I am working my way through Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820 by Vladimir Jankovic and finding it very rewarding. Even though I am only through the introduction and first chapter, I wanted to mark down some passages that I think are interesting for framing my research. I think the history of meteorology is a really cool framework for my current cloud research because while there are many themes that reoccur, clouds are not mentioned very often (at least in Jankovic’s writing). This necessitates an explanation of why clouds are important and how they have become more important (thus, an explanation and brief history of climate change) .
Jankovic begins by emphasizing the enormous role that weather played in people’s lives and that “english weather was not just about its rains, but also about national commerce, politics, religion or the esthetics of ‘skyscapes'”(2). He asks a very poignant question- “How can science assimilate these life-shaping agencies into a dimension of mere “nature”?” (3). This leads into an exploration of how meteorology differs from other sciences. He says, “In such activities, the ability to separate the immediate experience from its scientific representation – believed to be a sine qua non of the scientists ability to observe the fundamental and ignore the irrelevant – requires alienation from the setting’s sights, sounds, smells, or surprises”(3). Early meteorology focused heavily on reports of extreme or unusual weather. This follows Bacon’s line of reasoning that “nature spoke more clearly when it sported itself in the “out-of–ordinary””(4). Like today, unusual weather was often reported in media and thus brought greater recognition to its observer than day to day observations. Unusual weather captures the public’s imagination just as “preachers had reasons to descibe storms as divine signs, and if politicians had reason to translate then into national issues, so naturalists had reasons to see see them as facts”(5).
He also mentions that recently historians have argues that “our understanding of science depends on an understanding of the local setting in which it is produced and that the conditions of knowledge depends on the naturalists location in a social and physical space”(5). To me this necessitates studying the ARM facility in the Southern Great Plains as the locale of this study and well as the social and possibly political factors involved. This also helps to weave in a multidisciplinary methodology.