A Forecasting Classic in Hindsight

Previous articleNext article FreeSecond Look: Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the WeatherA Forecasting Classic in HindsightPeder RobertsPeder Roberts Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI begin this essay with a confession regarding the first time I laid eyes on Appropriating the Weather. The scene was the university bookstore. I was a rather naive and intellectually lazy graduate student, and while I immediately felt that I ought to read this book, I really didn’t want to. It was about Norway, yes; and Norwegian science in the early twentieth century looked like it would feature in my dissertation. But the front cover illustration evoked the mechanics of atmospheric phenomena—and memories of high school struggles with math and physics. And worse still, for someone who had recently grappled with poststructuralism for the first time, the introduction warned that “readers may discern the ghost of the late Michel Foucault lurking in some analyses and questions.”1 The book remained on the shelf.I felt an acute sense of embarrassment when I finally did read Appropriating the Weather and found in it an analysis that seemed clear and logical to the point of being uncontroversial. The particular form of modern meteorology that Vilhelm Bjerknes helped bring into being was contextually specific, a product of its time and place, of individuals who were engaged in creation as much as discovery. Meteorological forecasting actively helped to constitute the new understanding of the atmosphere that emerged in Bergen. The model of cyclone formation that adorned the book’s cover was an artifact built by flesh-and-blood historical actors seeking to create instruments through which atmospheric phenomena could be described and their consequences predicted. There was no sense that construction of models of the atmosphere somehow consigned the clouds and cyclones themselves to the status of figments of the imagination. The same individuals who were engaged in constructing a modern meteorology actually pushed for more attention to naked-eye observations of the clouds, emphasizing the need for the meteorologist to have access to a literal window through which to view the skies. Had the models not aided the production of forecasts that worked, the theories they informed would not have been built. The term “construction” quickly permeated—or perhaps saturated—my own writing.Reflecting on Appropriating the Weather more than a decade after my first encounter, I am struck by how lightly Friedman wears his learning. Foucault’s ghost does indeed lurk. But this is no poltergeist intent on destruction and bafflement. The underlying argument that a scientific research program is a human construction specific to a particular time and place, as are the models and theories it employs, succeeds in evoking the episteme without fetishizing it. The empirical dimensions of Friedman’s work are similarly impressive (although one never gets the sense that historical details are invoked unnecessarily). I recall feeling very smug when I got wind of a book from 1938 that described the dramatic effects of World War I on Norway’s economy and society—and then having a “but of course” moment when a Google search for its title directed me to Friedman’s footnotes.2Appropriating the Weather is a book that intertwines ideas, individuals, and institutions in a way that speaks to the spirit of its age, one that regarded discipline formation and research fields as products of social as well as intellectual context. A generation of scholarship has since made the strategic choices of actors a central element in the history of science conversation. This scholarship is informed not only by the historical and sociological studies with which Friedman identified but also by developments in STS such as actor-network theory, with its focus on agency and the language of allies and enrollment. Consider how ubiquitous terms like “center of calculation” have become as uncontroversial expressions of an accepted conceptual device within the history of science.3 Bjerknes’s quest for standardized terminology and enhanced networks for data collection might be placed within this frame. The book places great weight on following the historical actors—something Bruno Latour has pleaded for—and in my eyes it continues to stand tall through its emphasis on fine historical texture and the agency of individuals. The association of the Bergen School with Bjerknes personally cannot erase the creative power of the workers on the forecasting desk to make as well as merely calculate. Those workers were located within a specific set of intellectual, political, and economic currents, without which a different set of models would surely have emerged. Friedman was happy to accept the ominous word “necessity” as a factor in Bjerknes’s career and to emphasize the factors at the scale of the national (and beyond) that circumscribed his potential choices, leaving a sense that the Bergen School was both shaped and shaper.Like so many others, I think of the scientists I study as architects and builders of conceptual structures that reflect both the world they reside in and the material and immaterial resources they have to hand, rather than miners extracting nuggets of knowledge from the earth. It thus appears clear to me that Friedman did the Bergen School no disservice when he referred to its products as a “stopgap system” that used the technological, political, and economic resources of its time to produce “usable responses” to the demands of aviation (p. 245). This all seems so terribly obvious today, yet Friedman anticipated “grumbling and questioning” from readers about the concepts of construction and appropriation (and even the indefinite article in the book’s subtitle) (p. xi). On revisiting his footnotes, I note some concise but firm skepticism of studies that follow disembodied ideas through the history of meteorology. That discipline now has a rather different feel. When I heard James Rodger Fleming’s thoughtful analysis of Harry Wexler as an “entreprenour” it made intuitive sense to me, as did Kristine Harper’s fine study of the way agriculture and aviation alike shaped American meteorology in the years leading up to numerical weather prediction.4 I will leave it to others to judge definitively how significant a role Appropriating the Weather played in this historiographic shift, but the echoes that I sense in more recent works—particularly those concerned with the United States—lead me to suspect that it is substantial.Appropriating the Weather shares the anchoring in national historical contexts that informs many of Friedman’s later studies, so many of which reinforce the historiographic point that detailed attention to historical circumstances is an essential prerequisite for understanding the mechanics of science as both a practice and a product. Bjerknes’s run-ins with the infant Nobel Committee provided a taste of a meaty topic dealt with more thoroughly in The Politics of Excellence. Friedman’s study of the career of Harald Ulrik Sverdrup similarly combined the contexts for Sverdrup’s professional and personal choices, notably his decision to leave the burgeoning Scripps Institution of Oceanography—which he had helped to establish as a major player in marine science—and return to war-scarred Norway in 1948. An important and underappreciated essay on the role of civilization and national honor in Norwegian geophysics in the early twentieth century took a slightly different direction, examining how that discipline became a source of national pride and cultural prestige—a point asserted rather than examined in Appropriating the Weather.5Nonetheless, the book has never struck me as particularly “continental,” despite being so strongly embedded in a particular Norwegian milieu. The history of science in the Nordic countries has its own venerable texts, often written by Scandinavians themselves, for whom the language barrier presents no problem and the historical contexts are familiar rather than exotic. At times in the past, and perhaps also in the present, these works valorize a proud local tradition of science in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, including the legacies of notable national sons and daughters (Linnaeus is perhaps the best example). Neither then nor now do I get a sense that Friedman identified primarily with that quest. Appropriating the Weather seems to me a work that speaks to the history of science, one that drew its author to engage with the history of Norway in order to make a larger point with relevance beyond national boundaries. It has value for its insights on how to think about the history of meteorology—and beyond—insights that go far beyond its role as a standard reference for historians interested in the Bergen School and its legacy. The significant historical detail that Friedman assembled to ground his study is a means to a greater end.Friedman painted a picture of a meteorological system that could speak universally, drawing on data from around the world and informing forecasting far from Norway’s shores, while at the same time being grounded in dense local observations (and local concerns). I wonder if there is an analogy with the historiographic legacy of the book itself.NotesPeder Roberts has published widely on the history of science, industry, and environmental management in the polar regions during the twentieth century and on the history of midcentury oceanography. He is the leader of the European Research Council–sponsored project “Greening the Poles: Science, the Environment, and the Creation of the Modern Arctic and Antarctic.” Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, KTH Teknikringen 74D plan 5, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden; [email protected].1 Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), p. xiv (hereafter references to this book will appear in the text in parentheses).2 The book in question is Per Vogt, Jerntid og jobbetid: En skildring av Norge under verdenskrigen (Oslo: Grundt Tanum, 1938).3 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987).4 James Rodger Fleming, presentation at the conference “Exploring Ice and Snow in the Cold War,” Rachel Carson Center, Munich, 27–29 Jan. 2011; and Kristine Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).5 Robert Marc Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prizes in Science (New York: Freeman, 2001); Friedman, The Expeditions of Harald Ulrik Sverdrup: Contexts for Shaping an Ocean Science (La Jolla, Calif.: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1994); and Friedman, “Civilization and National Honour: The Rise of Norwegian Geophysical and Cosmic Science,” in Making Sense of Space: The History of Norwegian Space Activities, ed. John Peter Collett (Oslo: Scandinavian Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 3–39. 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Cognitive psychology · Economics · Hindsight bias · Data Visualization and Analytics · Forecasting Techniques and Applications · Philosophy · Psychology

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