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This chapter looks at nine different modes of scientific activity pursued by Quakers and Jews. These range from the wealthy amateur — including several Jews who pursued science in an upper-class, gentlemanly fashion — to the Jews and Quakers who traded in scientific specimens. Members of both communities used science in their professional engineering careers. Likewise, both communities produced educationalists who taught science through their lectures and textbooks. Another way in which science was deployed was in the scientific study of their own religious communities through the use of statistics. But there are also some interesting differences. For example, several 18th century Jews were attracted to Newton’s ideas, which were generally ignored by Quakers.

This chapter examines the Hong Kong Observatory director August William Doberck's conflict with the Jesuit fathers leading to the construction of other observatories in Asia. These Jesuit fathers include Marc Dechevrens of the Shanghai Observatory and Federico Faura of the Manila Observatory. This chapter also discusses the possible problems for meteorologists in Asia caused by the wars in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the social contours of the meteorological life. The goal is to situate the occupation within its organizational and social psychological constraints. It argues that the structure, culture, and interactions of operational meteorologists create the conditions in which weather forecasts are produced. In this case, it is the relationship of meteorology to science, to claims about the future, and to the communication of this knowledge that are at issue. The chapter begins with the place and space in which meteorology is done, moving inward to work relations, the links between humans and machines, and labor under conditions of stress and threat. Although meteorologists work for numerous organizations, the focus is on government employees, the authors of official weather information and keepers of the equipment that produces this information.

What does it mean to be a meteorological scientist and how is this claim linked to the microculture of groups of meteorologists? Forecasters are assigned different tasks and define their occupation in various ways. Having examined three local offices of the National Weather Service, this chapter argues that any orientation toward science and work is created by groups with their own shared pasts. Local conditions matter. By examining the office culture at the Chicago office, their impressions of other offices, and those offices' images of the Chicago office, it is argued that the relationship between particular work tasks and occupational identity varies, an outcome of tradition, resources, and organizational structure.

This chapter explores the production of the future. How do meteorologists create forecasts to contain uncertainty? Meteorologists rely on gathered data in conjunction with models that provide a theoretical infrastructure. This affects the data to be collected. But if this was all that was necessary, forecasters would not be needed, so humans carve out a domain of personal expertise, selecting among alternate models, doubting the adequacy of data, and then adding their own experience. Armed with data, theory, and experience, the organization provides legitimacy that is crucial for the presentation of these public predictions. Meteorologists, like other future workers, are authorized to predict by their sponsors. They are mandated to colonize the future.

This chapter explores public science as communication. Specifically, it addresses four aspects of the occupational tasks of meteorologists: how they coordinate their forecasts with others inside their office and with other National Weather Service offices; the art of writing forecasts and forecast discussions, suggesting how meteorologists think about their words; how forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center use visual representations (“boxes”) to claim their authority, emphasizing that communication is not necessarily tied to words; and the technological change the author of this book observed during his research in which a computerized forecast system was introduced. In this system meteorologists manipulated a database, which removed the authority to create the written forecast from the meteorologist.

This chapter discusses how Carl-Gustav Rossby’s research school not only influenced international meteorology generally, but also overcame the initial skepticism of both theoretical and applied meteorologists who doubted that numerical weather prediction was a valid and necessary technique for extending meteorological theory and improving weather forecasting. Founder of two meteorology programs in the United States (those at MIT and the University of Chicago), responsible for wartime training, and founder of the first peer-reviewed meteorological journal in the United States and of a Swedish journal aimed at the broader international geophysics community, Rossby was in the perfect position to convince the international meteorological community of the wisdom of numerical weather prediction. Providing a series of Scandinavian meteorologists who could bridge the gap between synoptic (current weather analysis) and dynamic (atmospheric motions) meteorology, he played a significant and largely unheralded role in the successful development of numerical weather-prediction techniques.

This chapter discusses how US congressmen, especially Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, attempted to regulate weather control as a potential weapon to use offensively against enemies, diplomatic tool to keep allies within and bring non-aligned nations into the West Bloc, and domestic tool to keep the nation secure and its economy strong. Starting in fall 1950, Anderson and others introduced a variety of legislation that would have placed weather control firmly in the hands of the American state and kept it there with a Weather Control Commission modeled on the Atomic Energy Commission. But major stakeholders—military services, commercial meteorologists, and academic meteorologists—pushed back. The military wanted total control, the commercial meteorologists wanted no control, and the academics thought there was no control possible. Ultimately, Congress settled on the creation of a temporary Advisory Committee on Weather Control that would assess experimental and operational results and recommend further action to the president. The recommendation: continue conducting research on weather control. The day-to-day regulation of weather control? That was left to individual states.

This chapter addresses the work of meteorologists during the 1950s as they focused on understanding the underlying physics of precipitation processes. The weather control juggernaut, however, threatened to discredit the scientific reputation that meteorologists had earned during World War II, and so these scientists were pulled from their data and equations into science policy. The American Meteorological Society, for example, produced a policy statement and attempted to influence congressional efforts to regulate weather control. But meteorologists were not in agreement; some supported weather control research and others considered it a waste of time and money. Consequently, the weather control research agenda—within and outside the United States—took two separate paths: one attacked cloud physics and precipitation mechanisms while developing viable theoretical underpinnings, while the other looked for practical methods of controlling the weather. The Advisory Committee on Weather Control then took those results and recommended that the National Science Foundation become the overseer of US research efforts and that the US Congress fund them to do so.

The development of a record large El Niño event and its ensuing major effects on the nation’s weather over an eight-month period created a scientific event of major proportions. Key science-related questions that developed during El Niño 97-98 included: • Who was issuing El Niño -based climate predictions and for what conditions? • What kinds of weather conditions were caused by El Niño ? • What types of impacts were being projected as a result of the El Niño weather? • How accurate and useful were the El Niño -based climate predictions? • How accurate were the oceanic predictions relating to the development, intensification, and dissipation of El Niño 97-98? • Was the record-size event caused by global warming? Answers to such questions define the scientific information transmitted to the public, the scientific community, and decision makers during the event. This assessment focused on the scientific information that appeared during the period from May 1997 to June 1998, but it also included information that appeared a few months after El Niño ended (i.e., into early 1999), since these issuances reflect the thoughts and findings generated by scientists during the event. Topics assessed included: (1) the sources of the scientific information, (2) how the information was interpreted and by whom, (3) the accuracy of what was presented by different sources, and (4) the scientific issues that emerged, some of which involved disagreements and/or caused potential confusion for decision makers and the public. Most of the information assessed herein was extracted from the Internet, newspaper stories, and scientific documents published during the June 1997-June 1998 period. What scientific information relating to El Niño 97-98 was measured? We assessed the presentations of the physical descriptions of El Niño and ENSO and the predictions, the predictions based on El Niño conditions of future seasonal climate conditions as well as the resulting physical and societal impacts, the verifications of the seasonal climate predictions, and other, more general information about El Niño 97-98 that emerged, such as its magnitude in comparison to past El Niño events and its possible relationship to other conditions, such as global warming.

The long-range seasonal climate forecasts based on El Niño 97-98 conditions and issued from June through August 1997 for the fall, winter, and early spring conditions across the United States were accurate for many parts of the nation (see chapter 2). An important question concerns whether decision makers in weather-sensitive public and private organizations used these El Niño -derived seasonal forecasts. Most seasonal forecasters viewed with great confidence the predictions of a strong El Niño and associated precipitation, temperature, and storm anomalies expected across the United States. From their perspective, it was an opportune time to use and, presumably, to benefit from the forecasts. Our assessment of a large group of potential users of the seasonal forecasts sought to identify who used and did not use the forecasts, the reasons for their use or non use, and the applications and potential value of the forecasts derived from their use. Sector differences were assessed by sampling decision makers in agribusiness, water resources, utilities, and other sectors. Results of such use and non use investigations will help develop better, more effective strategies for disseminating climate forecasts (Pfaff et al, 1999). Another objective of this study was to understand the perceptions decision makers had of seasonal forecasts and how the successful predictions based on El Niño 97-98 may have modified those perceptions. Figure 5-1 presents a typical humorous media view of the forecasts. A survey of individuals was conducted to gather the desired information about how the seasonal forecasts based on El Niño 97-98 were obtained, evaluated, and incorporated into decisions. The study was designed to focus on decision makers in weather-sensitive positions and to employ sampling techniques tested and developed in prior surveys. These previous studies had developed, tested, and used questionnaires as the tool by which to gather information about the use of climate information by weather-sensitive users in water resources, agribusiness, and utilities (Changnon, 1982, 1991, 1992; Changnon and Changnon, 1990; Changnon etal, 1988, 1995; Sonka etal, 1992).

El Niño 97-98 will be remembered as one of the strongest ever recorded (Glantz, 1999). For the first time, climate anomalies associated with the event were anticipated by scientists, and this information was communicated to the public and policy makers to prepare for the “meteorological mayhem that climatologists are predicting will beset the entire globe this winter. The source of coming chaos is El Niño . . .” (Brownlee and Tangley, 1997). Congress and government agencies reacted in varying ways, as illustrated by the headlines presented in Figure 7-1. The link between El Niño events and seasonal weather and climate anomalies across the globe are called teleconnections (Glantz and Tarlton, 1991). Typically, during an El Niño cycle hurricane frequencies in the Atlantic are depressed, the southeast United States receives more rain than usual (chapter 2), and parts of Australia, Africa, and South America experience drought. Global attention became focused on the El Niño phenomenon following the 1982-1983 event, which, at that time, had the greatest magnitude of any El Niño observed in more than a century. After El Niño 82-83, many seasonal anomalies that had occurred during its two years were attributed, rightly or wrongly, to its influence on the atmosphere. As a consequence of the event, societies around the world experienced both costs and benefits (Glantz et al., 1987). Another lasting consequence of the 1982-1983 event was an increase in research into the phenomenon. One result of this research in the late 1990s has been the production of forecasts of El Niño (and La Niña) events and the seasonal climate anomalies associated with them. This chapter discusses the use of climate forecasts by policy makers, drawing on experiences from El Niño 97-98, which replaced the 1982-1983 eventas the” climate event of the century.” The purpose of this chapter is to draw lessons from the use of El Niño -based climate forecasts during the 1997-1998 event in order to improve the future production, delivery, and use of climate predictions. This chapter focuses on examples of federal, state, and local responses in California, Florida, and Colorado to illustrate the lessons.