HENRY LANSFORD

It might be a good idea to begin with a caveat. Unlike many of the papers presented at this conference, this one does not represent the culmination of an extensive and rigorous research effort. However, we hope it is more than just a collection of the kind of "simplistic views and hasty conclusions" that Professor Lamb disclaimed in his introductory remarks.

This paper is a sort of postscript to The Climate Mandate, a book about food, population, and climate on which we recently collaborated. Its theme, which emerged from several things that we discussed in the book, seems to have special relevance for climatologists and historians who are working at the interface between their disciplines. However, we hope you will keep in mind that our intent is to be provocative rather than definitive.

Snow in the Streets of Chicago

Last February 27, a determined little Irish-American lady named Jane Byrne won the Democratic nomination for mayor of the city of Chicago. This was a startling upset, as Ms. Byrne's opponent was the incumbent mayor, Michael Bilandic, who was supported by the powerful Democratic political machine built by Richard Daley during his long tenure as mayor. Ms. Byrne went on to win the general election in April, and she is now Mayor Byrne.

Both sides, Byrne and Bilandic supporters alike, agreed that a major factor in this political upset was the bitterly cold weather and heavy snow that hit Chicago in January. Deep snowdrifts in the streets held the city in a semi-paralyzed state for weeks, and there was widespread dissatisfaction with the city administration's failure to clear the snow away. Ms. Byrne capitalized enthusiastically on this situation, and she succeeded in persuading a majority of the voters that a mayor who couldn't get snow off the streets wasn't competent to hold the job.

Although we have not examined the state of Chicago's snow-removal plans during the Bilandic administration, it seems clear that last winter's cold and snow represent the sort of extreme climatic event for which it is difficult and uneconomical to maintain a sustained capability for fast response. Stanley Changnon, head of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the Illinois State Water Survey, recently analyzed temperature and precipitation records for last winter and concluded that it was the worst of the century for northern Illinois. Chicago had almost six feet of snow during the winter, compared to a long-term average of less than 2 feet, and sustained bitterly cold temperatures kept the snow from melting once it fell. It appears that, to deal effectively with such an extreme climatic event, Chicago would have to maintain a massive fleet of machinery and operators that would be redundant and idle most of the time.

Our point is this: in political terms, it didn't matter whether or not Mayor Bilandic did an adequate job of responding to this climatic challenge as long as a majority of the city's electorate perceived his performance as inadequate. Popular perception of this climatic episode, rather than scientific analysis, determined Michael Bilandic's political fate.

The thesis that we would like for you to consider now is that the impact of climate on human affairs often is determined as much by popular perception of climatic events as by their actual nature. We will present several more examples from recent history that seem provocative enough to suggest that the subject could stand much more rigorous and comprehensive scrutiny than we have given it.

Rain Follows the Plow

The grasslands and wheat fields that roll eastward from the Rocky Mountains are part of that region of North America that is known to most people today as the Great Plains. But in the report on his expedition of western exploration in 1819-20, Major Stephen H. Long called these high plains the Great American Desert. Later explorers agreed. Lieutenant G. K. Warren, who led a government expedition in the 1850s, said that the 97th meridian, which runs approximately through Wichita, Kansas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, was the western limit of agriculture, separated by a "desert space" from the arable lands of the Pacific Coast. Major John Wesley Powell, the explorer and self-taught scientist who became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, also held this view. In his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, issued in 1875, Powell warned that there was not enough rainfall to grow crops without irrigation west of the 100th meridian.

But these conservative views ran counter to the prevailing optimism of the post-Civil-War period in the United States. The railroads were pushing west, and many national leaders were convinced that the nation's "manifest destiny" was to expand westward. During the 1880s, the erratic rainfall in the high plains was a little less scanty than it had been in past years, producing a number of theories to explain why the climate supposedly was growing more favorable for the farmer. The "rain belt" was moving westward, said the railroad promoters and land speculators. "Rain follows the plow" was the slogan of those who professed to believe that breaking ground for agriculture somehow altered precipitation processes to bring more rainfall. Homesteaders flocked to the plains, and many of them produced good crops for several years using the conventional farming methods that had worked back east.

However, 1889 was a very dry year, and it was followed by more dry ones that culminated in a severe drought. Many homesteaders were wiped out, and thriving little communities that had sprung up along the railroads became ghost towns. Then the drought ended, and a new wave of homesteaders settled on the plains in the years between 1900 and 1910. Another drought came, but its effects were partly offset by the great demand and high prices for wheat that came with World War I. After the war, larger and larger tracts of land were plowed up for big mechanized wheat-farming operations financed by eastern capital and sometimes even by European investors. New "dry-farming" techniques were developed for raising crops in spite of scanty precipitation. It began to look as if Powell and the other pessimists had been wrong--how could this land be unsuitable for agriculture when so much of it was being farmed with such great success?

Then came the granddaddy of all high-plains droughts--the "Dust Bowl" years of the 1930s. Hot, dry weather and strong, unceasing winds wiped out the wheat. Before the farmers came, the topsoil of the plains was protected by a tough mat of native grass that turned dry and brown when drought struck, but still covered the soil. Plowed land has no such protection, and topsoil blew away by the thousands of tons. On May 12, 1934, The New York Times reported that "a cloud of dust thousands of feet high, which came from drought-ridden states as far west as Montana, 1500 miles away, filtered the rays of the sun for five hours yesterday. New York was obscured in a half-light similar to the light cast by the sun in a partial eclipse."

As a result of an over-optimistic perception of the climate of the plains based on the "rain follows the plow" hypothesis, thousands of Great Plains farmers were ruined by the Dust Bowl drought, and millions of acres of land were terribly damaged by wind erosion.

The Dust Bowl also had some significant political impacts. At the same time that drought was spreading across the plains, the nation's economy was breaking down, bringing the Great Depression. On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the thirty-second president of the United States, and he promptly responded to the economic depression by launching a legislative program that ultimately would change the socioeconomic role of the federal government of the United States. One keystone in Roosevelt's "New Deal" program was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), designed to strengthen the nation's economy by cutting farm production in order to reduce the supply of wheat, cotton, and other commodities and thereby raise prices. In 1936, the Supreme Court declared the AAA unconstitutional. But by then the drought had created the Dust Bowl; 1935 farm production was held down as much by severe and widespread drought as by the AAA. Roosevelt's New Deal planners used the drought damage as a rationale for a new law, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, under which the government paid farmers to plant part of their land in soil-conserving crops such as alfalfa and clover instead of wheat and corn. In addition to restoring drought-damaged farmland, this law permitted the Roosevelt administration to continue the federal policy of limiting agricultural production to support prices. This policy, in one form or another, has been in effect ever since during times when excess production has threatened to upset the U.S. agricultural economy.

Thus it does not seem overly hasty to conclude, at least tentatively, that inaccurate popular perceptions of the climate of the Great Plains in the 1800s were a major determinant of federal agricultural and economic policies that were established in the 1930s and are still dominant in the 1970s.

Emptying the Breadbasket

In 1972, a severe winter in the Ukrainian wheat-growing regions of the Soviet Union was followed by a hot, dry summer in the agricultural lands around Moscow. In India, the summer monsoon rains came late, leaving wheat and other crops short of moisture. A disastrous drought in sub-Saharan Africa continued, and there were droughts in Australia and South America and floods in the midwestern United States. Total world food production dropped for the first time since the years just after World War II.

Although the bad weather brought poor harvests in many countries, the 1972 North American grain harvest was good. The United States harvested more than 200 million tons of grain and already had a stock of 69 million tons carried over from previous years. The Soviet Union bought 28 million tons of grain from the United States and Canada, and other countries also made up their shortages by purchasing grain from the so-called "North American Breadbasket." Altogether, U.S. grain exports jumped by 70 percent between mid-1972 and mid-1973, depleting what was left of a large U.S. grain reserve built up in the 1960s.

Grain prices rose sharply as grain stocks dropped, and consumer prices rose with them. Retail food prices in the United States, which had increased by only 5 percent in all of 1972, shot up 7.8 percent in just the first three months of 1973. Many people in Asian and African countries went hungry, some because of actual regional food shortages but others because they did not have the money to buy food that was available at inflated prices and also because food that was shipped to them through international assistance programs often did not reach the hungry people. Over the next few years, many people came to perceive these events as a striking example of severe economic and social impacts caused directly by extreme changes in the world's climate. But it now appears less likely that the climatic events of 1972 portended any long-term global trend, and it also appears that the international economic turmoil of 1973 and 1974 had a number of other interrelated causes in addition to the widespread bad growing weather. OPEC's sudden increase in petroleum prices at about that same time, grain export commitments by the Soviet Union to other communist countries, and other political, cultural, and commercial forces may have converged with climate problems to produce a large cumulative effect. The impacts were particularly bad in some developing countries where the infrastructure was not sound enough to absorb them.

The key question seems to be this: would another episode of unfavorable climatic events in several key agricultural regions of the world be followed by a similar period of economic turmoil? The popular perception that was current in the mid-1970s indicates that the answer is "yes," but that perception may be only a more sophisticated version of "rain follows the plow." The results are not necessarily all bad--this perception strongly influenced the U.S. Congress in enacting the National Climate Program Act, an action that should result in greatly improved scientific knowledge of climate mechanisms and impacts.

"You Can't Seed No Clouds"

The winter of 1976-77 brought climatic extremes to much of the United States. A persistent blocking high-pressure system off the Pacific Coast forced winter storm systems far to the north over western North America, then plunged them deep into the eastern half of the United States. The result was bitter cold and heavy snow over the Midwest and Southeast and drought in the western states.

In the West, one response to the drought conditions was to try to use weather-modification technology to get more snow in mountain watersheds. The State of Colorado, for example, began seeding clouds over the Rocky Mountains in February in a program that continued into May. The scientists who recommended, conducted, and evaluated the program emphasized that it could not cure drought, and that in fact they could not even measure how much extra snow might be producedby the cloud seeding. When skies over the Rockies remained clear most of the time, Governor Richard Lamm commented: "You can't seed no clouds."

The news media and the public did not understand the problems and uncertainties very clearly, however. Some people opposed the cloud-seeding program, while others regarded it as a remedy for the shortage of snow. At the end of the 1977 weather-modification effort, the scientists who evaluated it estimated that, if it worked as well as they possibly could have hoped, the cloud seeding might have increased the snowfall from about 50 percent of normal to about 54.5 percent of normal. This clearly was no panacea for the adverse impacts that the deficient snowfall had on Colorado's ski areas and water supplies.

There also was enthusiasm for weather modification at the national level. In June 1978, a national weather modification advisory board appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce released a report that recommended a greatly enhanced national effort in weather-modification research and application. Although some atmospheric scientists consider these recommendations overly optimistic about the state of weather-modification technology, others believe they represent a rational approach to exploring the potential of this controversial technology.

It seems to us that one serious risk represented by a large federal effort in weather modification is that the public and the government decision-makers may perceive cloud seeding and other weather-changing techniques as a "technological fix" for climate-related problems. At best, this technology appears to be one very modest tool that may be useful in dealing with water shortages, energy demands, and other problems created by climatic extremes. If weather-modification technology is perceived by the public as a solution to weather and climate problems, then we are likely to neglect other measures that can make our institutions and activities more resilient to climatic fluctuations.

Lessons

There seem to be lessons in these examples for both historians and climatologists. First, in evaluating past human responses as evidence for the occurrence of particular climate events or trends, the historians should keep in mind that such responses are sometimes based on incorrect perceptions rather than climatic actualities.

A second lesson concerns climate researchers and their future activities. Both the World Climate Program and the U.S. National Climate Program authorized by Congress last year include major components focused on the impacts of climate on human activities. It is very important for such research efforts to consider how societal responses to climatic events are influenced by popular perceptions. It is even more important for the atmospheric science community to recognize the need for good communication between scientists and the mass communication media, the general public, and key decision-makers in our society. Such communication is essential for scientific knowledge to be applied effectively to mitigate the adverse societal impacts of climatic variation.

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