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Beware the weather gods Our obsession with climate has ancient roots

Just like the ancient Celts, we're still obsessed with weather (Photo by RAKESH BAKSHI/AFP via Getty Images)

Just like the ancient Celts, we're still obsessed with weather (Photo by RAKESH BAKSHI/AFP via Getty Images)


September 25, 2024   5 mins

I drove home at midnight on Saturday through thunder and lightning, that stretched from horizon to horizon like a scene from the end of the world. The mood was made eerier by having eaten dinner outdoors, a scant few miles away, on a patio somehow unvisited by this howling storm. 

There, the conversation touched on a book heralding the return of enchantment, terror, and awe to the world. And as the sky seemed to tear around me, it was as if that uncanny feeling of the world’s aliveness was suddenly all around me.

Cocooned in my warm, dry car, it felt exhilarating: insulated from the wild elements by my mechanical bubble. But that sense of engineered safety has, at a broader level, grown shakier recently – not least because there have been more wild elements about than usual. The weekend’s rain prompted flood warnings across England, and by Monday homes, streets, and cars were flooded. Schools, roads, and train routes were closed. There was even a ‘mini-tornado’ in Luton

Is our weather getting more uncanny? The press thinks so: it’s as though we want it to be getting worse. A chilly spell in summer is “the coldest on record”; a wet month “the wettest”. Headlines about “extreme” weather are common, while you have to read more than halfway down the Met Office’s page on “extreme rainfall” in the UK to discover that this is “within past natural variation”. 

In other words: in keeping with the usual British climate, nothing is still happening, changeably, and with lots of precipitation. But even business more or less as usual has become a dread omen: “Never-ending rain” is now promised as our winter future – and not just any old rain but “20% wetter” rain. Even small variations in temperature merit panicky headlines: earlier this year there was great merriment in India after the Mirror warned of a “heatwave” rising as high as 26 degrees, which for a subcontinent accustomed to ambient temperatures well above 40 might mean putting on a cardigan.

There’s some justice to the sniggering. The defining feature of our climate is that while it’s sometimes unkind to picnickers or cricket-lovers, it’s rarely aggressively hostile. The worst it’s conventionally likely to do is bore us to distraction, through yet another miserable winter afternoon. Following his first visit to England in 1955, the Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri concluded that the English must derive their characteristically even temper from this changeable but mild climate – not least because, he observed, once transplanted to the stark heat of the subcontinent that serenity swiftly soured into a far more unpleasant ill-temper.

The historian Robert Winder made a similar case more recently, arguing in The Last Wolf (2017) that beyond anything else, the English are the way they are because of the landscape and weather. And yet, wonders Paul Kingsnorth in response: is that still true? Certainly, the derision that greeted Robert Jenrick for invoking “English identity” recently suggests we’re no longer quite as sure who we are. And if Kingsnorth is right, this uncertainty may be connected to our relative insulation from climate and landscape. 

Certainly, meeting thunder and lightning in the chilly, hand-to-mouth world of Bronze and Iron Age Britain must have been awe-inspiring and frightening in equal measure. No wonder the ancient Celts would burn human sacrifices to propitiate Taranis, the god of thunder and lightning. And in Anglo-Saxon Britain Þunor, a fierce god whose rumbling carriage wheels made the thunder, was so widely venerated he was often specifically named in baptismal vows as one of the deities being renounced. 

It’s not difficult to imagine that the confrontation with climate you’d experience in mostly un-heated and far less waterproof Bronze Age England would help shape both individual characters, and the culture of wider communities in that environment By contrast, while I enjoyed the midnight thunderstorm over East Anglia, I remained largely cut off from it. It felt thrilling, but not overwhelming.

When I think of traditional English foods, clothing, and festivals, many of these (such as stodgy puddings) only make sense if you live largely outdoors and your home has no central heating. So perhaps Kingsnorth is right, and the great enemy of national identity is really modernity and its technologies, in the many ways these uproot us from the spirit of a place and climate. And yet, paradoxically, it’s this same arc of modernity which is now conjuring the weather gods back into the world today.

“It’s this same arc of modernity which is now conjuring the weather gods back into the world today.”

Whether it’s caused by gods, fairies, or climate change, chaotic weather spells catastrophe for farming cultures. Over four centuries ago, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream captured that sense of deep unease: 

“…The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.”

Perhaps more than any other English literary figure, Shakespeare had one foot in the medieval world and one in early modernity. In the centuries that followed him, science and technology marched relentlessly on, driving back the weather gods — and even the fairies — while advancing our control over and protection from our environment. In its wake the world has grown a great deal more comfortable; but the price was what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “disenchantment”: the loss of magic and mystery from the world, replaced with a more banal universe of legibility and mastery. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream we can see that slow retreat of enchantment: here, climate chaos is not — as it was for the Celts — a frightening reality that prompts human sacrifice, but a jolly device in a play, caused by fairies quarrelling.

Modernity, then, disenchanted the world by controlling it through technology. Now, though, four centuries further into that arc of discovery and power, the weather gods are back — but this time as byproducts of modernity: first with the reported threat of climate change, and secondly thanks to the power of big data to visualise these changes. 

Today, those charts and visualisations are at everyone’s fingertips, in our ubiquitous smartphones. There’s even an app called “Weather Gods” that promises to “immerse” me in climate data with graphs, sounds, and cute personifications of the elements. It grants an illusion of control over the weather — but, in practice, all I actually get is slightly more precise guidance on whether I should take an umbrella with me than I’d get from looking at the sky and making a judgement call. The same also goes for all the charts and graphs which support the torrent of dire warnings about the effect modernity itself is having, in aggregate, on the weather. No matter how many warnings or calls to action are published, emissions go on rising.

And this is because both the weather, and aggregate human consumption, are types of complex and self-propelling dynamic systems that we can see, thanks to measurement and data visualisation, but which remain radically resistant to influence. In other words: exactly the kind of mysterious force that earlier times might have personified as a god or demon.

Of course, after four centuries of disenchantment we’re out of the habit of using such a florid term as “god” or “demon”. And yet, for all that we’re having the conversation in a “sciencey” register instead, with charts and computer models and so on, the subtext is still closer to the ancient Celts’ relation to the sky. What it expresses is a deep fear that we’re making the weather gods angry: a fear now so widespread it pervades the public conversation even in a temperate country where nothing much really has changed about the weather. 

In the light of this fear, we notice every little blip, each of which is now documented, measured, tabulated and pored over as possible evidence of “climate change”. And it’s not so much that the weather is worse than usual, but that we are expecting it to be worse, because a larger narrative about excess, greed, overreach and vengeful gods has told us it’s going to be. If it’s ironic that our modern lifestyles are conjuring their retribution, it’s even more ironic that the sciencey stuff is itself now encouraging us to see the climate in these terms, as a vengeful deity.  

Whereas ancient peoples made gods of the weather in the absence of information, we are re-awakening these gods as a byproduct of too much. And what these ancient and post-modern forms of weather god have in common is the sense of powerlessness, awe, and fear that comes with confronting the presence of forces greater than us: in a word, re-enchantment. 

We might, perhaps, find the presence of these figures easier to bear if we were willing to acknowledge them more directly. For it is growing apparent that “disenchantment” was the dream all along. It was an effect of the illusion that we were ever in control: an illusion the weather gods can shatter at will, with a single thunderbolt.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Matt Woodsmith
Matt Woodsmith
19 days ago

I did read recently the view that western views on climate catastrophisim are a fundamentally Christian viewpoint, even if unconsciously. In this argument, it’s standard millenarian judgement day style preaching, preaching to us that the end of the world is on its way, and it’s our fault, for we have sinned massively. Do societies such as China and India, with less Christian influence view climate change differently?

J Bryant
J Bryant
19 days ago
Reply to  Matt Woodsmith

That’s an interesting question.

Chipoko
Chipoko
17 days ago
Reply to  Matt Woodsmith

Climate change fundamentalism (fascism), which is a religious theme of the Woking Class, is a marxist-orientated philosophy aimed at transferring wealth from the western, white supremacist ‘democracies, to the Third World under the guise of ‘reparations’ for the misery of climate change inflicted on them by evil capitalism.

Matt M
Matt M
19 days ago

Lovely article!

I, for one, have never noticed any consistent change in British weather patterns since I were a lad (b 1974).

I sometimes wonder if some people who say it is hotter nowadays are just not factoring in that they are fatter and older than they were 40-odd years ago and so feel the heat more.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
18 days ago
Reply to  Matt M

Brilliant comment. As a thin person I always feel cold but those hefty people around me boast that they don’t need heating until November.

Martin M
Martin M
18 days ago
Reply to  Matt M

How did you know that I am fatter and older than I was 40 years ago?

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
18 days ago
Reply to  Matt M

Not to mention more you get generally more stressed as you get older.

I could keep calm and hardly sweat in hot temperatures as a single younger man.

Married with young kids, for example, I never feel cool even when in the AC!

Paul K
Paul K
18 days ago
Reply to  Matt M

Well, I was born two years apart from you and I’ve noticed enormous changes. Growing up in greater London, we would get snow every winter, and a decent amount of it – enough to make snowmen reliably in the gardens of the suburbs, and to go sledging every January on the local hill. November 5th, Bonfire Night, was always freezing – it required gloves, woolly hats and scarves. It was always frosty and you could see your breath. None of this happens now. I’ve talked to a lot of people of my generation and background and it turns out I’m not just imagining it. Today, it is so obviously warmer in winter that it’s bizarre it could even be controversial to say so.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Exactly this – I’m often still wearing a t shirt in October these days

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Of course, weather that changes during one’s lifetime of around 85 years is truly indicative and is a robust sample set to conclude that a trend is taking place. Unless you understand that the earth is around 4 billion years old and 85 years is but a flash in time.

Paul K
Paul K
18 days ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

True but irrelevant. I was responding to someone who was claiming that British weather had not changed since 1974. It clearly has. The cause, or causes, are another matter. We are unlikely to get to the bottom of them on an Internet comments section, especially one full of people invested in pretending that all climate scientists are communists.

mike otter
mike otter
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Evidence from my garden – food and flowering plants – shows a 15-20% fall in yield over the last 50 years. Causes could be lower temperature, less rain, less pollinators, more pesticides etc etc, What it isn’t caused by is more rain or warmer climate as that would increase yields in all plants i grow. (I don’t bother with broad leaved brasicas, turnips, potatoes and other lovers of cool and damp). Looking at the local cricket league records there’s certainly more stoppage and abandoned matches in the last 20 years but its only by 5%. Unlike “climate science” this is actual evidence – scant, weak, easily falsified BUT evidence non the less. Not all climate scientists are fake but the vast majority are. You can’t fake paleo-climate or tree ring evidence w/o faking data – which is how the CRUD lot at Norwich got caught. Did they get sacked- no they failed upward to dizzying heights of academic splendour. I expect they have a lot of what Neil Oliver calls “baubles”.

Tony Price
Tony Price
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Someone downvoted you so apparently it is! Why I have no idea as it is blindingly obvious that winters are generally warmer in London than they have been in my (66 years) lifetime – snow is now unusual when previously it was expected.

carl taylor
carl taylor
18 days ago
Reply to  Tony Price

I agreed with the original ‘since 1974’ sentiment, because my childhood was spent outside of London. I now live in London and I expect it to be warmer over winter in a huge capital city pumping out heat and light. Might technological change over the last 60 years be responsible for London’s winter climate rather than the weather? Just a thought.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Memories of my life in NYC have me agreeing with you. In particular, the nights are warmer than back in the 70s. But this easily fits within the record of natural variability. The weather might be different but that change was always expected. In fact it would be a bit odd to expect things to remain the same.
At the same time though, I remember much more variety and sudden changeability. Weather used to be a bit of an adventure.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

London must we colder than Scotland because we only saw snow enough to make a snowman once in the 5 years, 74-79, we lived just outside of Aberdeen. And it lasted one day.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Mr Paul Kingsnorth is that you? Whether or not you are that influential thinker and sometime contributor here, I hope you’ll continue to comment, offering your thoughts and varying the direction of the (un)herd a bit more.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
15 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

The changes you have observed occur when areas become more urbanised, with more concrete, more tarmac, more buildings, and less vegetation.

It is most obviously detected in meteorological data, where a weather station starts off, in a field, in the countryside. Then those that take the twice daily readings ask for a shed in which to keep the maintenance equipment, and a path. Then they want a hut, to make a cup of tea, and a road, for their vehicle. Then it’s an office, and a garage. It continues until there’s a community, a village and tennis courts, of course! And even some air conditioning, that can output plenty of heat.

And, all the while, the amount of tarmac and concrete that absorb the sun’s radiation increases, pushing the temperature higher. It’s called the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect:
http://www.surfacestations.org

It’s very useful for those wanting some scary data and, not so surprisingly, many of the newer stations are just a badly affected:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/03/01/met-office-temperature-network-is-junk

annabel lawson
annabel lawson
15 days ago
Reply to  Paul K

Too right. (I’m 87) going to bed dressed like Nanook of the North.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
18 days ago
Reply to  Matt M

It certain seems to be getting warmer though. Here in Kent it always snowed when I was a kid; the last significant snow we had was in 2010, and even then a few inches. Last winter we had precisely one night of frost.

Saul D
Saul D
18 days ago

Spotting trends in the weather is complicated by the fact that lifetimes are relatively short compared to the data. As statistical data, you’d need to have 30 adult summers to understand what a ‘typical’ summer is – so probably need to be in your mid-40s to ‘know’ about the weather from personal experience (if you can remember accurately and not cherry-pick the ‘memorable’ summers). So in some ways, younger people are still discovering what their ‘normal’ is to be.
What that means is that patterns like the Seine flooding Paris every thirty years, or so, end up as generational shocks, because we don’t live long-enough to see it as a repeating cycle. We forget why we needed floodplains or how powerful sea or wind erosion are.
The global warming trend of about 1.2C now over the past 120 years is such that we can’t really tell, as individuals, what life was like when it was that bit colder (and to reverse it, if we were in 1900 would it make sense to panic about a rise of 1.2C to now?). Sea level is about 30cm higher, but we don’t really notice, because our rate of building and development is such that we regenerate human cities and spaces every 30-50 years, and our mastery of geography is that we change the world faster than the weather – such as draining the polders or creating huge lakes behind river dams. We imagine today’s weather is the way it has always been, and panic if it varies beyond our personal experiences, not grasping the scale of time involved in real change.

mike otter
mike otter
18 days ago
Reply to  Saul D

Interesting – they say economic memory is 20-25 years, direct war or displacement memories 75 years, indirect could be longer: 1389 Kosovo, 1690 Boyne -Gaugamela anyone?. I am sure there are older examples. Considering climate has very little impact compared to recessions, progroms, wars etc its no wonder we only remeber the exceptional events.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
15 days ago

“(W)e are expecting (the weather) to be worse, because a larger narrative about excess, greed, overreach and vengeful gods has told us it’s going to be.”
And who specifically is borrowing this atavistic fear of weather gods to drive a very modern anti-Western agenda? The usual Progressives determined in their pathological self-hatred to bring down the whole modern culture around our heads.

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
19 days ago

Well, since climate change is a religion, it make’s sense that its believers should live in fear of a “vengeful deity” louring upon our houses. The trick will be to convince these zealots that there is something more sensible to believe in, science, for instance.

jane baker
jane baker
19 days ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

The Science ha ha ha

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
19 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Not to confuse small s-science with the Big S-Science which is Big Settled (BS for short).

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Of course not. Because you and those who share your approximate perspective have the knowledge and discernment to separate the real from the fake, using lowercase bs—which stands for “bellicose smugness”.

jane baker
jane baker
18 days ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

I know. I was being obnoxious. Yes,a big difference between science and The Science

Kathleen Burnett
Kathleen Burnett
19 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Do you use any electrical devices?

Brett H
Brett H
19 days ago

Just the ones they apply to her head.

Philip May
Philip May
18 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

thanks for the laugh.

jane baker
jane baker
18 days ago

No,I live in a shed and get my water in a bucket.

Kathleen Burnett
Kathleen Burnett
18 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Okay, you’re a hypocrite. No problem.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
18 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Science is good. Scientists are bad.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
19 days ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Science isn’t something to be “believed” in. It’s a process, always open to revision in the light of new findings – the very opposite of blind belief.

There is, however, skewed ‘science’ which occurs when so-called scientists fall foul of their prejudices and end up seeking to confirm their bias.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
18 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Yes, as I scientist I am pleased that you are saying this. Today, scientists think they’ve discovered something and leak their findings to the press. This is not science, of course. What is then needed is the patient repeating of the process to establish that the discovery is a real fact, not just a theory. Science now has a bad name.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
18 days ago

The fact that science is more about “attempted refutation” than proving theories appears to be equally unknown.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
18 days ago

science has replaced Christianity as the West’s main religion. Ironically, of course.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
15 days ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

You mean ‘The Science’ has, as often acclaimed by PPE and History graduates.

mike otter
mike otter
18 days ago

“Science” only has a bad name when it refuses to adhere to the Mertonian norms or allow its findings and theories to be tested. The testing makes possible falsification and therefore modification of the theories. Warmist science, like Marxism, Christianity etc cannot be subject to test as they are matters of faith and belief, not science. The first two try to present as scientific in an Elizabeth Homes kind of way to achieve power. The latter doesn’t even bother and continues to pedal myths deprive it of even pseudo-science status.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
15 days ago
Reply to  mike otter

All those ways of viewing the World can be checked for usefulness, and most are useful to an extent, but some have undesirable side effects.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
18 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

The scientific method involves careful observation coupled with rigorous scepticism, since cognitive assumptions can distort the interpretation of the observation, leading to the creation of a hypothesis through inductive reasoning which you then attempt to disprove by means of experimentation and statistical analysis, adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.
It is clear that “climate scientists” have abandoned any pretence of scepticism or attempting to disprove their hypothesis. All they do is look for any evidence to support their theory of climate change and ignore anything that doesn’t.
See the below quote. OK taken from the Christian Monitor but it seems fair enough
In late August of last year, a climate scientist named Patrick Brown, along with seven co-authors, published a study in the journal Nature about the connections between wildfires in California and global warming.
It was also, Dr. Brown claimed publicly just a month later, untrustworthy. Dr. Brown confessed in a Free Press article that he had framed his research not just to reflect the truth, but to fit within what he described as the climate alarmist storyline preferred by prestigious journals in the United States. He did this, he says, by intentionally focusing only on climate as a factor in wildfires, and not on the myriad other causes that contribute to the blazes consuming ever more land across the country…….
And climate advocates skewered Dr. Brown as being everything from unhinged to unethical. His words, they said, would bolster what watchdog groups say is a new wave of climate denialism. 
“We’ll be hearing echoes of Brown’s impulsively emotional blurt for a very long time,” wrote Doug Bostrom on the website Skeptical Science, which was created to debunk climate misinformation. “Brown has caused durable material harm to climate progress. It’s to no good end.”

mike otter
mike otter
18 days ago

See how easily Lindsay, Pluckrose and the other guy got their hoax “papers” published simply by using jargon and BS. I remember Lindsay and Pluckrose as they wrote “Critical Theories”. Sadly the other guy has left my memory for now. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton did a similar job earlier. These would be good standard texts for when true scientific endeavour re-emerges. A reasoned persepective would help if we can bring the climate pseudo-scientists to law as we did their predecessors in 1945.

carl taylor
carl taylor
18 days ago
Reply to  mike otter

Peter Boghossian

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
17 days ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Every generation in history has believed that it was living in a time like no other. We’re no different. Climate change is happening – it just isn’t the big deal that the hysterics make it out to be.
Fifty years ago the great fear was nuclear holocaust. Nobody’s bothered about that now but, in reality, the danger is greater than ever. I’d give it five years after Iran begins producing fissile material before someone in the Tehran nuclear establishment sneaks some out to Hezbollah or Hamas and a major world city becomes uninhabitable.
But hey, sea levels have risen by three millimetres!!.

Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle
15 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Get your facts correct
Sea Levels have risen by 3 mm
Oh dear me far more than that
Over the last 100 yrs and the rise accelerating exponentially
Then once you find out just how much it is has risen
Multiply by 10 to cater for high spring and Autumn equinox tides in a storm situation
Then open a map of where you reside and if your location is less than one metre above existing sea levels
Time to put your property upon the market and move to ground
At least 100 metres above sea level and most certainly not any
Where within the vicinity of a river and a associated flood plain
If should you not , then abandonment shall be forced upon you as sure as serious default of your mortgage would

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
15 days ago
Reply to  Brian Doyle

You’re mad, you know. Your facts are pulled out of thin air. 100 meters above sea level? Madness! (According to NOAA, sea levels have risen, surprisingly steadily, about 1.2 feet in a hundred years for the past 7 or 8 thousand years.) So go sell your property if you want. But stop trying to scare the little children and the old people.
A hobby might help. And, please don’t go anywhere near the beach. There are sharks; big ones.

jane baker
jane baker
19 days ago

But this new chaotic weather plus is s inflicted on us by scientists in the pay of …who? Well Bill Gates is one name often cited,but then Bill Gates is cited for everything probably because he is 100% guilty. If it looks like a duck it is a duck. Science can now move blocks of electricity through the air. That is how they start “wildfires”. That is how they can precipitate rain. This is not science fantasy. It is science fact. All those white 5G boxes and tall towers. They are to,one day,FRY YOUR BRAIN if you don’t comply. 5G is a MILITARY INSTALLATION and the Enemy is YOU.

Brett H
Brett H
19 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

. Science can now move blocks of electricity through the air. 
Nature does that too. That’s why there were wildfires centuries ago when we were still developing tools.

jane baker
jane baker
18 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Too bad I won’t be around to throw a bucket of water over you when they throw the switch

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
18 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

I’m assuming satire.

jane baker
jane baker
18 days ago
Reply to  Ian Wigg

My late Mum always said “never assume anything” I mean Believe in Your Dream work hard and Never Give Up we all assume to be true dont we. We’ve watched enough Disney movies. Well some have. But is it true? The Yanks say “if hard work made you rich ditch diggers would be millionaires

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  Ian Wigg

I hope that’s at least partly true. But I don’t think ranting and raving, however feigned or sincere, rises to the level of satire. Farce maybe.

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
18 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Go and take your meds before we continue this discussion.

jane baker
jane baker
19 days ago

Cloudbusting by Kate Bush is more relevant now than when it was written.

J Bryant
J Bryant
19 days ago

A lovely essay. When I hiked in the mountains much more than I do now, I was acutely aware of the weather. There’s the old saying that the mountains make their own weather and it’s true.
Thunder and lightning are truly terrifying if you’re caught out by it in a mountain valley and you see a tree being struck. You instinctively cower and that’s a protection of sorts: make yourself small, crouch on all fours if necessary, preferably on a plastic/rubber sleep mat that’s non-conducting. There’s a scientific understanding of electrical behavior in your actions, but there’s also an instinctive prostration before the weather gods.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Well said. For those who allow some wisdom to parts of old writing, Proverbs 1:7 calls fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom (or “knowledge”; translations vary) not its goal or culmination. Of course the text is the same for readers who ridicule and dismiss every line of the Bible, along with almost everything else that seems to emerge from “superstitious times”.
In large measure, we’re still at the mercy of Forces beyond our control and understanding, whether natural, providential, or both. Heavy weather has power to send a reminder of that. As with foxholes, you’ll find few committed atheists in a tornado.

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
19 days ago

the Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri concluded that the English must derive their characteristically even temper from this changeable but mild climate – not least because, he observed, once transplanted to the stark heat of the subcontinent that serenity swiftly soured into a far more unpleasant ill-temper.
There might be something to that: having grown up in the closest thing climate-wise the United States has to England, the Pacific Northwest, I do perceive that after having been transplanted to a location with more extreme weather I’ve become more irritable and my weather-sense is all screwed up–it’s too frequently sunny here and thunderstorms can blow up out of nowhere, leading to a constant mild sense of meteorological paranoia.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
19 days ago

I started out in the Pacific Northwest too, where did you end up?

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
18 days ago

Midwest.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago

Way to pinpoint your location for us!
Fair enough on the evasiveness front, but in your estimation how many states belong to the Midwest?

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
18 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Enough

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
19 days ago

Harlan Ellison, the SF writer, wrote a series of stories exploring what new gods would be like. When one considers the gods of wokeism, going back to the Chronos of wokeism, Marxism, one realizes his dangerous visions were pretty much right on the money. Which is ironic because he was in no way a conservative.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

“In Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” is one of the most disturbing stories of all time!

Criticism from within (so to speak) may be ironic, but it’s also not without precedent or parallel. Orwell was firmly, not uncritically, a man of the left, but took apart the evils and hypocrisies of totalitarian socialism (or “oligarchical collectivism”) in his two major cautionary works.

William F. Buckley was quite effective in diagnosing the psychosis and toxic backwardness among extreme reactionaries like those in the John Birch crowd. When it comes to ideology—or anti-ideological good sense—some of the best victories are in “intramural” games.

Brett H
Brett H
19 days ago

What it expresses is a deep fear that we’re making the weather gods angry
Yes, and we must be punished. “Get on your knees you bad, bad boy and thank madam for your punishment.”

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
19 days ago

The mood was made eerier by having eaten dinner outdoors, a scant few miles away, on a patio somehow unvisited by this howling storm.”
This made me smile. We’ve had a summer of extremes in Austria – from months of heat (a constant 33°C-35°C: with no aircon in my flat, the indoor temp hovered around 30°C day and night from mid-June until September), we then had days and days of non-stop heavy rain and serious flooding.
In the days after the rain, I had several social engagements – all of which included a semi-dazed exclamation along the lines of “But…but…but…this time last week, we were swimming in the river/outdoor pool and it was 30°C!”
The weather swing was quite literally stunning. Disorienting.
In several ways it was fascinating. We watched in awe as the Wien river – usually no more than a lively stream that often dries out in summer close to where it meets the Danube Canal – become a raging torrent as the water all flowed down off the surrounding hills. And we were amazed at the forward-thinking construction of the 19th century engineers who built the flood defences for the expanding imperial city. They held out magnificently and kept us from suffering much worse damage in 2024.
I also realised why it is that Vienna has such good flood defences: it’s because the rich and the powerful have always coveted living space by/close to the water. Of course the projects that protect them were going to get done! We hill-dwelling plebs may have felt a little schadenfreude as we spent the rainy days cleaning our apartments and reading in armchairs rather than having our cellars pumped out.
Re: weather and general mood. I’m not sure whether the transplanting from rainy Yorkshire (via rainy London) to a continental climate has affected my general mood and irritability. I was moody before and I’m moody now. But my curly hair definitely likes the dry continental air better.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
18 days ago

Has anyone noticed that 2024 hasn’t been particularly warm compared to 2023. Last year the news channels showed wildfires everywhere and could happily predict the end of the world.
A recent book, written in 2022, predicted that 2023 would be super hot because of a massive underwater volcanic explosion (in 2022), which threw billions of litres of water vapour into the stratosphere – water being the most potent greenhouse gas. The same book said that 2024 would revert to normal. This was not reported in the media in 2023 because end-of-world stories were more newsworthy. There have been no news stories this year about the lack of wildfires.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
18 days ago

I’m surprised Greta or Al Gore haven’t proclaimed the need for a blue ribbon panel of experts to confront underwater volcanic explosions! How dare we!

Marianne Kornbluh
Marianne Kornbluh
18 days ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

Greta has now joined the crowd of Israel bashers – so climate change cannot be that bad in its consequence.

carl taylor
carl taylor
18 days ago

Of course, if you’re Palestinian (or trans, apparently) you are far more vulnerable to climate change than boring white people.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
18 days ago

I live in the Pacific Northwest of the USA (Oregon). There is an odd thing. All the news reports say we have had a “record” wildfire season. But in Portland, it doesn’t seem like it. I remember a few bad years just in the last five or so. Smoke blanketed the state for many weeks each summer. It was terrible. None of that this year. And yet apparently this is a “record year”. I don’t understand. Do the fires burn without smoke now?

Sam Rowland-Simms
Sam Rowland-Simms
18 days ago

This put me in mind of a passage in Four Quartets:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

Point of Information
Point of Information
18 days ago

More than a touch of woo to this and some of Harrington’s other recent articles. Are the crystal and incense shops of East Anglia getting to her?

Stay somewhere where people work and produce useful things – you’ll find there’s less time for gods and fairies – although they may be invoked in an emergency. In fact, fairy-busting has been a popular pastime of pragmatists for at least as long as there have been goblins, including by Shakespeare (on and off):

“He is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies
Julius Caesar, ii, 1.

Andrew Nellestyn
Andrew Nellestyn
18 days ago

As usual Mary has penned an entertaining and illuminating article. The weather as she summed it up so adequately speaks volumes and without hyperbole and doomsday scenarios: “ Headlines about “extreme” weather are common, while you have to read more than halfway down the Met Office’s page on “extreme rainfall” in the UK to discover that this is “within past natural variation”.

Katrina McLeod
Katrina McLeod
18 days ago

It wasn’t Charles Taylor who first called the modern loss of mystery and meaning ‘disenchantment’. It was Max Weber (Entzauberung) in (I think) “Politics as a Vocation” just after WW1.

Kelly Madden
Kelly Madden
18 days ago
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago

A return to vintage form for Ms. Harrington: a reflective stroll that isn’t overdetermined or cheaply political.

Of course there’s an apocalyptic religiosity that informs much of the doomsaying around climate. And a moralism that’s more or less divorced from scripture and traditional faith.

That doesn’t mean the worry is unfounded. But it’s useless unless it can shake off panic, and do something doable in the actual world we’re blessed to inhabit; the only world we’ll ever have as far as we know for sure, since cases for sustainable life on Mars or an afterlife—heavenly or hellish—remain inconclusive in the empirical sense.

Burning down our civilization in order to save it, or to restore Mother Earth, will not work. We need stronger appeals to a kind of enlightened self interest in which we protect and accept our neighbors for our own good. Yes, including those ones. Even our opponents.

The common opponents of such a cooperative restoration are the rabid extremists on either side of the overdrawn divide: both the climate/anti-Western extremists and the wrecking-ball populists.

No person or group of people gets to play the Lord of Destruction. Such people can advocate their destructive negativity to a point, but they must opposed, by non-violent means. Some can be talked down or “converted”, but not with ridicule or hatred.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
18 days ago

Brava!

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
18 days ago

I’m sticking with Odin. I like the ravens.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
18 days ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

Well it is Wodenesday in the old form, the Anglo-Saxon for “Odin’s Day”.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
18 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

The hump day commercial is pretty funny too,

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
18 days ago

George Santayana thought that the English carried their cool weather with them wherever they went and it became a sane oracle among ‘the deliriums of mankind’.
Though a cook might attribute English character to bland Yorkshire pudding if they were unfamiliar with polenta or similar.
C S Lewis loved to be immersed in weather. Actually to be immersed in the quiddity of it: the wetness of rain; the coldness of the air.