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Predicting the weather By Bill Miller Jul 10, 2022 12:15 AM A A “The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more.” — John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath” Sometimes, while snooping though history, you come upon something totally unexpected that almost seems like something we saw on television last night or read in today’s newspaper — what Mark Twain may have said was the “rhyme of history.” By 1934, the Dust Bowl’s sandpaper winds had already scraped America’s southern plains into a prolonged drought. Crops were ripped away and livestock died of starvation. “Does This Mean U.S. Is Becoming Vast Desert?” said a newspaper headline that spring. When asked, most weather experts believed droughts were just an ordinary part of weather cycles, nothing to worry about. However, one expert disagreed. Dr. William Jackson Humphreys warned that the country and the world were only at the beginning of “the greatest climatic change in all the recorded history of mankind.” For 30 years, Humphreys had been a meteorological physicist for the National Weather Service. Considered “the foremost living authority on peculiarities of weather,” Humphreys, if not the first, may have been among the earliest to predict the climate change that continues in controversy today. Even his arguments seem to echo today’s newspapers. “We have found,” Humphreys told a reporter, “that for the last 50 years the weather in the United States, and in other parts of the world, except the tropics, has been growing slowly warmer.” Because the increase was so gradual, he said the average person wouldn’t be able to notice it. His climate predictions were beyond dire. Polar ice, he said, was melting faster than winter and humans were able to replace it. The decreased supply of ice meant fewer raindrops. Wind patterns would also change, further thinning the water vapor, further decreasing rainfall. At first, some areas might receive 10 inches less each year — or more. Less rain meant longer dry spells, he said, forcing “men, women and children to flee, as the ”great drought,“ gradually renders useless for human habitation vast stretches of land in the temperate zone, now the fairest and most fruitful in the world.” Where would they go? Perhaps they would migrate to the now warmer and dryer North and South Poles. “Never before in the history of the world,” Humphreys said, “has the fate of so many human beings been dependent upon the will of a capricious Nature. It is safe to assume that many hundreds of millions of humans will be forced to uproot themselves and find habitations in distantly removed parts of the world.” Humphreys noted that humans have always been migratory creatures; however, “those earlier migrations will seem on a relatively small scale as compared to the movement necessitated by the increasing aridity of those regions which now are the finest and fairest in the world.” He closed with a few rays of hope. None of this, he said, would happen for at least 5,000 years, a figure that doesn’t rhyme with what we are told today. He had confidence that the Weather Bureau, “or its successor in the centuries to come,” would continue to study the question of climate change and have plenty of time to warn the public of imminent danger. It’s amazing what you can accidentally find, even when you’re not looking. As President Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “Forgotten Voices of WWI.” Reach him at [email protected].