The Weather Experiment by Peter Moore; book review

Giant waves hit the lighthouse wall at Whitehaven, as the stormy weather is causing disruption across parts of the UK with power cuts, ferry and train cancellations and difficult driving conditions. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday Decembe (Owen Humphreys/PA Wire )

Remember the “barbecue summer” of 2009? Equipped with all that modern technology has to offer, that April, the Met Office told Britain to strip off and get ready to sizzle sausages in the back garden. Three soggy, wretched months later, by which time a tornado had hit the north of Scotland, the Met Office put out a “revised” forecast, noting that “seasonal forecasting is still a new science”.

The Met Office was mildly chastened but no heads rolled. We are used to forecasters making a hash of it. Mid-Victorian Britain less forgiving, however. Perhaps because predicting the weather really then was “a new science”, the bar was set correspondingly high. When Robert FitzRoy, the government’s first chief meteorologist, got a few storm warnings wrong in the 1860s, he was shredded in the Times, which had been the first newspaper to carry his forecasts. Downcast, FitzRoy slashed his own throat.

FitzRoy was obviously oversensitive - but he also a victim of the Victorians’ inflated expectations of scientific progress. Before the 19th century, people did not have the foggiest about the weather. Christianity taught that God hovered above the clouds and periodically sent plagues, droughts and floods “to visit the wickedness of such as dwell upon the earth” as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer put it, grimly. What changed everything was the erosion of belief in the literal accuracy of the Bible plus the invention of the electrical telegraph. It was the telegraph that enabled FitzRoy to collect daily weather reports from the corners of the land, slap them together and send out a digest to the newspapers. The nation went mad for these predictions. As Moore relates, the Fitzroy family was amazed one day to find Queen Victoria’s servants at the door, wanting a forecast for the Isle of Wight, as Her Maj was about to sail over there.

Moore describes FitzRoy as the embodiment of many of the contradictions of the Victorian age. A crusty snob in some ways, he shared in the prevailing feeling of excitement about scientific advances, while struggling to reconcile them with his religious beliefs. Apparently, he squared the discovery of the dinosaurs with the Bible by maintaining that dinos must have died out because they were too big to fit into Noah’s Ark.

FitzRoy was a fascinating if ultimately tragic character and Moore deserves credit for bring out the revolutionary significance of his work. Unfortunately for the purposes of the book, however, he was not the only granddaddy of modern weather forecasting, which the fruit of a huge team of characters, spread over several countries and generations. Moore gives each his due, which is fair enough, but FitzRoy’s own story - which seems the most interesting - as a result is interwoven with those of many others. As we jump back and forth between Britain, Holland, France and America it can be hard to follow the thread, and at times reading the book is like trying to follow a play in which dozens of characters are all talking at once. I would have preferred a narrower focus on “the great prognosticator of the weather”, as the newspapers called FitzRoy after his death, whose “ideal of a public weather service,” Moore justly observes, “has not only survived but become integral to our way of life”.