The Climate of the Times

Joanne Freeman: So I’m guessing that some people might be surprised to hear that in early America they were thinking about climate change, but people might not be surprised to know that they were linking in one way or another, climate and God or climate and religion. Would you say that’s the case Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: I would say that’s the case. I mean the Bible itself has any number of references to not wanting to make God upset and God changing the weather, His clouds and pillows of smoke and great floods. So the story of God’s power over the climate is really as old as the story of Noah. There is a really important sermon delivered in the early 18th century by Increase Mather called ‘The voice of God in stormy winds’, where he essentially claims or affirms that natural processes behind storms where God’s will and that you have to control your behavior, police your behavior in order to get the weather that you want, or the climate that you want. Which as you can imagine, in the Massachusetts Bay colony with freezing winters and I’m sure you know, not terribly comfortable summers much of the time, a lot of people are going to take heat of. And it’s a pretty handy way to try to get people to behave the right way if you think that you can control the weather in the meantime.

Joanne Freeman: And indeed, I think people did take heed of that. So I think for sure as you just suggested Nathan, there’s this major religious stripe in the way people are thinking about climate. But then on the other hand, certainly in the 18th century, there’s a sort of more naturalist approach to it too, which sounds very highfalutin, modern and scientific. But on the other hand, I think people at the time, certainly in the old world, they were assuming that the climate in the new world made new world life of all kinds, inferior, right? So it’s naturalistic, but there still enlightenment-esque sort of drawing broad patterns and grounding them in the old world.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. And your guy, Jefferson in fact Joanne, pushed back on these notions that the climate was inferior or I guess more accurately, he accepted them and said that, “Americans are doing something about that.” Cutting down all these forests, they are cultivating the land and that in turn is actually improving the climate. He actually advocated for Spain cutting a canal through the Panamanian isthmus, not just to send ships through it, he liked that idea, of course, but he believed that cutting down all those trees would continue this effect on the climate, making more temperate, making it more livable for all of North America.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. Now that is a thing I did not know about Thomas Jefferson.

Brian Balogh: That’s why you need to listen to Backstory more often.

Joanne Freeman: Clearly, clearly. Wow. So yeah, it makes sense that Jefferson would broadcast this around the world.

Brian Balogh: Probably if you didn’t know it Joanne, probably means it’s not true. And I’m getting in a hell of a lot of trouble here. where we’re going with our amazing researchers who have never been wrong about anything. So I’m sticking with that.

Joanne Freeman: I always believe you, Brian. I always believe you. So that has us in early America, I would assume that this topic is going to change dramatically when we move up into actually the neck of the woods that you guys are more normally in, which is a more modern era. How do things fundamentally change about people and how they feel that they are or aren’t controlling the weather?

Nathan Connolly: Well, one of the things that is surprising to me every time I revisit this, is just how early the climate change conversation is going, right? So again, I totally embrace my identity as a 20th century guy, but we can’t claim in the 20th century to have created the conversation on climate change. There are sources going back to the 1820s, where French scientists for instance were talking about a hothouse effect connected to human activity, right? The changing the climate of the planet. In 1859, the London morning post has a lecture from a man named John Tyndall, an Irishman, a scientist who’s talking about the atmosphere and its effect on heat and the absorption of heat on the earth’s surface. In the 1890s you have Swedish scientists who are doing the same thing, talking about the effect of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground. That’s a title from one of these journals, right? The Philosophical magazine in Journal of Science to be exact. So all of this to say that the 19th century-

Brian Balogh: I still subscribe to that Nathan.

Nathan Connolly: I believe it. I believe that you owe them some money last I checked. So the thing about the 19th century is as much as we want to think of it as an era of still rural America or as a time when the concerns of the 20th century are not present, they’re absolutely there in the way that people are thinking about their evolving relationship with the globe. Now they think it is true though, to your point, Joanne, that for your average farmer, they’re much more concerned with how to get the rain that they want. So the idea that you might, for instance plow fields and somehow rain clouds will follow the plow, that was still a widely held idea among many Americans in the 19th century. Or the idea that battlefields were places where rain essentially followed because the releasing of gunpowder into the atmosphere, created rain clouds, an that was an actual writing that came around the civil war. But the idea that climate change was something we should be mindful of that was still largely confined to smaller scientific communities.

Brian Balogh: But what’s amazing since both you and Joanne have confessed to learning so much about this topic, what I’m always amazed at is the degree to which going all the way back to the 18th century, they really were talking about climate, not just the weather. I understand that Increase Mather thing was about a very bad windstorm, thunderstorm, whatever. But you know, Jefferson and all of those people that Professor Chaplain was talking about, they’re talking about real climate change in the journals you just cited, Nathan. That’s climate change, that’s not weather. Most of the stuff that I’ve looked at in the 20th century actually until the 1960s or so, was much more about altering the weather rather than altering the climate. And why is that? I’m not a scientist. I can’t be exactly sure, but my sense is, in the 20th century, which is always the best century, scientists began to recognize just what a powerful thing climate is.

Brian Balogh: For instance, when they developed the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, they realized that these incredibly massive weapons, so powerful, were nothing compared to a regular thunderstorm, not to mention a hurricane, and that in turn was just a weather event that was minuscule compared to the regularity, the predictability of climate. And they began to realize in the 20th century just what a powerful and to many, somewhat permanent thing climate was. Which is not to say that they didn’t realize that it has changed, there were ice ages, et cetera. But it was an extraordinarily powerful, almost framing device for human life and the rest of life on the earth.

Joanne Freeman: Wouldn’t you maybe also say though, my sort of 18th century hunch would be part of why they’re thinking about climate and not weather, is because they are thinking in a kind of enlightenment kind of a way about big patterns and about whishing across time. And that what you’re talking about in a sense is power. The outgrowth of power. If you have power, then you are going to start thinking in a really concrete way about being able to change weather.

Brian Balogh: I think that’s exactly right, Joanne.