, expired: Arvids Linde, Preston Tucker & Others: Tales of Brilliant Automotive Innovators & Innovations (Dorchester, U.K.: Veloce Automotive Publishers, 2011), 149.
Likewise when army guards: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 55.
Charles Macintosh lived to see: Ibid.
Goodyear lost a legal battle with Hancock: Slack, Noble Obsession, 235.
a twenty-one-year-old McDonald’s advertising secretary: Jamie Fox, “A Meal Disguised as a Sandwich: The Big Mac,” 2009, collected for the Literary and Cultural Heritage Map of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Center for the Book, http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/BigMac.html.
Apple’s Jef Raskin code-named a secret computer project: Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2004), 272.
The British slang dictionary: Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2006), 29.
Their family-owned company: Robert Gore, induction, National Inventors Hall of Fame, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/1_3_0_induction_gore.asp.
After much trial and flooded-tent error: Kristin Hostetter, “Gore-Tex, the Fabric That Breathes,” Backpacker, April 1998, 70.
Companies all over the world: Ibid.
Daniel was the spoiled youngest: Author interview with Daniel Dunko, Cumbernauld, Scotland, November 19, 2014.
My tour guide was: Author interview with Willie Ross, Cumbernauld, Scotland, November 20, 2014.
As a boy, Tom Jefferson was drawn to a peak: Thomas Jefferson, “Head and Heart Letter” to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Paris.
The vista drew the boy: Thomas Jefferson, “A Memoir of the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 4 (1799), 255–56.
Year upon year: Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 41.
“How sublime to look down”: Jefferson, “Head and Heart Letter.”
Even Jefferson’s admiring biographer: Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: Jefferson the Virginian (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1948), 144.
But he ignored his Renaissance idol’s: William Howard Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 51.
More recently, ten of the thirteen original British colonies: Arthur C. Benke, Rivers of North America: The Natural History (Burlington, Mass.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 21.
When it came time to sink a well: Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1988), 156.
When the first British colonists set out across the Atlantic Ocean: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review, vol. 87, no. 5 (December 1982), 1262.
Temperatures plunged: Thomas Purvis, Colonial America to 1763 (New York: Facts on File, 1999), 1.
By Thomas Jefferson’s day: Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), chapters 6, 7, and 8, details Buffon’s theories and the responses from the New World, including Jefferson’s.
This “theory of degeneracy”: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., updated 7th edition, 1915), xiv.
Buffon’s influential books: Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist, 155.
America is “overrun with serpents, lizards”: Ibid., 160.
They debated the inaccuracies: Ibid., 192.
Jefferson invested in rain gauges: Thomas Jefferson, edited by Edwin Morris Betts, Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book: 1766–1824 (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1999), 69.
And often, they were followed by brilliant sun and the rainbows: Thomas Jefferson to William Dunbar, January 12, 1801, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
He estimated average rainfall: Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, 625. Jefferson made this analysis based on records kept by Colonel James Madison, father of the president, whose rainfall data had the advantage of being collected in the same spot year after year, as opposed to Jefferson’s dragging of gauges from Monticello to Philadelphia to Paris to the new federal city of Washington.
Modern meteorologists: Charlottesville, Virginia, Period of Record General Climate Summary—Precipitation, 1893 to 2012, Southeast Regional Climate Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In London: South East England Precipitation Averages, 1981–2010, Met Office, United Kingdom.
The architectural historian: McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 156–57.
Cisterns, ranging from the simplest clay pots: Larry Mays, George P. Antoniou, and Andreas N. Angelakis, “History of Water Cisterns: Legacies and Lessons,” Water, vol. 5, no. 4 (2013), 1923.
He spent years struggling: “Cisterns,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/cisterns.
But, contrary to the evoking: Peter J. Hatch, A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 89–90.
In the first modern treatise of architecture: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 27.
Rain can warp, swell, discolor: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994), 114.
As a general rule, the showier the house: Ibid., 115–16.
Brand found some 80 percent: Ibid., 58.
Its owner, Pittsburgh businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr.: Ibid.
On a “beautiful little ravine”: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Wright: Building for Democracy (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2004), 45.
“Dammit, Frank—it’s leaking on my desk!”: Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 372.
Despite all the hardships: Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello, 46–47.
He would marvel: Charles B. Sanford, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 72.
Two years later, he sold: Gaye Wilson, “Jefferson’s Long Look West,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Monticello, Summer 2000.
His official instructions: Thomas Jefferson, “Instructions to Lewis,” in Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, vol. 7 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1905), appendix, 249.
“One wants new words”: Walt Whitman, “Specimen Days,” The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 268.
He described the Great Plains: Major S. H. Long, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains Performed in the Years 1819, 1820, vol. III (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 236.
“The traveller who shall”: Ibid., 24.
Now a long humid cycle: John C. Hudson, Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 284; and Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, updated edition, 1993), 35–36.
Anyone willing to head west: “An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain,” Chapter 75, 12 Stat. 392 (1862, repealed 1976).
A line down the middle: J. W. Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878), 1–3.
Truth was: George Cameron Coggins, Charles F. Wilkinson, and John D. Leshy, Federal Public Land and Resources Law (New York: Foundation Press, 2002), 79.
Even in what Powell called: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 3.
“too much planning”: Donald Worster, speaking to NPR’s Howard Berkes, NPR’s Water in the West series, “The Vision of John Wesley Powell,” August 26, 2003.
“Sun rose beautiful”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Thomas, October 1–2, 1866, Nebraska State Historical Society.
“Is it raining”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger, September 29, 1872, Nebraska State Historical Society.
When the conquistador: Jane Braxton Little, “Saving the Ogallala Aquifer,” Scientific American, Special Edition, vol. 19, no. 1 (March 2009), 32–39.
“It seems this desert”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, February 9, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
Aughey reported on several “facts of nature”: John Francis Freeman, High Plains Horticulture: A History (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), 26.
But, as long as they were blessed: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, April 13–18, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
Several ranchers died: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (New York: Random House, 2008), 176.
Never known was the death toll: Addison E. Shelton, ed., “The April Blizzard, 1873,” Journal of Nebraska History and Record of Pioneer Days, vol. III, no. 3 (July–September 1920), 1–2.
It was thought to come: Jordan Almond, Dictionary of Word Origins: A History of the Words, Expressions and Clichés We Use (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), 37–38.
At the Omaha Republican: Shelton, ed., “The April Blizzard, 1873,” 1.
Sam “seems some”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, April 13–18, 1873.
It wasn’t the novelty: Mattie V. Oblinger to Thomas family, May 19, 1873; and Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and Wheeler Thomas Family, June 16, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
“It seems as though we are destined”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, February 9, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
The financier Jay Gould: Clark C. Spence, The Rainmakers: American “Pluviculture” to World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 6.
“I feel that it is not possible”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Thomas Family, September 26, 1880.
Between 1888 and 1892: Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 340.
“The farmers helpless”: Stephen Crane, Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1984), 689.
There, the river finishes: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, “The Mississippi River Basin,” http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/Missions/MississippiRiverFloodControl/MississippiRiverTributaries/MississippiDrainageBasin.aspx.
For millennia, the Mississippi: Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 36–37, 138.
“Without floods”: Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 37.
In the sixteenth century: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 140.
Native people: Ibid., 62.
When French settlers floated down: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 34.
Twelve feet of water: Ibid., 38–39.
The environmental historian Worster: Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 1992), 20.
Ten years later: Susan Scott Parrish, “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927,” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 35.
He uttered the words: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 67.
“When it rains, it pours”: “Morton Salt: When It Rains, It Pours,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012.
Yet another was close: John M. Barry, “After the Deluge,” Smithsonian, November 2005.
Gauge readings: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 2007, 2.
each greater than any seen in the preceding ten years: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
New Orleans broke records: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 67.
floodwaters rose phenomenally: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 156.
“These heights changed the equations”: John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 40.
Thousands of men worked desperately: Ibid., 202–3.
“Refugees coming into Jackson”: Ibid., 202.
The dynamiting left scars: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 6.
Some 637,000 peopl: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 159.
The river and its tributaries: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
Barry wrote that the government: Ibid.
mud-caked and barren: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 7.
“The removal of forests”: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 76.
“It’s a man-made disaster”: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
Jeffersonian dream of land-based democracy: Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11, 47.
In 1925, Ford Motor Company’s: “Ford Makes 500,000 Tractors,” Engineering News-Record, vol. 94 (1925), 1078.
Along the Mississippi River: Worster, Dust Bowl, 11.
The Dakotas became as arid as the Sonoran Desert: Ibid., 12.
Two summers later: Ibid.
Grasshoppers swarmed: Ibid.
The winds that nearly blew Uriah: Ibid., 15.
With neither the prairie grass: Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), 10.
“We watched that thing”: Interview with J. R. Davison, “Surviving the Dust Bowl,” American Experience, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interview/dustbowl-witness-jr-davison/.
Ships three hundred miles: Worster, Dust Bowl, 13–14.
Midafternoon, the warm air: Ibid., 18.
“It got so black”: Alan Lomax interview with Woody Guthrie, March 21, 1940, record at American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, transcribed at http://soundportraits.org/on-air/woody_guthrie/transcript.php.
Those hardest hit: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 157.
“People, since its raining”: “Blind” Lemon Jefferson, “Rising High Water Blues,” 1927.
“We had no rain”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Charlie Thomas, October 27, 1896, Nebraska State Historical Society.
He had sent ahead a freight car: Robert St. George Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent of the Department of Agriculture for Making Experiments in the Production of Rainfall,” U.S. Senate, 52nd Congress, First Session, 1891–1892, 5–13.
Dyrenforth, his odd freight: James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 66.
Sporting the pith helmets: Photograph III, “The Party,” in Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 18.
Also on this first line: Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 13.
Without enough men: Ibid., 14.
“The delight, nay, enthusiasm”: John Seelye, “ ‘Rational Exultation’: The Erie Canal Celebration,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 94, no. 2 (October 1984), 259.
When the men at the second cannon: Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1792–1854 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 185.
The smallest villages were determined: Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 313.
Clutching the end: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 56–57.
From the time of Plutarch: Spence, The Rainmakers, 22.
By the eighteenth century: Ibid., 24.
In 1842, the U.S. government had hired its first: Ibid., 10.
A long curtain of showers: William B. Meyer, Americans and Their Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 86.
The idea especially alarmed: Ibid., 87.
“He might enshroud us in continual clouds”: Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, quoted in Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 55.
“I would not trust such a power to this Congress”: Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, quoted in Meyer, Americans and Their Weather, 88.
The only redeeming influence: Spence, The Rainmakers, 7.
John Wesley Powell said as much: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 74–75.
The first champion of the theory: Spence, The Rainmakers, 24.
J. C. Lewis “took note”: J. C. Lewis, “Rain Following the Discharge of Ordnance,” American Journal of Science and Arts, vol. 32 (November 1861), 296.
“The discharge of heavy artillery”: Ibid.
Fighting in the godforsaken mud: Spence, The Rainmakers, 24.
“This fact was well noticed”: Edward Powers, War and the Weather, or, the Artificial Production of Rain (Chicago, 1871; Wisconsin: Delavan, 1890), 152.
two hundred siege guns: Powers, War and the Weather, 200.
The war had been fought: Spence, The Rainmakers, 29.
In 1890, Charles Benjamin Farwell: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 64.
The chief of the division: Donald Grebner, Pete Bettinger, and Jacek Siry, Introduction to Forestry and Natural Resources (London: Academic Press, 2013), 410.
He complained that he had neither men nor means: Spence, The Rainmakers, 29.
The agent was Robert St. George Dyrenforth: Ibid., 30.
“A patent lawyer”: Ibid., 30–31.
“They Made Rain”: Ibid., 33–34.
When the real experiments began: Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 19.
Still, Dyrenforth reported dark clouds: Ibid.
The farm journalists sometimes witnessed: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 67, 69.
Instead, they repeated the hype: Spence, The Rainmakers, 34.
“more than one Congressman”: Ibid., 35.
The following year, Congress again ignored: Ibid., 41.
The nocturnal explosions rained: Clark C. Spence, “The Dyrenforth Rainmaking Experiments: A Government Venture in Pluviculture,” Arizona and the West, vol. 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1961), 227.
“The scheme”: Ibid., 228.
When he wrote to U.S. agriculture secretary: Ibid., 229.
That left people particularly vulnerable: Spence, The Rainmakers, 39–40.
Working in explosives: Louise Pound, “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making, California Folklore Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2 (April 1946), 135.
On a hot July day: Ibid.
He claimed he’d been forced: Spence, The Rainmakers, 52.
He took bets: Ibid., 53.
Melbourne began to charge $500: Pound, “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making,” 137.
He toted it: Spence, The Rainmakers, 55–56.
In Canton: Ibid., 53.
“Melbourne Causes the Rain to Fall”: Ibid., 60.
Police ruled it a suicide: Ibid., 62.
After Melbourne left Goodland: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 86–87.
By 1902, he was dabbling: Spence, The Rainmakers, 80–81.
He got into professional rainmaking: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 90.
“I simply attract clouds”: Nick D’Alto, “The Rainmakers,” Weatherwise, vol. 53, no. 5 (September/October 2000), 26–33.
“When it comes to my knowledge”: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 90.
He was soon credited: D’Alto, “The Rainmakers,” 26–33.
Hatfield worked like a madman: Ibid.
In Hatfield’s home: Ibid.
If Morena topped its banks: Spence, The Rainmakers, 90–91.
On January 27 the Lower Otay Dam burst: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 94. 170 The disaster became known as “Hatfield’s Flood”: Spence, The Rainmakers, 91.
The city lawyers: Ibid., 92.
“He was anxious to explain”: “Italy Engages Rainmaker,” New York Times, August 22, 1922, 6.
He made a trip to Honduras: Spence, The Rainmakers, 96.
When the spectacle was over: Ibid., 94–95.
Hatfield’s fans urged: Ibid., 98.
The headline in the Washington Post: “Charles Hatfield, The Rainmaker, Dies in Obscurity,” Washington Post, April 16, 1958, C2.
When the ag secretary Jeremiah Rusk: Jeremiah McLain Rusk, “The Future of American Agriculture,” in Albert Shaw, ed., The Review of Reviews, February 1893, 331.
Wright had been a key: Peter L. Jakab, “Aerospace in Adolescence: McCook Field and the Beginnings of Modern Flight Research,” in Peter Galison and Alex Roland, eds., Proceedings of the Evolution of Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, April 4–5, 1997.
“The cloud began to fade away”: Manus McFadden, “Is Rainmaking Riddle Solved?” Popular Science Monthly, May 1923, 29.
Grandson of the well-known historian: John W. Servos, Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 159.
Bancroft had a particular: Wilder Dwight Bancroft, Applied Colloid Chemistry (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1921), 2.
He pondered the mechanics of raindrops: Ibid., 283–86.
It is not clear how: Spence, The Rainmakers, 104.
Infused with sand: Ibid.
He wrote to Warren: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 113.
The sand shot out: L. Francis Warren, “Facts and Plans: Rainmaking—Fogs and Radiant Planes,” January 2, 1928.
The head of McCook Field: “Expect to Spend $10,000,000 for New Buildings on Big Air Site,” Dayton Daily News, October 29, 1922, 11.
Warren and Bancroft might have cashed in: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 116.
“The idea of the college professor”: Ibid.
“No use arguing”: “Rainmaking Plans Attacked as Futile,” New York Times, March 22, 1923, 10.
While the electrified sand: Spence, The Rainmakers, 114–15.
With little to show: Ibid., 114.
They hauled the portable dynamometer: Jakab, “Aerospace in Adolescence.”
This included aircraft icing: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 139.
Langmuir and Schaefer decided: Earrington S. Havens, “History of Project Cirrus,” General Electric Report No. RL-756, July 1952, 3–5.
It turns out that supercooled: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 143.
When Schaefer shared his discovery: Ibid.
Langmuir, fifty miles away: Ibid., 146–47.
GE lost no time in asking the military: Ibid., 147.
The New York Times crowed: “Three-Mile Cloud Made into Snow by Dry Ice Dropped from Plane,” New York Times, November 15, 1946, 24.
Letters, telegrams, and postcards: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 148.
Vonnegut experimented: Ibid., 154.
GE employees were: Havens, “History of Project Cirrus,” 13.
“No chemist, physicist, or mathematician”: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 156.
Ten years later, an advisory committee: Dianne Dumanoski, The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 136.
The idea was to flood out roads: Clyde Edward Wood, Mud: A Military History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 46.
Operating out of Udorn Royal Air Base: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 180.
In 1972, Seymour Hersh: Seymour M. Hersh, “Rainmaking Is Used as Weapon by U.S.,” New York Times, July 3, 1972, 1.
At congressional hearings: Peter Braestrup, “Witness Silent on Rain War,” Washington Post, July 27, 1972, A-21.
The years of drought and storm: Marquis Childs, “Making War with the Weather,” Washington Post, July 13, 1976, A-19.
Project Popeye’s final report: Wood, Mud, 47.
State water scientists in Utah: Utah Division of Water Resources, “Cloud Seeding,” pamphlet, March 2003.
“There is still no convincing scientific proof”: National Research Council, Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 3.
China spends by far the most: Xinhua Chinese News Agency, “Better Tech to Boost Weather Manipulation,” May 23, 2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2012-05/23/c_131605614.htm.
Roelof Bruintjes, lead scientist for weather modification: Author interview with Roelof Bruintjes, National Center for Atmospheric Research, April 30, 2014.
Miamians rowed: Jay Barnes, Florida’s Hurricane History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 175–76.
The GE and military scientists: “Destroying a Hurricane,” New York Times, September 10, 1947, 26.
He described a “pronounced modification”: Irving Langmuir, The Collected Works of Irving Langmuir (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1960), 172–73.
“Savannah early this morning”: “1947 October 15: Hurricane Hits Savannah,” Savannah Morning News, August 8, 2010.
The federal government’s chief hurricane forecaster: Jack Williams and Bob Sheets, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 161.
Soon after the fateful hurricane: General Electric Company, General Electric Review, vol. 55 (1952), 26.
Hurricane scientists were dismayed: Williams and Sheets, Hurricane Watch, 162.
The quote was a flourish: “Postal Service Mission and ‘Motto,’ ” U.S. Postal Service, postal history, http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/mission-motto.pdf.
In 2009, the billionaire Microsoft founder: “The Latest on Hurricane Suppression,” Intellectual Ventures, IV Insights Blog, October 30, 2012, http://www.intellectualventures.com/insights/archives/the-latest-on-hurricane-suppression.
His primary school was a “bleak mausoleum”: Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 8.
A young visitor, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Hamburg, Germany: Tredition Classics, 1845).
It was Marr who came: Johnny Marr, personal biographical sketch, http://www.johnny-marr.com/about.
“a vast company that loves misery”: Michael Azerrad, “Book Review: ‘Autobiography’ by Morrissey,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2013.
Marr said that the band’s: Johnny Marr, “The Smiths Make Their Top of the Pops Debut,” Guardian, June 13, 2011.
Their 1984 hit: “500 Greatest Songs of all Time,” Rolling Stone, April 7, 2011.
“Teenage depression”: Tom Cardy, “He’s Not Miserable Now,” Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand), December 14, 2012.
“His composition that evening was full of raindrops”: Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 212.
The Manchester-born music journalist: Nabeel Zuburi, “ ‘The Last Truly British People You Will Ever Know’: Skinheads, Pakis, and Morrissey,” in Henry Jenkins III, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 541.
The Doors used those sorts of sound effects, Stephen K. Valdez, A History of Rock Music (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 2006), 318.
But the song’s well-known rain solo: Jon Pareles, “Harold Rhodes, 89, Inventor of an Electric Piano,” obituary, New York Times, January 4, 2001.
The area consistently suffers: Jim Vleming, “Grays Harbor County Profile,” Washington State Employment Security Department, July 2012, https://fortress.wa.gov/esd/employmentdata/reports-publications/regional-reports/county-profiles/grays-harbor-county-profile.
Some ascribe the rise of Cobain: Pete Prown and Harvey P. Newquist, Legends of Rock Guitar: The Essential Reference of Rock’s Greatest Guitarists (Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard, 1997), 242–43.
Anthologies seem to have no end: See the “Rain” entry in Tessa Kale, ed., The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 13th edition, 2007), 2126–27.
“It’s a sorrowful morning”: Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, February 1852, in Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 177.
Dickinson considered rain: “Everything is so still here, and the clouds are cold and gray—I think it will rain soon—Oh I am so lonely!” she writes to her brother in 1851. Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, October 25, 1851, in ibid., 150.
“We are a rather crestfallen company”: Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, June 8, 1851, in ibid., 110–12.
In other letters, Dickinson describes her horror: Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, October 5, 1851, in ibid., 140.
Dickinson’s dark days: Christopher H. Ramey and Robert W. Weisberg, “The ‘Poetical Activity’ of Emily Dickinson: A Further Test of the Hypothesis That Affective Disorders Foster Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 16, nos. 2 & 3 (April 1, 2004), 173–85.
In fiction, rain gives a sense: Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (London: Harmsworth Library, 1905), 681.
Louisa was sure: Bernard N. Schilling, The Rain of Years: Great Expectations and the World of Dickens (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 21.
In The Old Curiosity Shop: Ibid., 22.
Snowy London winters: Bill McGuire, Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53.
Lord Byron suggested: Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 107.
The Earth, and he, were grateful: Walter Raymond, The Book of Simple Delights (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906), 129.
Hardy, putting hangman: Thomas Hardy, “The Three Strangers,” in Wessex Tales (London: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 35–61; and Thomas Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor (New York: Harper, 2003), 76.
None worked as perfectly: Harold Bloom, ed., Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (New York: Infobase Publishing), 26.
“The fiery exultation”: Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker (Boston: Harcourt/Harvest Paperbacks, 1978; orig. pub. 1961), 239.
The counterpoint to rain as cleanser: Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 77.
The sight of herself sullied: Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 312–16.
“At the calendar’s gloaming”: Timothy Egan, “The Longest Nights,” New York Times, January 10, 2013.
It is said that one in ten: Rosie Goldsmith, “Iceland: Where One in 10 People Will Publish a Book,” BBC News, October 13, 2013.
In his four-part “Gifts of Rain”: Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 3, 85.
Rain, gray skies, and lightning: S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 193.
“I mean, it wasn’t always as stormy”: Woody Allen, Radio Days (Orion Pictures, January 1987).
“is for me an aphrodisiac”: Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109.
The final, rain-kiss scene: McKim, Cinema as Weather, 95.
“People are confined”: Woody Allen and Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen (New York: Grove Press, revised edition, 2005), 186.
The unconvincing line: Alasdair Glennie, “Andie MacDowell Defends THAT Four Weddings Line,” Daily Mail, March 29, 2013.
To conjure a tempest: Alexander Pope, No. 78, June 10, 1713, in The Works of Alexander Pope, with Notes and Illustrations by Himself and Others, vol. 5 (London: Longman, Brown, and Co., etc., 1847 edition), 440–41.
Charles Schulz’s Snoopy: Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 74.
“the rain fell in torrents”: Edward Lytton Bulwer, “Paul Clifford,” in The Works of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Esq., in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1836), 523.
“Wild piles of dark and coppery clouds”: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The American Claimant (The Gutenberg Project, 2006, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3179/3179-h/3179-h.htm), originally published 1892.
“We all need rain”: Paul A. Woods, Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews (Medford, N.J.: Plexus, 2007), 156. The emphasis is added.
As the millennium turned: Marilyn Ann Moss, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 178. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard bought their Encino estate from the director Raoul Walsh. It was on Petit Street, but they changed the name to Tara Drive.
He rented a little guest house: Budd Schulberg, “Remembering Scott,” in Jackson Bryer, Alan Margolies and Ruth Prigozy, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 11–12. Scott rented the Encino guest cottage of Edward Everett Horton.
The estate lies just south of Ventura: 4543 Tara Drive, Encino, California, 91436. Lynn Barber, “The Man with the Thorn in His Side,” Observer, September 14, 2002. This was where Morrissey was living in 2002, when Lynn Barber of The Observer asked him about his estate, and whether he really lived next door to Johnny Depp. Morrissey corrected her: “No—he lives next door to me.”
While color and song eventually returned: Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), 113.
A seven-spouted silver hydra: Ibid., 124–25.
“Smell,” wrote Helen Keller: Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904), 66.
“My little friends and I”: Ibid., 67–68.
Geosmin is the bane: Mark Waer, Leland Harms, Rick Bond, and Nicholas Burns, “A Matter of Taste: How to Control the Odor and Flavor of Water Before Residents Raise a Stink,” American City & County, June 1, 2003, 16–24.
In the desert Southwest: Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’Odham Country (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 5–6. Nabhan once asked a Papago Indian boy to describe what the desert smelled like to him. “The desert smells like rain,” he replied. How could that be, Nabhan wanted to know, when it hardly ever rains there? It turns out that his question had triggered in the child the strong memory of a scent. When the boy pondered the smell of the desert, he remembered feeling overtaken by the odor of creosote bushes after a storm—their aromatic oils released by the rains. The scent and the memory attached to it were so strong that they became, for him, the desert’s essence.
“Clean but funky”: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Scribner, 2000; orig. pub. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 69.
To Sanjiv Chopra: Deepak Chopra and Sanjiv Chopra, Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream (Seattle: Amazon Publishing, 2013), 23.
At fifty-three, he wrote of how: Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo, The Dictionary of the Work of W. R. Bion (London: H. Harnac, 2003), 2–3.
The scent can so tantalize: I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” Nature, vol. 201, no. 4923 (March 7, 1964), 993–95.
A leading Aussie poet: Les A. Murray, “February: Feb,” from Les Murray Selected Poems (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007), 108.
Using steam distillation: Bear and Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” 993–95.
Just like perfume: “Petrichor: Rain’s Piquant Perfume,” Ecos, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, February 1976, 32.
Ultimately, Bear and Thomas linked: I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, “Genesis of Petrichor,” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 30, no. 9 (September 1966), 869–79.
They help form the blue haze: William Alyn Johnson, Invitation to Organic Chemistry (Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1999), 261–62.
The aroma is: Bear and Thomas, “Genesis of Petrichor,” 869–79.
They called it “petrichor”: Bear and Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” 993–95.
Despite geosmin and ozone: Author interview with Heather Sims, head perfumer, Arylessence, August 22, 2013.
Many of these are behind the most famous perfumes: Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 52–53.
Chanel was said to abhor: Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (New York: Viking, 2011), 185.
Beaux said he chose: William Lidwell and Gerry Manasca, Deconstructing Product Design: Exploring the Form, Function, Usability, Sustainability, and Commercial Success of 100 Amazing Products (Minneapolis: Rockport Publishers, 2011), 130.
South Florida’s water supply: Elizabeth D. Purdum, “Florida Waters,” Institute of Science and Public Affairs, Florida State University, April 2002.
It happened that California was searing: “The 1976–1977 California Drought: A Review,” California Department of Water Resources, May 1978.
Historians have variously described: See eminent historians of both California and Florida who have written histories with the title Land of Sunshine: William Deverell and Greg Hise’s Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); and Gary Mormino’s Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).
In the nineteenth, flood-weary Mexicans: Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 14–15
In L.A. alone: Kevin Roderick, “Deadly Flood of 1938 Left Its Mark on Southland,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1999.
grizzly bears lumbered down from the hills…sewage-treatment plants upstream: Roderick, “Deadly Flood of 1938”; and Peter J. Westwick and Peter Neushul, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2013), 173–74.
An estimated 85 percent of Los Angeles: Author interview with Hadley Arnold, March 31, 2014.
Elaborate charts: California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, “Safe Eating Guidelines for Fish from Coastal Areas of Southern California: Ventura Harbor to San Mateo Point,” http://oehha.ca.gov/fish/so_cal/socal061709.html.
“The water will have”: Ian Lovett, “Slaking a Region’s Thirst While Cleaning Its Beaches,” New York Times, April 7, 2013.
The late writer and Everglades champion: Jack E. Davis, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 522.
devastating, ruining, havoc-wreaking rains: Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 223.
After the 1947 wet season: Ibid., 221.
As with the Los Angeles River: Cynthia Barnett, Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 29.
When I visited the Miami: Author interview with Virginia Walsh, Senior Professional Geologist, Chief Hydrogeology Section, Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department, May 28, 2014.
Scientists say Miami: Southeast Regional Climate Change Compact, “A Unified Sea Level Rise Projection for Southeast Florida,” April 2011, iv.
The water may not wash over flood gates as we imagine: Coral Davenport, “Rising Seas,” New York Times, March 27, 2014.
This rain runoff: State of Washington, Puget Sound Partnership, www.psp.wa.gov.
But the greatest tragedy: Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 18.
Fleming died: Staff, “Seattle Audio-book ‘Star’ Among Four Dead in Storm,” Seattle Times, December 15, 2006.
Seattle is at the forefront: Office of the City Clerk, Executive Order: 2013-01 Citywide Green Stormwater Infrastructure Goal & Implementation Strategy, March 6, 2013.
The first green street: Seattle Public Utilities, Green Stormwater, Street Edge Alternatives, http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/DrainageSewer/Projects/GreenStormwaterInfrastructure/CompletedGSIProjects/StreetEdgeAlternatives/index.htm.
“Be a light”: Denise Whitaker, “Storm Water Pond Dedicated in Memory of Woman Who Drowned,” KOMO News, May 22, 2013, http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Storm-water-pond-dedicated-in-memory-of-woman-who-drowned-in-basement-208538021.html.
In spring 2014: Ed Fletcher, “Folsom Lake’s Decline Exposes Gold Rush History,” Sacramento Bee, December 31, 2013.
Governor Jerry Brown: Carla Marinucci, “Gov. Jerry Brown Sails into History Books,” SFGate, September 29, 2013.
During a rare deluge: “With Rain in the Forecast, LADWP Urges Customers to Turn Off Sprinklers and Save Water,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, February 25, 2014.
Angelenos use far less: Paul Rogers and Nicholas St. Fleur, “California Drought: Database Shows Big Difference Between Water Guzzlers and Sippers,” San Jose Mercury News, February 7, 2014.
Hundreds of acres: Stephanie Pincetl and Tim Papandreou, “Los Angeles, the Improbable Sustainable City,” California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, sustainablecommunities.environment.ucla.edu/2011/09/los-angeles-the-improbable-sustainable-city/.
Bolstered by a cadre of young conservation-design gurus: See the nonprofit Watershed Management Group, watershedmg.org.
If we do not lower the carbon emissions that are warming the Earth: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Impacts in the Southwest,” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/southwest.html.
The city has launched an ambitious retrofit: Author interview with Mark Hanna, September 29, 2014; and City of Los Angeles Stormwater Program, “LADWP Announces Stormwater Capture Master Plan,” March 28, 2014.
“The work on the river”: Author interview with Hadley Arnold, Executive Director, Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University, March 31, 2014.
“were afraid to move in case we trod on them”: Anecdote based on firstperson accounts recorded by Paul Simons, “Raining Frogs and Monsters: Tornado-like Waterspouts May Explain Showers of Fish and Snails and Other Strange Downpours. But Do They Hold a Clue to the Mystery of Nessie?” The Guardian, November 11, 1993; Michael Allaby, Tornadoes (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 113; and Bob Rickard and John Michell, The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena (New York: Penguin, 2007), 25.
When the rain let up: David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace, The New Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information (New York: Canongate, 2005), 566.
“In Paeonia and Dardania, it has, they say, before now rained frogs”: Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus, vol. 2 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 526–27, full text accessed via University of Wisconsin digital library, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?id=Literature.AthV2.
In 1946, the professional skeptic: Bergen Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 25; and Jerry Dennis, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of the Sky (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 47.
Reports of frog rain continue: Liwei Fu, “Strange Storms: Frogs, Spiders and Fish,” Epoch Times, story updated January 6, 2011, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/strange-storms-frogs-fish-insects-from-skies-6468.html.
In 2010, hapless frogs fell: Kathryn Quinn, “Raining Frogs,” Romanian Times, June 22, 2010.
The same year, frogs and fish: Cosmas Butunyi, “Kenya: Experts Warn of More ‘Fish and Frogs’ Rain,” The Nation, October 5, 2010.
“I have personally never been so fortunate”: E. W. Gudger, “Do Fishes Fall from the Sky?” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 29, no. 6 (December 1929), 526.
The sky rained mud: Joe Hasler, “Weird Stories of Objects Falling from the Sky—Explained,” Popular Mechanics, September 17, 2009.
Australian scientists have some of the best: Peter J. Unmack, “Biogeography of Australian Freshwater Fishes,” Journal of Biogeography, vol. 28, no. 9 (September 1, 2001), 1065.
A tornado reported: Chris Dolce, “Where Frogs, Fish and a Cow Fell from the Sky,” Weather.com, August 23, 2013, http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-central/frogs-fish-raining-down-20130411?pageno=2.
The strange rain of Labor Day 1969: “Charlotte Rains Golf Balls,” St. Petersburg Times, September 3, 1969.
Popular Mechanics magazine speculated: Hasler, “Weird Stories of Objects Falling from the Sky—Explained.”
Those included frog and fish falls: Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort (New York: Penguin, 2008; orig. pub. 1919), 29.
Perhaps there was an invisible: Ibid., 90.
Many of Fort’s pet phenomena: John S. Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 15.
The biologist and bee expert: Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 59.
He later worked with the Harvard chemical-weapons expert: Tomas D. Seeley et al., “Yellow Rain,” Scientific American, vol. 253, issue 3 (September 1985), 128–37.
Other scientists and former CIA agents: Paul Hillmer, A People’s History of the Hmong (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), section 5.
Fort could have told them: Fort, The Book of the Damned, 63.
“My own impositivist acceptances”: Ibid., 36–37.
Louis and Kumar hypothesized: Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar, “The Red Rain Phenomenon of Kerala and Its Possible Extraterrestrial Origin,” Astrophysics and Space Science, vol. 302, no. 1 (April 2006), 175–87.
When exposed to the extreme heat: Rajkumar Gangappa, Milton Wainwright, A. Santhosh Kumar, and Godfrey Louis, “Growth and Replication of Red Rain Cells at 121°C and Their Red Fluorescence,” Conference Proceedings, vol. 7819, Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology XIII, September 2010.
Some children wandering: Chares Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010), 29.
It would take survivors years: Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 3.
It was some of the first proof: Ranjeet S. Sokhi, ed., World Atlas of Atmospheric Pollution (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 16.
Given the exact same amount of water vapor: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 134–35.
In the countryside, he wrote: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, quoted in Peter Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952,” in Erna Melanie DuPuis, ed., Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 155.
When a pea-souper claimed 1,150 lives: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 462.
People, press, and politicians: Peter Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952” in DuPuis, Smoke and Mirrors, 158.
Ultimately, the Great Fog killed 12,000 people: Christopher Stevens, “The Pea Souper That Killed 12,000: How the Great Smog Choked London 60 Years Ago This Week,” Daily Mail, December 5, 2012.
Facing intense public pressure: Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952” in DuPuis, Smoke and Mirrors, 160.
Not until the Clean Air Act: American Meteorological Society, “A Look at U.S. Air Pollution Laws and Their Amendments: 1955, 1963, 1970, 1990,” http://www.ametsoc.org/sloan/cleanair/cleanairlegisl.html.
Engineers at the Metropolitan Transit Authority: P. Aarne Vesilind and Thomas D. DiStefano, Controlling Environmental Pollution: An Introduction to the Technologies, History, and Ethics (Lancaster, Pa.: DEStech Publications, 2006), 335.
Black rains and black snow: R. D. Gupta, Environmental Pollution: Hazards and Control (New Delhi, India: Concept Publishing Company, 2006), 23–24.
Residents reported that the rains: Fu Jianfeng, “The Black Rain in Shenzhen,” East-South-West-North, August 24, 2007, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20070826_1.htm.
For nearly a century: Chris C. Park, Acid Rain: Rhetoric and Reality (Oxford: Methuen and Co., 1987; citation is to the U.S. edition, New York: Routledge, 2013), 6.
In the 1960s, they began to reveal themselves in Germany’s Black Forest: Ibid., 100–101.
Some streams: Christine Alewell et al., “Are There Signs of Acidification Reversal in Freshwaters of the Low Mountain Ranges in Germany?” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3 (2001), 368.
These drops, in turn: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 483.
The sickest areas: Park, Acid Rain, 3.
In the 1960s, American scientists sampling rainfall: Gene E. Likens and F. Herbert Bormann, “Acid Rain: A Serious Regional Environmental Problem,” Science, June 14, 1974, 1176–79.
In an article in the journal Science: Ibid.
They sounded the alarm: Ibid.
Today it’s well under 8.9 million: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Acid Rain and Related Programs: 15 Years of Results 1995 to 2009,” October 2010.
In places most prone: Meg Marquardt, “Neutralizing the Rain: After Much Success in the Battle Against Acid Rain, Challenges Remain,” Earth, June 2012.
Foresters believe: Charles Driscoll et al., “Acid Rain Revisited: Advances in Scientific Understanding Since the Passage of the 1970 and 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments,” Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, 2001.
Lakes are healing: Kristin Waller et al., “Long-term Recovery of Lakes in the Adirondack Region of New York to Decreases in Acidic Deposition,” Atmospheric Environment, vol. 46 (January 2012), 56–64.
Back at the Hubbard Brook: Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, Acid Precipitation Trends, www.hubbardbrook.org.
Scientists who track contaminants in the atmosphere: National Atmospheric Deposition Program, http://.nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/.
The largest premodern statue: Christina Larson, “China Takes First Steps in the Fight Against Acid Rain,” Yale Environment 360, October 28, 2010.
At the turn of the century, China surpassed the United States: Zifeng Lu et al., “Sulfur Dioxide and Primary Carbonaceous Aerosol Emissions in China and India, 1996–2010,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 11, September 2011, 9848.
In South Florida, studies have shown the massive drainage: Curtis H. Marshall, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Louis T. Steyaert, and Debra A. Willard, “The Impact of Anthropogenic Land-Cover Change on the Florida Peninsula Sea Breezes and Warm Season Weather,” Monthly Weather Review, vol. 132 (January 2004), 51.
At the other extreme: Matt McGrath, “Reservoirs Make Local Flooding Worse, Says Study,” BBC News, December 14, 2012.
“As we change”: Dr. Jerad Bales, U.S. Geological Survey, “Water, Energy, and Food Production: Observing, Understanding, Forecasting,” University of Florida Water Institute Symposium, remarks and Q&A, February 11, 2014.
Scientists analyzing precipitation: Robert K. Kaufmann, Karen C. Seto, Annemarie Schneider, Zouting Liu, Liming Zhou, and Weile Wang, “Climate Response to Rapid Urban Growth: Evidence of a Human-Induced Precipitation Deficit,” Journal of Climate, vol. 20, May 15, 2007, 2299–306.
In the United States: J. Marshall Shepherd, Harold Pierce, and Andrew J. Negri, “Rainfall Modification by Major Urban Areas: Observations from Spaceborne Rain Radar on the TRMM Satellite,” Journal of Applied Meteorology, vol. 41 (July 2002), 689–701.
Skyscrapers can have: Author interview with Bob Bornstein, San Jose State University Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, July 29, 2014.
how the emissions we send: Global Carbon Project, Carbon Budget 2014, http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/.
“believed in ‘Megonia’”: Steven Gaydos, “Fort, ‘Wild Talents’ Were Major Influences on Anderson,” Variety, February 7, 2000.
Because they require both land and aquatic habitat: Kerry Kriger, “Save the Frogs!” http://www.savethefrogs.com/why-frogs/index.html.
After the nuptials: Naresh Mitra, “Croaking Consorts in Rain Call,” Times of India, April 10, 2013.
Among the Zuni: Ann Marshall, Rain: Native Expressions from the American Southwest (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2000), 69.
Nineteenth-century science journals: David P. Badger, Frogs (Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, 1995), 23.
Frogs have a “barometric propensity”: Book review of St. George Mivart’s The Common Frog (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), Quarterly Journal of Science and Annals of Metallurgy, Engineering, Industrial Arts, Manufactures, and Technology, vol. 5 (January 1875), 99.
In Louisiana, the Creole people: Lafcadio Hearn, “Gombo Zhèbes”: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, Selected from Six Creole Dialects (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 22.
The weatherwise chorus: Badger, Frogs, 72.
Those that lay their eggs: Archie Carr, A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 183.
Nearly two hundred frog species have vanished: David B. Wake and Vance T. Vrendenburg, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, colloquium paper, vol. 105, issue supp. 1, 11466.
Tzilkowski and Hixson: Colleen O’Connor, “Massive Dust Storms Hit Southeast Colorado, Evoking ‘Dirty Thirties,’ ” Denver Post, June 9, 2013.
Similar dust storms: “Despite Fall Floods, Drought Persists in Southeastern Colorado,” NOAA, February 18, 2014.
The tumbleweeds have to be pushed: Garrison Wells, “Colorado Tumbleweeds Explosion Creating Hazards and Headaches for Many,” The Gazette, February 23, 2014.
In the largest airlift since Hurricane Katrina: Jason Samenow, “Colorado’s ‘Biblical’ Flood by the Numbers,” Washington Post, September 16, 2013.
The Boulder area broke every rainfall record on its books: Charlie Brennan, “Forum: Colorado Flood Not ‘The Big One,’ but Still an Event for the History Books,” Daily Camera, February 27, 2014.
A thunderstorm lifting: “Colorado Remembers Big Thomson Canyon Flash Flood of 1976,” NOAA, July 30, 2001.
A stationary low-pressure system: “Severe Flooding on the Colorado Front Range: A Preliminary Assessment,” CIRES Western Water Assessment, University of Colorado, September 2013.
“Rainfall and other weather events”: Martin P. Hoerling, “Climate Change and Extreme Weather: Recent Events and Future Forecasts,” Ohio State University Climate Change Webinar, April 24, 2014.
The scientists predict greater intensity and frequency: Working Group 1, contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers,” 5.
As the world consumes: NASA Earth Observatory, “How Much More Will Earth Warm?” Global Warming, 5, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page5.php.
Some of them, including James Hansen: James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), 225–26.
Along the beaches: Claire Marshall, “Storms and Floods Unearth Unexploded Wartime Bombs,” BBC News, February 28, 2014.
The problem for climate scientists: Thomas C. Peterson, Martin P. Hoerling, Peter A. Stott, and Stephanie C. Herring, “Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 94, no. 9 (September 2013), 1.
What constitutes a rainy day?: G. J. Symons, British Rainfall 1866: On the Distribution of Rain over the British Isles During the Year 1866, as Observed at Above 1000 Stations in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Edward Stanford, 1867), 4.
Or he’d go on a tear: Ibid., 5.
“As well as looking forward”: Author interview with Mark McCarthy, the Met, Exeter, U.K., November 21, 2013.
At Slate: Charlie Warzel, “The Search for the Internet’s Next Top Weather Nerd,” BuzzFeed, February 5, 2014.
“My wife and I realized”: Eric Holthaus, “Why I’m Never Flying Again,” Quartz, October 1, 2013.
“What can all this be?”: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 7.
Every major: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Consensus: 97% of Climate Scientists Agree,” Global Climate Change website, http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus.
will come to be seen like the vulture ship-salvagers: Malcolm Walker, History of the Meteorological Office (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvii.
Given its initial championing: Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins, “The S02 Allowance Trading System: The Ironic History of a Grand Policy Experiment,” MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, August 2012.
“The arrogance of people”: Senator James M. Inhofe, interview, “Crosstalk,” Voice of Christian Youth America, March 7, 2013.
The oil and gas industry: Senator James M. Inhofe, career donations, Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.Org, federal campaign contributions through March 10, 2014. The exact number is $1,587,596.
Other evangelical Christians: N. Smith and A. Leiserowitz, “American Evangelicals and Global Warming,” Global Environmental Change, vol. 23, no. 5 (October 2013), 1009–17.
“It’s the poor”: Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, statement to the Rev. Mitch Hescox, “Dr. Katharine Hayhoe Named TIME’S 100 Most Influential People,” Evangelical Environmental Network, April 24, 2014.
A growing number of scientists: “Jeff Goodell, Can Dr. Evil Save the World?” Rolling Stone, November 2006.
The European Geosciences Union: “Geoengineering Could Disrupt Rainfall Patterns,” European Geosciences Union, June 6, 2012.
As Powell said in his Arid Lands report: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 70.
The impossible caveat: Meyer, Americans and Their Weather, 138.
In The Martian Chronicles: Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), 67, 68.
Between August 1860 and July 1861: World Weather Records, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 79, “Cherrapunji, India, Precipitation in Inches” (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institute, 1929), 246.
As the clouds meet the Khasi Hills: Ahrens, Essentials of Meteorology, 350.
But the locals were so hostile: Alexander Frater, Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India (London: Viking, 1990), 251–61.
Scientists have identified 250 orchid species: Meghalaya State Development Report, chapter 3, “Development and Management of Natural Resources,” 31–40, http://megplanning.gov.in/MSDR/natural_resources.pdf.
Florida is drowning in the rainiest summer: National Climatic Data Center, NOAA, “National Overview, Summer 2013,” http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2013/8.
Local governments shuttered the public schools: Hemanta Kumar Nath, “Assam Heat Wave: Death Toll Rise to 26,” India Blooms News Service, June 13, 2013.
By the time I left India: “India Raises Flood Death Toll, Reaches 5,700 as All Missing Persons Now Presumed Dead,” CBS News, July 16, 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/india-raises-flood-death-toll-reaches-5700-as-all-missing-persons-now-presumed-dead/.
The “drip-tips” guide rainfall: Nalini Nadkarni, Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 226.