It had been on the news all day, the storm was on its way. As I shut the door of my west London home it was somewhere out in the Channel, perhaps blowing up great waves like those FitzRoy and Sulivan had encountered two hundred years before on the Thetis. It was a quarter to nine in the evening on Sunday 27 October 2013. By Christian custom the next day would mark the ancient feast of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Someone had noticed this and begun a trend that had gathered momentum on social media. Even before it crossed the coast it was St Jude’s Storm.
In the street the wind was already lively. Clusters of brittle, golden leaves were twirling from the plane tree outside, adding to the mound of several hundred that had accumulated on the pavements over the last few days. There were a few hours left of this uneasy calm. I pulled up the hood of my battered parka and set off for the river.
It was three days since the Met Office had first put out a forecast for potentially damaging winds across the south of England. On Friday they had upgraded this to an amber warning, to be ‘prepared for potentially hazardous conditions’. Over the weekend we had watched the satellite images as the clouds began to swirl in their ominous anticlockwise spiral out in the Atlantic. The forecasters’ demeanour changed, their easy playfulness gone. They stared gravely into the camera, repeating the maxim that this storm was one ‘you would not see every year’. On Sunday, tension had built. Railway companies were anticipating delays during Monday morning’s rush hour. Firemen and paramedics had been put on standby. To emphasise the message to anyone still not listening, erstwhile BBC weatherman Michael Fish, famous for missing a violent extra-tropical cyclone in 1987, had been fetched out of retirement to broadcast his own personal warning. ‘This is totally amazing,’ Fish said in an interview on BBC News. ‘The modern computers are literally able to invent these things in thin air. No human being could have done this.’1
Down by the Thames at Fulham Reach the atmosphere was thick, wet and cold. I couldn’t see far in the gauzy light – I could just make out the green outline of Hammersmith Bridge a hundred metres upstream. I sheltered beneath a white willow and listened to the breeze. Orange tunnels of sodium light illuminated individual, fine drops of rain that were falling at an angle. There was a smell of musk and the river seemed swollen. From somewhere above the iron lid of sky came the metallic whirr of an aeroplane descending towards Heathrow. A jogger bounced by with his headphones in. Then a dog walker, his Labrador tugging impatiently at his hand.
Before St Jude came I had wanted to feel this moment for myself. The unsettling mix of anticipation and suspense. This is the power of weather. It is what Constable experienced in the East Bergholt windmill, a wide-eyed boy of fifteen watching the horizon as scudding clouds flew overhead. It is the sense of anxious tension FitzRoy must have felt during that night in the Strait of Magellan in 1846, on his passage home from New Zealand, with Captain Cable gone below and his barometer dropping fast.
I waited under the willow for half an hour. Then the wind began to rise, so I turned for home.
* * *
St Jude swept across the south of England four hours later, and we woke the next morning to news of its effects. Winds of 99mph had been recorded on the Isle of Wight. Six people had died, mostly from the hundreds of fallen trees. At Heathrow 130 flights had been cancelled; 850,000 homes were without electricity. The Port of Dover had been shut for three hours, as had Dungeness nuclear power station.
But that was not the end of it. St Jude turned out to be the opening volley in one of the most unsettled winters in recorded history. As I sat inside reading about Reid and Redfield and Espy and FitzRoy, one storm after another was flung by a jet stream that seemed locked like a missile on the south coast of England. Six major storms struck in January and February 2014, with volumes of rainfall that broke all records. Not since 1766 – two years before Cook set sail for the South Seas in the Endeavour – had the recorded rainfall been so high. As it had during the Royal Charter Gale, the Dawlish railway collapsed. At Milford on Sea in Hampshire thirty-two diners had to be rescued from a seafront restaurant when gigantic waves sent shingle from the beach flying through the windows. The floods stretched east from the Somerset Levels to the Thames Valley. By the middle of February Eton’s playing fields were underwater.
The weather thrust the Met Office centre stage. With its IBM Power7, one of the most powerful computers in the world – able to calculate 1,000,000,000,000,000 sums a second – it could track and forecast each storm. Almost a hundred and fifty years after he died it was the realisation of FitzRoy’s vision. Rather than being cast aside as a costly extravagance, the Met Office was at the heart of the action – briefing politicians, businesspeople, the media and the public.
Today the Met Office has a budget of more than £80 million; it employs around fifteen hundred staff, five hundred of them scientists.* Although the weather, particularly British weather, retains its potential for surprise, we now live in a world where forecasts are predominantly trusted. By the Met Office’s latest statistics 94.2 per cent of its maximum temperature forecasts are accurate within 2°C and 85 per cent of minimum temperatures to within 2°C; 73.3 per cent of rain forecasts turned out correct while storms are almost never – apart from the rare Michael Fish case – missed.2
The value of the Met Office was illustrated by a 2007 consultancy report. It concluded that it delivered ‘an exceptional return on investment’, that it saves lives, protects properties and provides wide-ranging social and environmental benefits; all told, it brings £353.2 million of savings to the British economy. Although much has changed since the early fractious days of the 1850s and 1860s, its initial vision has not. FitzRoy’s ideal of a public weather service, provided by government for the good of all, has not only survived but has become integral to our way of life.3
For his foresight FitzRoy is fondly remembered by those at the Met Office today as their founding father. Its headquarters is located on FitzRoy Road in Exeter and, in a wonderfully apt tribute, back in 2002 one of the BBC’s fabled shipping-forecast regions was renamed from Finisterre to FitzRoy. He has been well served by three excellent biographies and in 2005 FitzRoy’s life was turned into thrilling fiction in Harry Thompson’s Booker-nominated This Thing of Darkness – proving beyond any doubt that history loves a rebel. Far away from Britain’s shores soars the awe-inspiring Monte Fitz Roy in southern Patagonia. Named in FitzRoy’s honour in 1877 by Francisco Moreno, the Argentine explorer, the summit juts up above a spectacular landscape like a fang. The weather at Monte Fitz Roy is often wild. For climbers it is the ultimate ascent, and few have ever stood on its summit.
Today FitzRoy is chiefly remembered for the part he played in the story of evolution as Darwin’s taciturn captain on the Beagle. This history has always overshadowed FitzRoy’s later life and his meteorological work. To be labelled ‘Darwin’s captain on the Beagle’ is a fate FitzRoy would have hated. A much better epitaph is inscribed on his gravestone at All Saints Church, a breezy passage from Ecclesiastes:
The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. (Eccles. 1:6)
Among those who know the story of FitzRoy’s days at the Meteorological Department, there remains a sense of injustice. ‘FitzRoy was treated very badly by the scientific community,’ Dame Julia Slingo, the Chief Scientist at the Met Office, said when I spoke to her. I asked her, with the benefit of hindsight, whether she thought what he had done was unscientific? ‘No,’ she replied. ‘He was just at the start of a very long journey.’4
And if Robert FitzRoy was at the start of one journey, then Dame Julia Slingo is at the beginning of another.
* * *
On 7 February 1861, the evening after FitzRoy issued the first ever British storm warning to the north-east ports, John Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, stood to deliver the prestigious Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society. Forty-one-year-old Tyndall was an Irish scientist and one of the rising stars on the London scene. He was a gifted experimenter, communicator and popular author, well known for his written accounts of his climbing exploits in the Alps, where he had summited many of the hardest peaks. Already he had been at the Royal Institution for about a decade and his reputation as a lecturer was well established. In a year’s time he would be invited to serve alongside FitzRoy, Glaisher, Herschel and Airy on the British Association’s Balloon Committee, but this night he had other things on his mind.
Tyndall’s lecture was titled ‘On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gasses and Vapours’, the latest update on a scientific enquiry that had been occupying him since 1859. Like Glaisher, Tyndall had developed an interest in the transfer of heat throughout the global system. And just as Glaisher had tracked the flow of radiation through solid bodies, Tyndall had resolved to do the same – but this time with gases. His interest was born of the realisation that for the earth to be hot enough to support life some of the gases had to trap and retain some of the sun’s heat. This seemed obvious but, as Tyndall realised, the question had been almost completely ignored by science. It was, he announced, ‘perfectly unbroken ground’.5
For two years Tyndall had sought to answer the question, testing which gases were the strongest absorbers of radiant heat – what we today call infrared radiation. He had constructed his apparatus at the British Institution, a rig which let him pass heat through tubes of gas and monitor the amount of absorption. The task had been difficult but he had stuck at it and from 9 September 1860 until 29 October he had ‘experimented from about eight to ten hours daily’. Now Tyndall was ready to reveal his results. He told his audience it seemed that a negligible amount of heat was soaked up by the typical atmospheric gases: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. Other gases, however, had dramatic absorptive powers, as did water vapour. One of his discoveries related to carbonic acid (carbon dioxide). He was eager to correct a misapprehension:
In the experiments of Dr Franz, carbolic acid appears as a feebler absorber than oxygen. According to my experiments, for small quantities the absorptive power of the former (carbonic acid) is about 150 times that of the latter (oxygen); and for atmospheric tensions, carbonic acid probably absorbs nearly 100 times as much as oxygen.6
No one could have guessed that February night at the Royal Society, as FitzRoy was issuing his very first storm warning, that Tyndall was laying the theoretical foundation stone for one of the most contentious scientific disputes in history. The implications of Tyndall’s discoveries were clear. The more water vapour, carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ present in the atmosphere, the warmer the atmosphere would be. In the weeks that followed the lecture Tyndall put out a press release in the London papers. ‘All past climate was now understood, and all future climate changes could be predicted simply from a knowledge of the concentrations of these “greenhouse” gases.’7
For years Tyndall’s research remained little more than a neat, if somewhat obscure, foray into the properties of gas, remembered by some, forgotten by most. In the late nineteenth century the Swedish meteorologist Svante Arrhenius dabbled with the riddle, producing calculations on the correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and surface temperature on earth. It was not until 1938 that the subject was revisited again, this time by G.S. Callendar, a British steam engineer, who wondered what the consequences of a high-carbon atmosphere would be. By then Britain was producing about 250 million tonnes of coal a year, the burning of which along with other hydrocarbons was emitting increasing volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Callendar calculated the upshot in temperature that should result from a 20 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels and concluded that it was probably a good thing: rising temperature helping to stave off another ice age.
For a few decades scientists occasionally speculated about this quirk of atmosphere – known to them casually as the Callendar Effect – while all the time the volumes of carbon dioxide continued to rise. The increase in concentrations was dramatic. From about 1805 when FitzRoy was born to the end of the twentieth century the level of carbon dioxide rose from 280 parts per million to 380 parts per million. In the last decades of the twentieth century there was a rejuvenation of interest in the problem. No longer was Tyndall’s discovery a scientific curiosity or mathematical puzzle. Politicians realised that the experiments Tyndall had performed in a sealed tube at the Royal Institution were now being played out on a massive scale in the earth’s atmosphere. The problem was given a title – global warming – and it became the defining scientific issue of the age.
The issue hit the political mainstream in 1988. That year saw Margaret Thatcher give an anxious address on global warming to the Royal Society, cautioning that humanity had ‘unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself’.8 The same sentiments were expressed by the NASA scientist James Hanson before a Congressional committee in Washington, DC, and in response the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded. In the years since, the IPCC has issued five reports on the state of the atmosphere and the likely impact of increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The latest was launched with a press conference in September 2013. It stated that 95 per cent of scientists now agree that global warming is happening. In their notes for policy-makers, the IPCC declared that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’.9
The fifth IPCC report is loaded with statistics, many of them disconcerting. There had been a rise in global surface temperatures of 0.85°C between 1880 and 2012; ‘the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years’. As evidence of a changing planet it points to the shrinking of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets; the disappearance of massive glaciers; Arctic sea ice and northern hemisphere spring snow. Should the atmosphere continue to fill with increasing volumes of greenhouse gases, before the end of the twenty-first century we will find temperatures rising between 3° and 5°C, with sea levels up by half to one metre. Thomas Stocker, the IPCC co-chair who launched the report, made the point starkly. Climate change ‘threatens our planet, our only home’.10
The climate-change debate has evolved very much like a slow-motion weather forecast, strikingly reminiscent in tone and tenor to the early forecasts of the 1860s. Indeed what FitzRoy and others faced then seems like small beer compared to the passionate arguments that have developed over the past twenty years. The difficulties of the Brussels conference of 1853 are as nothing when set beside the political wrangling of summits at Rio, Kyoto, Bali or Copenhagen. Augustus Smith in the Commons in the 1860s barely registers when we consider the lobbying of powerful free-market capitalists of today. Yet the debate is eerily familiar. Just as before, it lies with human faith in a meteorological prediction. Can we trust scientists to warn us of coming danger? What economic and social costs should we be expected to bear? How can scientists know that they are right?
All these questions are fought over with the same volatility as FitzRoy’s forecasting debate. Now, as then, the language is polarised. For both sides there are pejorative and celebratory terms: you can be a warmist or a denier, a believer or a sceptic. In the US where – keeping on the Espy/Redfield tradition – the debate is most febrile, Democrat-leaning news programmes have been found to use the term ‘climate change’ while their Republican opponents have preferred ‘global warming’. Each term calls up a particular set of Pavlovian reactions in the audience. Climate change is valiant, scientific, crucial to the survival of humanity. Global warming is expensive, a pseudoscience, a propaganda trap of the first magnitude.
For the sceptics climate change is the latest in a chain of alarmist phenomena, from Malthus and his population theories to fears over the depletion of fossil fuels and, more recently, the Millennium Bug. Climate change is the latest beating of the drum by a powerful environmental lobby that does not have evidence to support its theory. They point out that there has been no observed warming over the past fifteen years and deride the IPCC’s argument that excess heat has been soaked up by the oceans as ‘creative science’ deployed to patch up a stumbling theory. For sceptics climate change is a hysterical cult that is too big to fail and has become intolerant of criticism. Its political and economic edge give it a dangerous power with governments and businesses overly invested, fumbling away in an advanced state of paranoia, trapped in a cult of omertà.
Perhaps the most sustained and potent attacks on climate-change policies have come from libertarian economists, exasperated at the millions of pounds wasted on carbon taxes. They prefer to stick with tried and tested economic theory: the lowest-cost principle. Hydrocarbons, like fossil fuels, are the richest sources of energy and, as a result, provide us with the means for fastest growth. The most lucid explanation of the economic argument is made by Rupert Darwall, an ex-investment banker, in his forensic analysis, The Age of Global Warming. He argues, ‘Across every dimension, global warming has been a costly fiasco’:
Unsustainable commitments to solar and wind energy in Germany and Spain; the morally abhorrent diversion by rich countries of resources from growing food into making biofuels; the collapse of the EU’s carbon market; the transformation of the UK’s liberalised energy market producing some of the cheapest electricity to become Europe’s most expensive electricity producer; the scandals associated with the Clean Development Mechanism; the destruction of tropical rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations – all provide material for students of policy failure.11
Lord Lawson of Blaby, once Chancellor for the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, added his own conclusion in early 2014: ‘Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.’12
* * *
Dame Julia Slingo, Britain’s most visible climate scientist, has worked on the subject for forty years, becoming the UK’s first ever female professor of meteorology at Reading University in the 1990s and then, in 2008, returning to the Met Office where she had started her career. She has been leading the climate-change debate, communicating the science and the dangers of a warmer world to the British public.
Julia Slingo told me that her curiosity for weather began during her schooldays in the 1960s. ‘I spent a lot of time sat at the desk in my bedroom,’ she said, ‘while I was revising for my A-level physics. The window looked out to the south and I watched the clouds and wondered why the wind should always blow from the west.’13
A few years later, in the early 1970s, as one of the Met Office’s young researchers Slingo started work on some of the earliest ever climate models – then a completely new area of study. ‘When I entered the Met Office we had barely seen a satellite image,’ she says; ‘no one knew what clouds looked like from above, we didn’t have any models.’ From the start Slingo worked on the carbon dioxide question. One of her first publications, Carbon Dioxide, Climate and Society, examined the climate’s sensitivity to increased volumes of the greenhouse gas. ‘I didn’t think this was going to be the biggest problem for humanity in the twenty-first century, as it is turning out to be,’ she said.14
Forty years later, in November 2013, Slingo gave the Burntwood Lecture at the Institution of Environmental Sciences, her subject ‘Why Climate Models are the Greatest Feat of Modern Science’. The 1970s were a world away. She showed the evolution of climate modelling, how meteorologists understood how heat is moved around the global system – something pioneered years before by Glaisher and Tyndall. To the layman these climate models are indescribably complex. They combine advanced mathematics, Newtonian physics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer, particle microphysics, chemistry and biology to create forecasts that can then be projected on to increasingly tiny squares of the earth to suggest how the climate might evolve in the years ahead. All the formulas are processed by the IBM supercomputer in Exeter, informing IPCC reports. It is a system that for sheer complexity would have baffled, amazed and thrilled nineteenth-century scientists, who had little more to go on than their barometers, thermometers and weather maps. ‘People end up with this idea that meteorology is just a soft environmental science, when in fact it is very difficult,’ Slingo tells me. ‘It is a postgraduate science. You need to understand maths, physics and chemistry at the very least.’15
But for all the grounded theory, meteorology’s lot remains a controversial one. Over the decades sceptics have uncovered bad scientific practice within the climate-change community. They accuse scientists of fiddling the numbers, loading the dice so that the machine pumps out confirmatory data. When the Daily Telegraph published a review of one climate-change book in 2014 it received 9,093 reader comments in reply: ‘sceptics’ attacking ‘warmists’, ‘believers’ hitting back at ‘deniers’.16
‘There are so many parallels with what is happening now and what happened with FitzRoy,’ Slingo says. ‘We are the only science that really has to predict and that brings trouble. I have had criticism from FRSs [fellows of the Royal Society], they have this idea that you are not a very good scientist if you work in this field, which is wrong. Other scientists are not criticised in the same way. You wouldn’t criticise the Chief Medical Officer. No one would dare to pick apart medical science the way people do with climate change.’17
In a BBC interview in 2014, Slingo was asked why she continued to work in such a contentious area. She went back to Francis Bacon’s quote in her answer. ‘This has become more and more important to me. It is why I applied for the Met Office Chief Scientist’s role after many years in academia. I needed to see my science working for society – “the relief of man’s estate”. To save lives and livelihoods and to make life better for people who are affected badly by hazardous weather, climate extremes … People don’t like what I say about the science because it doesn’t suit them, but it’s never going to stop me saying it.’18
I suggested that listening to her words reminded me of FitzRoy, and how he might have replied a hundred and fifty years before. I asked if she thought there were any similarities between the two of them. ‘Well, I’ve no intention of committing suicide,’ she replied.19
* * *
Like no other science, meteorology demands faith. For some, such a demand is unscientific. In The Age of Global Warming Rupert Darwall writes at length about the ‘inscrutability of the future’. What can really be known? For a benchmark he uses Karl Popper’s twentieth-century theory of falsification – Popper’s idea that a theory can only be described as scientific if it is capable of being falsified. The best theories are capable of being falsified, he argues. ‘The most,’ Darwall points out, ‘that can be said is global warming has happened between two dates in the past.’
He bolsters his philosophical attack on global warming with a quote from Percy W. Bridgman, a Harvard physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Bridgman wrote:
I personally do not think that one should speak of making statements about the future. For me, a statement implies the possibility of verifying its truth, and the truth of the statement about the future cannot be verified.20
And here we come to the crux. For the good and safety of humanity meteorologists are forced to forecast. Although not falsifiable by Popper’s method or watertight by Bridgman’s standards, the weather forecast is something we generally today have faith in. Few ignored it in October 2013 as St Jude’s Storm approached, just at many kept indoors in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the US’s eastern seaboard. Neither Hurricane Sandy nor St Jude could have been falsified, yet they are not unscientific.
Nowadays forecasts are a vital source of protection, a paradigm shift since the days when they were a source of hilarity in the Commons. Who knows how good climate models could become in the future? In the meantime, as the meteorologist Sir Brian Hoskins told the BBC:
By increasing the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, to levels not seen for millions of years on this planet, we are performing a very risky experiment and we’re pretty confident that that means that if we keep going like we are that temperatures are going to rise somewhere around 3 to 5° by the end of this century, sea levels up to half to one metre rise.21
This is our own experiment, and forging a coherent pact between the science, the politics and the economics will be one of the challenges of our age. We can have faith in the science or we can let nature take its course, just as Captain MacWhirr did in Conrad’s Typhoon.
There is a moment of prophetic lucidity early in Conrad’s story, when MacWhirr surveys the atmosphere from the chart room of the Nan-shan.
… he stood confronted by the fall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall – taking into account the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year, and the ship’s position on the terrestrial globe – was of a nature ominously prophetic; but the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inward disturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had brought it home to his very door … The lurid sunshine cast faint and sickly shadows. The swell ran higher and swifter every moment, and the ship lurched heavily in the smooth, deep hollows of the sea.22