Quotes about climate (and a few weather quotes)

                        Collected by Neville Nicholls
      Please email me any quotes you think should be added to this page

********************************************
The Rainy Day, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

*********************************************

The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a
comfortable room.
[Horace Walpole, Letter to William Cole, 1774]

Instead of the glorious and ever-memorable year 1759, as the newspapers
call it, I call it this ever-warm and victorious year. We have not had more
conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and West
Indies of sunshine.
[Horace Walpole, Letter to George Montagu, 1759]

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at
occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which
swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling
along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps
that struggled against the darkness. [Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul
Clifford, 1830]

Spring is the season of gaiety, and winter of terror; in spring the heart
of tranquillity dances to the melody of the groves, and the eye of
benevolence sparkles at the sight of happiness and plenty: in winter,
compassion melts at universal calamity, and the tear of softness starts at
the wailings of hunger and the cries of the creation in distress.
[Samuel Johnson, Rambler, 22 December 1750]

It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is
of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must
already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.
[Samuel Johnson, Idler, 24 June 1758]

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed
an army stretched out on the hills, resting. [Stephen Crane, The Red Badge
of Courage, 1895]

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway
leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast
sky— seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. [Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness, 1902]

This morning Mr Berkenshaw came again, and after he had examined me and
taught me something in my work, he and I went to breakfast in my chamber
upon a collar of brawn, and after we had eaten, asked me whether we had not
committed a adult in eating today; telling me that it is a fast day ordered
by the Parliament, to pray for more seasonable weather; it having hitherto
been summer weather, that it is both as to warmth and every other thing,
just as if it were the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague
(as all men think) to follow, for so it was almost the last winter; and the
whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day.
[Samuel Pepys, Diary, 15 January 1661/1662]

11: In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the
seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the
great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
12: And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
[The Bible, Genesis, 7]

6: And all the multitude sat trembling in the broad court of the temple
because of the present foul weather
[Esdras (Apocrypha), 9]
4: He that observeth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the
clouds shall not reap
[The Bible, Ecclesiastes 11]

...in January the gardener cultivates the weather. There is something
peculiar about the weather; it is never quite right. Weather always shoots
over the mark on one side or the other. The temperature never reaches the
hundred years' normal; it is either five degrees below or five degrees
above. Rainfall is either ten millimetres below the average or twenty
millimetres above; if it is not too dry, it is inevitably too wet.
[Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year, 1929; English translation 1931]

They call this war a cloud over the land but they made the weather then
they stand in the rain and say shit it's rainin.
[From the movie Cold Mountain; based on the novel by Charles Frazier]

Choosing shorts or long underwear on a particular day is about weather; the
ratio of shorts to long underwear in the drawer is about climate.
[Charles Wohlforth, The whale and the supercomputer. On the northern front
of climate change, North Point Press, 2004, p 150.]

It was certainly possible to argue that other, smaller effects would cancel
greenhouse gas warming, but the burden of proof belonged on those who made
such claims. Yet even as the evidence piled up on the side of the most
reasonable assumption, the public repeatedly spun off in weird directions,
with every “what if” given equal weight. It was as if a murder defendant
caught with a bloody weapon in one hand and a written confession in the
other were acquitted on the theory that an alien might have beamed him into
that position.
[Charles Wohlforth, The whale and the supercomputer. On the northern front
of climate change, North Point Press, 2004, p 169.]

 ***************************************
When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare.
[JRR Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1966]

When Spring unfolds the beechen leaf, and sap is in the bough;
When light is on the wild-wood stream, and wind is on the brow;
When stride is long, and breath is deep, and keen the mountain-air,
Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is fair!
[JRR Tolkein, The Two Towers, 1966]

 *******************************************

1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By the power of which the flower is created;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
6 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
In every wood and field has breathed life into,
7 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
T he tender new leaves, and the young sun
8 Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
Has run half its course in Aries,
9 And smale foweles maken melodye,
And small fowls make melody,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open ye
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
11 (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),
12 Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
[Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 1387-1400.
Interlineal translation by L. D. Benson
(http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/)]
***************************************************************

The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months...The
fruits did not ripen, and the wine tasted like sour grapes
[Michael the Syrian, 11th century, quoted in Krakatoa by Simon Winchester,
2003]

The observations made...upon land as well as at sea would be collected, as,
if that were done, he anticipated that in a few years, notwithstanding the
variable climate of this country, we might know in this metropolis the
condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand.
(M J. Ball, Member for Carlow, House of Commons, 30 June 1854, in debate to
establish Meteorological Office)
Response from House: Laughter
[quoted in Gribbin & Gribbin, Fitzroy, 2003, p 251]

Whatever may be the progress of the sciences, never will observers who are
trustworthy and careful of their reputations venture to foretell the state
of the weather.
[The Times, 18 June 1864, quoted in Gribbin & Gribbin, Fitzroy, 2003, p
279]

*************************************
To Autumn. John Keats, 1820

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.




Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.




Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
*********************************************

Each day hath a planet that ruleth it: so if the first day in the year fall
on First Day (Sunday) that day is the Sun's and this portendeth
(though Allah alone is All-knowing!) oppression of kings and sultans and
governors and much miasma and lack of rain; and that
people will be in great tumult and the grain-crop will be good, except
lentils, which will perish, and the vines will rot and flax will be
dear and wheat cheap from the beginning of Túbah to the end of Barmahát.
[1001 Nights, vol. 5]

 *************************************
BAKER'S WIFE
Into the woods,
The weather's clear,
We've been before,
We've nought to fear...
Into the woods, away from here--
[...]
CINDERELLA
Into the woods,
But not too long:
The skies are strange,
The winds are strong.
Into the woods to see what's wrong...

["Into the Woods", by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine]
*****************************************************

Part of the success of the invasion of the French Coast [in WWII] came by
virtue of the fact that the weather forecast for that event, made by the
American forces, was so inconceivably bad that the German meteorological
experts, who were substantially better, simply couldn't believe that we
would be so stupid as to make so bad a forecast, and could not believe that
we would act upon it, and therefore could not believe that the invasion
would occur at the time when it actually did. So, rather curiously, we
profited by the bad state of our meteorology at that moment.
[Warren Weaver, 1962, cited in “Controlling gunfire, inventory, and
expectations with the exponentially weighted moving average”, Judy Klein,
1998].

The atmosphere forms a vast ocean above us, an ocean but little explored.
We crawl about the ground like crabs on the bottom of the sea.  We make our
meteorological observations down on the ground, ignorant of all that is
going on in the midst of that great expanse of air above our heads, where
the clouds hang about, where the rain and the hail are formed, where the
lightning-flashes have their origin.
[Baden-Powell, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 1907,
p 193]

You get a quite different set of meteorological conditions in the Indian
Ocean - quite different. Any fool knows that.
[quoted in Down Under, Bill Bryson, Doubleday, 2000]

It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. There were periods
of drizzle during which everyone put on his full dress and a convalescent
look to celebrate the clearing, but the people soon grew accustomed to
interpret the pauses as a sign of redoubled rain. The sky crumbled into a
set of destructive storms and out of the north came hurricanes that
scattered roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted every last plant
of the banana groves.
[Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude]

The house was away from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a
settlement with miserable and burning streets where the goats committed
suicide from desolation when the wind of misfortune blew.
[Gabriel García Márquez, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Inocent Eréndira
and her Heartless Grandmother]

Winter fell one Sunday when people were coming out of church
[Gabriel García Márquez, Monologue of Isabel]

***********************************************
Summer by Alexander Pope
See what delights in sylvan scenes appear!
Descending Gods have found Elysium here.
In woods bright Venus with Adonis stray'd,
And chaste Diana haunts the forest shade.
Come lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours,
When swains from shearing seek their nightly bow'rs;
When weary reapers quit the sultry field,
And crown'd with corn, their thanks to Ceres yield.
This harmless grove no lurking viper hides,
But in my breast the serpent Love abides.
Here bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew,
But your Alexis knows no sweets but you.
Oh deign to visit our forsaken seats,
The mossy fountains, and the green retreats!
Where-e'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e'er you tread, the blushing flow'rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
Oh! How I long with you to pass my days,
Invoke the muses, and resound your praise;
Your praise the birds shall chant in ev'ry grove,
And winds shall waft it to the pow'rs above.
But wou'd you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
The wond'ring forests soon shou'd dance again,
The moving mountains hear the pow'rful call,
And headlong streams hang list'ning in their fall!
But see, the shepherds shun the noon-day heat,
The lowing herds to murm'ring brooks retreat,
To closer shades the panting flocks remove,
Ye Gods! And is there no relief for Love?
But soon the sun with milder rays descends
To the cool ocean, where his journey ends;
On me Love's fiercer flames for every prey,
By night he scorches, as he burns by day.
***********************************************

I was born on an island in love with the wind
Where the air has the smells of sugar and vanilla
and which cradles in the moving tropical sun
the warm and blue currents of the Caribbean sea
[Daniel Thaly, L'Ile lointaine]

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather
rather than climate.
[John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley]

Creeds and carrots, catechisms and cabbages, tenets and turnips, religion
and rutabagas, governments and grasses all depend upon the dewpoint and the
thermal range. Give the philosopher a handful of soil, the mean annual
temperature and rainfall, and his analysis would enable him to predict with
absolute certainty the characteristics of the nation.
[John James Ingalls, In praise of blue grass, 1875 – cited in Prairyerth by
William Least Heat-Moon, 1991]

The climate of many countries seems to be one of the great reasons why
idleness, dishonesty, immorality, stupidity, and weakness of will prevail.
If we can conquer climate, the whole world will become stronger and nobler.

[Huntington, Civilization and Climate, Yale Univ. Press, 1915, p 294]

Climate Condition (of a region or country) in relation to prevailing
atmospheric phenomena as temperature, humidity, etc., esp. as these affect
animal or vegetable life 1611. "The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet"
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, III, I.
[Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1966]

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.
[Robert Heinlein, 1973, Time enough for love]

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.
[Mark Twain, English as she is taught]

... the spring, the summer,
The chilling autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
[A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare]

So we can claim that these islands of frequent changes, of the terrible
Atlantic gales whose endless roar besets our coasts in winter, of the
exquisite long June days celebrated by our poets throughout the centuries,
of the harsh biting north-easter in April, the wind-driven rain day after
day if there comes a wet autumn, the occasional spell of three weeks of
snow and frost, the persistent dryness that quite frequently leads to
shortage of water in early summer – all these give us much cause to
grumble, but even more cause to enjoy the march of the seasons and the
opportunities for such a variety of flowers that the poorest man can still
grow them in his garden.
[Gordon Manley, The Weather in Britain, Anglia, 1963]

Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,
On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns?
[Henry V, William Shakespeare]

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
[In the bleak midwinter, Christina Rossetti]

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
[Who has seen the wind? Christina Rossetti, 1872]

What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.
[Lord Byron, Don Juan, I, lxiii]

I looked forward to the coming of the monsoon and I became a watcher of the
skies, waiting to spot the heralds that preceded the attack. A few showers
came. Oh, that was nothing, I was told; the monsoon has yet to come.
Heavier rains followed, but I ignored them and waited for some
extraordinary happening. While I waited I learnt from various people that
the monsoon had definitely come and established itself. Where was the pomp
and circumstance and the glory of the attack, and the combat between cloud
and land, and the surging and lashing sea? Like a thief in the night the
monsoon had come to Bombay, as well it might have done in Allahabad or
elsewhere. Another illusion gone.
[Jawaharlal Nehru, The monsoon comes to Bombay, 1939. Quoted by Colin
Ramage in Monsoon Meteorology]

It is too well known that there was not sufficient warmth in the summer of
1816 to ripen grain; and it is generally thought that if the ten or twelve
days of hot weather at the end of June last had not occurred, most of the
corn must have perished. The warm and settled appearance of the weather at
this early period of the season, leads us to hope that an agreeable change
is about to take place in our planet; and that we shall not, as for many
past years, have to deplore the deficiency of solar heat which is so
necessary to ripen the productions of the earth.
[The Observer, 18 June, 1818, quoted in Climates of the British Isles by
Hulme And Barrow].

The true problem for the climatologist to settle during the present century
is not whether the climate has lately changed, but what our present climate
is, what its well-defined features are, and how they can be most clearly
expressed in numbers. [Cleveland Abbe, Is our climate changing?, Forum, 6,
pp 687-688, 1889]

There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that
there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.
[Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey ]

Every morning he went out with his umbrella and put a stick in the place
where the water came up to, and every next morning he went out and couldn’t
see his stick any more, so he put another stick in the place where the
water came up to, and then he walked home again, and each morning he had a
shorter walk than he had the morning before.
[A.A.Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh]

***************************************
The School Boy by William Blake

I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the sky-lark sings with me.
O! what sweet company.

But to go to school in a summer morn,
O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn.
The little ones spend the day,
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learnings bower,
Worn thro' with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy,
Sit in a cage and sing.
How can a child when fears annoy.
But droop his tender wing.
And forget his youthful spring.

O! father & mother. if buds are nip'd,
And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are strip'd
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care's dismay.

How shall the summer arise in joy.
Or the summer fruits appear.
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy
Or bless the mellowing year.
When the blasts of winter appear.
********************************************


It is considered very important that screens of uniform pattern should be
employed in each country, and that detailed descriptions, with sketches and
descriptive lettering, should be published, so that the conditions of
exposure may be imitated exactly in any other place.
[Codex of resolutions adopted at the International Meteorological Meetings,
1872-1907, London, 1909]

Climate is a function of time. It varies; it is subject to fluctuations; it
has a history. [Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of feast, times of famine. A
history of climate since the year 1000, Allen & Unwin, 1972]

…when the great countries of antiquity rose to eminence they enjoyed a
climatic stimulus comparable with that existing today where the leading
nations now dwell. In other words, wherever civilization has risen to a
high level, the climate appears to have possessed the qualities which today
are most stimulating.
[Huntington, Civilization and Climate, Yale Univ. Press, 1915, p 294]

Our guides assured us in 1741 that in the time of their fathers the Glacier
[Mer de Glace on Mont Blanc] was but small, and that there was even a
Passage through these Valleys, by which they could go into the Val d'Aosta
in six hours, but that the Passage was then quite stopped up, and that it
[the glacier] went on increasing every year."
[a letter from a Mr Windham, cited in Grove, J. M., The Little Ice Age,
Methuen, 1988, p 112]

…the ice spreads out more and more every year…the experiment has been tried
of erecting a post on the bare ground a good distance from the ice, and the
next year it was found to be overtaken by it. So swift is this growth that
present day Greenlanders speak of places where their parents hunted
reindeer among naked hills which are now all ice.
[Otto Fabricius, missionary at Frederikshåb, Greenland, 1768-1773, cited in
Grove, 1988].

After the 28th of October, when the frosts began, the flight of the French
assumed a still more tragic character, with men freezing, or roasting
themselves to death by the camp-fires.
[L.N.Tolstoy, War and Peace, Penguin, 1957, p 1263]

The Conference recommends Central Offices to continue observations with as
little change as possible at one or more stations within their systems –
the numbers to depend on the size of the system – and to publish the
results regularly. A request was added for the examination and publication
of series of observations extending over long periods which have not yet
been printed.
[Codex of resolutions adopted at the International Meteorological Meetings,
1872-1907, London, 1909]

In the past hundred years the burning of coal has increased the amount of
CO2 by a measurable amount (from 0.028 to 0.030 per cent), and Callendar
sees in this an explanation of the recent rise of world temperature. But
during the past 7000 years there have been greater fluctuations of
temperature without the intervention of man, and there seems no reason to
regard the recent rise as more than a coincidence. This theory is not
considered further.
[Brooks, C. E. P., Geological and historical aspects of climate change, pp
1004-1023 in Compendium of Meteorology, American Meteorological Society,
1951]

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a
kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the
future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and
oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over
hundreds of millions of years. This experiment, if adequately documented,
may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and
climate.
[Roger Revelle & Hans Suess, Carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere
and ocean and the question of an increase in atmospheric CO2 during the
past decades, Tellus, 9, p 19-20, 1957]

..if carbon dioxide is the most important factor [in the earth’s climate],
long-term temperature records will rise continuously as long as man
consumes the earth’s reserves of fossil fuels.
[Gilbert Plass, Scientific American, July 1959, p 47]

MARK ANTONY [To OCTAVIUS CAESAR]
Thus do they, sir: they take the flow o' the Nile
By certain scales i' the pyramid; they know,
By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth
Or foison follow: the higher Nilus swells,
The more it promises: as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
And shortly comes to harvest.
[Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare]

Any contemporary atlas will contain, next to the map of the world’s
vegetation, a map of the world’s climate…The two will match because they
are the same map.
[Paul Colinvaux, Why big fierce animals are rare, Penguin, 1980, p 45].

Comparing our records with those of India, I find a close correspondence or
similarity of seasons with regard to the prevalence of drought, and there
can be little or no doubt that severe droughts occur as a rule
simultaneously over the two countries.
[Charles Todd, 1888, The Australasian, p 1456]

It is evident that we shall never discover the laws which govern the
general movements of the atmosphere if the only observations we make on the
earth’s surface are those in civilized countries. What is clear is that the
atmosphere is a continuous mass resting on the earth and the sea, and that
these two react upon each other. Any disturbance which appears at any one
point must make itself felt at very considerable distances from that
pointy. We shall often have to seek for the cause of a certain phenomenon
in another which has taken place perhaps in another hemisphere…we have
found interesting simultaneous relations between the barometrical pressure
and the rain at different centres of action. So we have shown that there
exists a sort of compensation between certain neighbouring centres of
action.
[Hildebrandsson, H., H., Report on the establishment of observatories at
the centres of action of the atmosphere. Appendix XI in Report of the
International Meteorological Committee, St Petersburg, 1899]

**************************************
Because Drought, who’s in on every forced sale,
Though he may have seen the farmers granted bail
This summer, has the continent in his entail.
Even smashed, he’s seen you:
That old man up a back road fumbling his mail
Gets letters from El Niño.
[Les Murray, Variations on a measure of burns]

***************************************
The Summer Sun Shone Round Me by Robert Louis Stevenson

The summer sun shone round me,
The folded valley lay
In a stream of sun and odour,
That sultry summer day.

The tall trees stood in the sunlight
As still as still could be,
But the deep grass sighed and rustled
And bowed and beckoned me.

The deep grass moved and whispered
And bowed and brushed my face.
It whispered in the sunshine:
"The winter comes apace."
*****************************************

An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it
were – without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy,
tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very
spirit out of him.
[Joseph Conrad, Typhoon]

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in
all his life, and he was goodness knows how old – three, was it, or four? –
never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days.
[A.A.Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh]

Phenomena that are supposedly chaotic include simple everyday occurrences,
like the falling of a leaf or the flapping of a flag, as well as much more
involved processes, like the fluctuations of climate or even the course of
life itself.
[Edward Lorenz, The essence of chaos, UCL Press, 1993, p 4-5]

I think it is likely that after long ages of belief in the control of our
affairs by the heavenly bodies men are born with instinctive faith in the
existence of periods in the weather. I lost mine when the imperative need
of reliability in seasonal forecasts drove me to replace instinct by valid
quantitative criteria.
[Walker, G. T., On the periods and symmetry points in pressure as aids to
forecasting, QJRMS, 72, 265-283]

...here give you the observations of a full year, made by order of the
philosophical society at Oxford, not only of the rise and fall of the
quicksilver (mark’d by the wandring prickt line, after Dr Lister’s method)
and the weather; but also how the wind stood each day. If the same
observations were made in many foreign and remote parts at the same time,
we should be enabled with some grounds to examine, not only the coastings,
breadth, and bounds of the winds themselves, but of the weather they bring
with them; and probably in time thereby learn to be forewarned certainly of
divers emergencies (such as heats, colds, dearths, plagues, and other
epidemical distempers) which are now unaccountable to us; and by their
causes be instructed for prevention, or remedies.
[Robert Plot, Secretary to the Royal Society in the 17th century. Quoted in
G. J. Symons, Jubilee Address, QJRMS, 26, 176-181, 1900]

While it is admitted that plague is due to a specific microbe, it cannot
spread except under certain meteorological conditions associated with the
conditions of the ground, which must be in such a state as to exhale what
is necessary for the propagation and spread of this particular disease.
[Latham, B., 1900. The climatic conditions necessary for the propagation
and spread of plague, QJRMS, 26, 37-94]

He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by; and
the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and whites
alike in that climate never fastened upon him.
[Jack London, Yah! Yah! Yah!, from South Sea Tales, 1911]

**************************************
The rain it rains without a stay
In the hills above us, in the hills;
And presently the floods break way
Whose strength is in the hills.
The trees they suck from every cloud,
The valley brooks they roar aloud--
Bank-high for the lowlands, lowlands,
Lowlands under the hills!
[Rupyard Kipling, The Floods]
***************************************

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of
inelegance. [Jane Austen, Letters, 18 Sept. 1796]

We who live in Kansas know well that its climate is superior to any other
in the world, and that it enables one, more readily than any other, to
dispense with the use of ale.
[Carl Becker, Kansas, 1910 - quoted in Prairyerth by William Least Heat-
Moon, 1991]

*******************************************
Back in nineteen twenty seven
I had a little farm and I called it heaven
Prices up and the rain come down
I hauled my crops all into town
Got the money...bought clothes and groceries...
Fed the kids...and raised a big family

But the rain quit and the wind got high
Black old dust storm filled the sky
I traded my farm for a Ford machine
Poured it full of this gas-i-line
And started...rocking and a-rolling
Deserts and mountains...to California
[Talking Dust Bowl Blues, Woody Guthrie]


It rained and rained and rained
The average fall was well maintained
And when the tracks were simply bogs
It started raining cats and dogs
After a drought of half an hour
We had a most refreshing shower
And then the most curious thing of all
A gentle rain began to fall
Next day also was fairly dry
Save for a deluge from the sky
Which wetted the party to the skin
And after that the rain set in
[A visitor to the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand, quoted in
the Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit: New Zealand, 1996]
*******************************************************************

It was raining in the small, mountainous country of Llamedos. It was always
raining in Llamedos. Rain was the country’s main export. It had rain mines.

[Terry Pratchett, Soul Music, Corgi Books, p 13, 1995]

"I don’t know how it is, Christopher Robin, but what with all this snow and
one thing and another, not to mention icicles and such-like, it isn’t so
Hot in my field about three o’clock in the morning as some people think it
is. It isn’t Close, if you know what I mean – not so as to be
uncomfortable. It isn’t Stuffy. In fact, Christopher Robin," he went on in
a loud whisper, "quite-between-ourselves-and-don’t-tell-anybody, it’s
Cold."
[A.A.Milne, The House at Pooh Corner]

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by
atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as
time.
[Marcel Proust, In search of lost time, 1913]

The frost set in in November. I have respect for the Danish winter. The
cold – not what is measured on a thermometer, but what you can actually
feel – depends more on the force of the wind and the relative humidity in
the air than on the actual temperature.
[Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, Panther, 1993, p 4].

It is freezing, an extraordinary -18C, and it's snowing, and in the
language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost
weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer
of pulverized white frost.
 [Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, Panther, 1993, p 3].

The stranger [to Kansas], if he listened to the voice of experience, would
not start upon his pilgrimage at any season of the year without an
overcoat, a fan, a lightening rod, and an umbrella.
[John James Ingalls, In praise of blue grass, 1875 – quoted in Prairyerth
by William Least Heat-Moon, 1991]

************************************************************

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swing blind and blackening in the moonless air
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
[Lord Byron, written at Geneva in 1816 and inspired by the cold, wet,
dreary summer following the eruption of Tambora in April 1815. Quoted  on p
273 of Climates of the British Isles by Hulme And Barrow]

************************************************************

"Autumn" [Gyodai]
The falling leaves
fall and pile up; the rain
beats on the rain.

"Summer Garments" [Buson]
Upon the golden screens
are summer garments -- whose?
The autumn wind...
************************************************************

It was one of those mild, idyllic spring days novels tell us are made for
lovers, and Alice and Eric did their best to live up to meteorological and
other expectations. [Alain de Botton, The romantic movement, Picador, 1994,
p 52]

"I always think when it’s nice, it’ll always be nice." The climate begged
to differ. Because an inclination of 23º meant the sun was directly over
the Tropic of Cancer [23.5ºN] on June the twenty-second, London summers
were warm enough to sunbathe and Eric could play tennis in the evenings and
breakfast on his small rear patio. But because the sun arrived directly
over the Tropic of Capricorn [23.5ºS] on December the twenty-second, the
winters were without leaves on the trees, the nights were dark and taxis
were impossible to find in the rush-hour drizzle. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to
live somewhere where it was always warm?’ continued Alice in a reflective
mood.
[Alain de Botton, The romantic movement, Picador, 1994, p 86]

He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words
for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very
monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow,
light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in
flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your
neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of
winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood
that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery
snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that
falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going
out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the
huskies have pissed on.
 [Douglas Adams, So long, and thanks for all the fish]

And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for,
though he did not know it, Rob McKeena was a Rain God. All he knew was that
his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays.
All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to
cherish him, and to water him. [Douglas Adams, So long, and thanks for all
the fish]

It is your human environment that makes climate.
[Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar].

*************************************************
A law was made a distant moon ago here
July and August cannot be too hot;
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot;
By order summer lingers through September
In Camelot

[Alan Jay Lerner, Camelot]
************************************************
Climate, indeed, is a subject upon which the most extravagant and
unreasonable statements are made. Not only do many men, even of much
scientific information, imagine that within the short scope of their own
recollection they can detect a permanent change in weather or some other
phenomenon, which would involve a connected change over all the regions of
the earth, but they even assert that man’s muscular strength and mental
ingenuity can effect such changes. The clearing away of trees they say will
render a climate dry; extensive reservoirs of water may increase the
moistures of the atmosphere.
[William Stanley Jevons, Some data concerning the climate of Australia and
New Zealand, in: Waugh’s Australian Almanac for 1859, Sydney, 1859, p 79).

It will be seen that rational climatology gives no basis for the much-
talked-of influence upon the climate of a country produced by the growth or
destruction of forests, the building of railroads or telegraphs, and the
cultivation of crops over a wide extent of prairie.
[Cleveland Abbe, Is our climate changing?, Forum, 6, pp 687-688, 1889]

So nicely adjusted was the system, so independent of meteorology, that the
sky, whether calm or cloudy, resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same
patterns periodically returned.
[E.M.Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909]

…wars were always suspended in winter, otherwise what would have become of
the men on horseback, scantily clad beneath their corslets and sleeveless
coats of mail, with the drizzle penetrating the holes, rents and gashes,
and the less said about the foot-soldiers the better, trampling practically
barefoot in the mud and with their hands so frostbitten that they can
scarcely hold the puny weapons…
[José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Harvill Press, 1996, p
102].

"It’s snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we
haven’t had an earthquake lately."
[A.A.Milne, The House at Pooh Corner]

Well, if you go when the snowflakes storm,
When the rivers freeze and summer ends,
Please see if she's wearing a coat so warm,
To keep her from the howlin' winds.
[Bob Dylan, Girl of the North Country, 1963]

Wintertime in New York town,
The wind blowin' snow around.
Walk around with nowhere to go,
Somebody could freeze right to the bone.
I froze right to the bone.
New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years;
I didn't feel so cold then.
[Bob Dylan, Talkin' New York, 1962]

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
[Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965]

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever
visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the
ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her
usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and
be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at
the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous.
Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon
sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road.
[Virginia Woolf, Orlando]

The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the
British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather,
did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales,
long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath
its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain
fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than
they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with
clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were
discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of
the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century.
[Virginia Woolf, Orlando]

SEBASTIAN What a strange drowsiness possesses them!
ANTONIO It is the quality o' the climate
[Shakespeare, The Tempest]

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
[Shakespeare, Twelfth Night]

How beautifully blue the sky,
The glass is rising very high,
Continue fine I hope it may,
And yet it rained but yesterday.
To-morrow it may pour again
(I hear the country wants some rain),
Yet people say, I know not why,
That we shall have a warm July.
[The Pirates of Penzance, W.S.Gilbert]

The aire so kinde and temperate that not only the Summers be not excessive
hot by reason of continual gentle winds that abate their heat...but the
winters are also passing mild.
[William Camden, Brittania, 1637. Quoted in A History of Britain, Simon
Schama, 2000]

The essential features of white pastoral settlement - a stable home, a
circumscribed area of land, and a flock or herd maintained on this land
year-in and year-out - are a heritage of life in the reliablekindly climate
of Europe. In the drought-risky semi-desert Australian inland they tend to
make settlement self-destructive.
[Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

The people of the pastoral country in Australia...think a lot of the
weather. Or, to be more exact, they think a lot about it. Of the weather,
and of the rain which doesn't come when it should, or comes too suddenly
and too heavily, they have not a very high opinion.
[Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

"We have had seven dust-storms already this month: I don't mean just days
with dust in the air, but bad enough for me to have to clean the house out.
Three out of the seven were bad; and by that I mean that I got about half a
kerosene tin of dust and sand out of every room!"
[quoted in: Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

THE AUSTRALIAN INLAND MUST EXPECT A SMASHING DROUGHT ONCE EVERY DECADE, AND
LESSER DROUGHTS MORE OFTEN
[Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

To defeat that arch-enemy, drought, is of course impossible; but cannot its
attacks be circumvented and their more lasting effects avoided?
[Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

One of the most extraordinary and at the same time most discouraging
aspects of the whole matter is the reluctance, amounting almost to stubborn
refusal, on the part of the Australian people, to recognize the
inevitability of drought. The tacit assumption that drought is an
exceptional visitor to the inland country has shaped and infected public
thought and official policy alike.
[Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, 1938]

... semicivilized and barbarous peoples have given credence to the
prophesies of their priests and medicine men and today, fakirs and
charlatans in the various professional and scientific fields, astrologers,
fortune tellers and long-range weather forecasters, command in civilized
communities a lucrative following. Long-range weather forecasts have ever
been impossible of achievement.
[E B Garriott in 'Weather, folk lore and local weather signs' prepared
under the direction of the Chief, US Weather Bureau, 1903]

Whoever wishes to pursue the science of medicine must first investigate the
seasons of the year and learn what occurs in them.
[Hippocrates 4th century B.C.]

And then there was Hortense's horror of weather reports. Whoever it was,
however benign, honey-voiced and inoffensively dressed, she cursed them
bitterly for the five minutes they stood there, and then, out of what
appeared to be sheer perversity, proceede d to take the opposite of
whatever advice had been proffered (light jacket and no umbrella for rain,
full cagoule and rain hat for sun). It was several weeks before Irie
understood that weathermen were the secular antithesis of Hortense's life
work, which was, essentially, a kind of supercosmic attempt to second-guess
the Lord with one almighty biblical exegesis of a weather report. Next to
that weathermen were nothing but upstarts And tomorrow, coming in from the
east, we can expect a great furnace to rise up and envelop the area with
flames that give no light, but rather darkness visible while I'm afraid the
northern regions are advised to wrap up warm against thick-ribbed ice, and
there's a fair likelihood that the coast will be beaten with perpetual
storms of whirlwind and dire hail which on firm land thaws not Michael Fish
and his ilk were stabbers-in-the-dark, trusting to the tomfoolery of the
Met Office, making a mockery of that precise science, eschatology, that
Hortense had spent over fifty years in the study of.
[Zadie Smith, White Teeth, Penguin, 2000, p. 341]

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs
that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing
the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their
master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and
turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The
extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during
the past ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art...At
present people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and
painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There
may have been fog for centuries in London, I dare say there were. But no
one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist
until Art invented them [Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, in The Writings
of Oscar Wilde, Oxford Univ. Press, 1989, pp 232-33]

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a
generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set
the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces,
fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as
"This is a colder year than I've ever known. " Such things are sensible.
But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span
of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to
survive on any planet. They must learn climate. --- Arrakis, the
Transformation, After Harq al-Ada.
[Frank Herbert, Children of Dune, 1976].

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpertually changing, sent clouds
of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking
at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then
shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be
expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed
neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of
the counter at Whiteley's and the Army and Navy Stores. [Virginia Woolf,
The Years, 1937].

I am sorry my mother has been suffering, and am afraid this exquisite
weather is too good to agree with her. I enjoy it all over me, from top to
toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally; and I
cannot but selfishly hope we are to have it last till Christmas -- nice,
unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close, muggy weather.
[Jane Austen, letter of 2 December 1815].

The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the
bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if
there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise,
the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the
ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable
copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted
letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.
[Virginia Woolf, The Years, 1937]

************************************************
The Soote Season
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new-repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
[Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547]

******************************************************
The Melancholy Year
The melancholy year is dead with rain.
Drop after drop on every branch pursues.
From far away beyond the drizzled flues
A twilight saddens to the window pane.
And dimly thro' the chambers of the brain,
From place to place and gently touching, moves
My one and irrecoverable love's
Dear and lost shape one other time again.
So in the last of autumn for a day
Summer or summer's memory returns.
So in a mountain desolation burns
Some rich belated flower, and with the gray
Sick weather, in the world of rotting ferns
From out the dreadful stones it dies away.
[Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904]

******************************************************


Acknowledgements:
Alan Robock suggested the Dylan lyrics
Robert Fawcett suggested the Tempest, Twelfth Night, & Pirates of Penzance
quotes
Peter Price suggested the Garriott quote about long-range forecasts.
Helen Morgan suggested the Zadie Smith quote.
James Risbey suggested the Frank Herbert quote.
Ilan Kelman suggested the Sondheim & Lapine lyrics
Rene Gommes suggested the quotes from Genesis and Esdras; and the quote
from 1001 Nights.
Peter Webster suggested the quote from Ecclesisates.