Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath. New York, NY, June 1943. Source: Library of Congress

Hot Enough For You?

The History of Climate Change

08.24.18

According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2018 is on pace to be the fourth hottest year on record. So, on this week’s episode, Nathan, Brian and Joanne talk about how Americans understood climate and weather in centuries past. They also explore how the invention of air conditioning changed America forever.

Climate change; weather

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I Speak for the Trees

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had different ideas about how to warm up the chilly American climate, and trees may be on the chopping block. Historian Joyce Chaplin explains.

Music:

Netherland by Podington Bear
Cold Like This by Jahzzar

Climate change; environment; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Hey there Backstory listeners. In honor of our ten year anniversary, Backstory is giving you all a chance to win autographed copies of our host’s most recent books. Beginning on August 17th, we’ll insert one word into ten episodes published as early as May 25th and ending September 28th. Combined, the words will form a single sentence. The first ten listeners to correctly identify and submit the sentences on or after September 28th when the last episode with a hidden word airs, will win a Virginia Humanities tote bag with signed copies of books from all four hosts, as well as additional swag from some of our sister programs. Check our website backstoryradio.org/contest for instructions on how and when to submit your entry and details on prizes. And follow Backstory on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or your favorite pod catcher to receive it free every week and not miss a contest episode. Happy hunting. Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to Back Story. The show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

Reporters: New findings on the effect of climate change in the U.S.

Reporters: A report obtained by the New York Times found the average temperature in the U.S. has gone up rapidly since 1980.

Reporters: But, scientists say it’s more than temperatures. They have connected man made climate change to deadly heat waves, droughts, and devastating floods.

Reporters: Now, the study by scientists from 13 federal agencies directly contradicts claims by the president and some cabinet officials who say that human contribution to climate change is uncertain.

Brian Balogh: This summer has been brutally hot. So hot in fact it’s the fourth warmest summer ever worldwide in all of recorded history. Since the late 19th century, the earth’s average temperature has risen about two degrees. Most of that rise comes from increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Now two degrees might not sound like much, but scientists fear that those rising temperatures could produce even more extreme weather, famines and millions of climate refugees.

Nathan Connolly: Americans have long been fascinated by climate patterns and how those patterns affect their lives. At the dawn of the republic, concerns about the climate were also concerns about national security. Historian Joyce Chaplin says lots of folks, including the founding fathers, debated about how to deal with the young nation’s harsh climate.

Joyce Chaplin: Being scientifically literate was culturally important during this period of time and you weren’t really a well-educated person unless you knew some science.

Nathan Connolly: Is there an earlier version of a climate debate happening among the founders in this period?

Joyce Chaplin: That’s what’s really interesting about this period is that not only were there now theories of climate being complex, but there are also complexities within the argument about it. So there was not one theory, there was not one opinion. There was a big interesting argument about it all.

Nathan Connolly: So, the most popular theory, which originated in Europe, suggested that cutting down trees would produce warmer, more comfortable temperatures.

Joyce Chaplin: They were convinced that forests, too many trees, actually shaded the earth from the sun. Land that had been overgrown with weeds and wild vegetation, if it were cleared and planted with crops, and all that land turned up with hoes or plows, that also would have a warming effect on the climate. And so we also see coming into focus a sense of antipyogenic climate change. What humans do affects the climate. The idea that humans on a large scale could transform the average temperature for entire regions if not continents was quite new, and yet this is what settlers in North American start talking about doing.

Nathan Connolly: This idea was actively promoted by science nerd turned US president, Thomas Jefferson.

Joyce Chaplin: So, Jefferson was an advocate or a proponent for clearing land, bringing it onto cultivation through European style agriculture, and in some ways, this is a criticism of the indigenous inhabitants whom he thought had not brought enough of the land under cultivation and that therefore the country was cooler than it actually needed to be.

Nathan Connolly: So given these ideas about the link between deforestation and climate change being bandied about, did people actually deforest on a mass scale to bring about these ends?

Joyce Chaplin: The deforestation took place on a mass scale, whether people were really doing it to make the weather warmer or not. It just happened because a lot of settlers were moving across land and taking down forests in order to create farmland. It’s true that into the 19th century there was this other belief that land that was cleared would bring rain. So when people moved out into the Great Plains area, where there had been historic droughts, there was nevertheless a believe that rain follows the plow, that once lands are brought under cultivation the rain would come.

Nathan Connolly: So the plow comes first, then the cloud comes after. Wow. That’s something.

Joyce Chaplin: Yes, exactly. And only after several terrible droughts and people failing, was there a kind of concession that maybe not.

Nathan Connolly: While Jefferson and others were actively trying to warm things up. America’s leading scientists felt cutting down all the trees was a terrible plan.

Joyce Chaplin: So Benjamin Franklin warned that taking down all the trees are too many trees might make the summers unbearably hot. So be careful, and be careful what you wish for that if you really, really want a warm climate, fine, but having a climate that was going to be too hot was not going to be good.

Nathan Connolly: Franklin who had been studying climate fluctuations for while, started by printing daily weather reports in his newspaper and in Poor Richard’s Almanac.

Joyce Chaplin: Where very conventionally he reports on what the average temperatures were supposed to be, what the prevailing conditions, kind of odd weather events, storms, significant changes in weather and unexpected patterns. And these include the freezing over of Boston Harbor, really bad winter weather that begin to intrigue him because he starts tying them back into a theory that these were not just stray events, but part of a longer term shift.

Nathan Connolly: And then trying to make sense of that shift, Franklin collected data on a grander scale.

Joyce Chaplin: Franklin does study heat and weather in a lot of parts of the world, so eventually he makes observations about medieval Europe, different parts of the Americas, even as far away as Russia. So he really is aware of how global climates operated in contrast to each other and how specific weather patterns were particular to different parts of the world. So in some ways he has a bigger geography that he comments on, than perhaps Jefferson was doing in relation to Virginia and two parts of North America and the United States specifically.

Nathan Connolly: Benjamin Franklin’s interest in patterns of hot and cold lead him to a more sophisticated understanding of the climate itself.

Joyce Chaplin: And in this way he contributes to earlier theorization about atmospheric circulation and oceanic circulation. How it is that patterns of hot and cold move over hemispheres, over continents and oceans. He describes, for instance, the circulation of hot air out of the Gulf of Mexico, up the continent and eventually across the Atlantic Ocean, and he connects us to the phenomenon that we now call the gold stream. So that sense of circulation and have a kind of irregular pattern of heat and cold moving north and south as well as east and west, that was one of the biggest challenges to this old idea of climate as latitude.

Nathan Connolly: Now, we use an idea today of something called a little ice age. They might not have used that language back then, but they certainly were aware that there were things happening kind of across many different generations that were reflecting changes in the environment. Is there a sense that the ice age or the kind of long period of cold that the founders were considering and that Jefferson and Franklin were debating, that, that has come to some kind of end.

Joyce Chaplin: I gather from geologists that we’re not sure it’s over. We could still be in a period of global cooling, but we have forced the climate to be warmer and that’s overriding the cooler stage that we would be in otherwise, which is kind of terrifying to think about that it would be even hotter. What we’re doing in terms of forcing carbon to the atmosphere would make things even hotter than it would be if we didn’t have this period of global cooling that’s still going on. It does seem that the little ice age, the conditions that were described from the late middle ages into the colonial period was feeding over the course of the 19th century. We think it was still operating when Napoleon’s troops marched out of Moscow in much colder weather than they had anticipated. It may still have been operating into the 1840s and up to perhaps about 1850. For the second half of the 19th century though, all of the components of the little ice age, extreme weather condition, longer winters, freezing over bodies of water, those stopped being commented on and we’ve entered a new age.

Nathan Connolly: So Joyce, can you give me any sense of what native Americans might have thought about the little ice age? Do we even know?

Joyce Chaplin: Oh, I wish we knew more, and we need to know more. And this will require a lot of experts in indigenous languages and archeology to really expand our understanding, because without that we actually don’t know a lot about how human adaptation to climates in North America would have worked before 1492, and it’s really essential that we do that.

Brian Balogh: In the way that the founders observed and debated the nature of climate change and human activity, are there any lessons from that, that we could point to and draw from today?

Joyce Chaplin: I guess I’m always skeptical about the claim that anything that happens now is historically unprecedented because in some sense that’s self-congratulatory. Everything new happens to us. Whatever we are undergoing now or talking about now has never happened to anyone in the world ever before. Well maybe so, but I think we want to eliminate the possibility that actually it’s happened before. Yes, we may be living within something unprecedented in terms of anthropogenic climate change that we have done it, but we’re not the first people to live in a period of rapid or dramatic climate change, and looking at everyone who has done that before could be incredibly useful for us.

Nathan Connolly: Joyce chaplain is a professor of history at Harvard University and author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the pursuit of genius.

The Climate of the Times

Joanne, Brian and Nathan discuss how climate and weather have been understood and even manipulated from the 17th century to the present.

Music:

Two days by Jahzzar

Climate change; science; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne Freeman: So I’m guessing that some people might be surprised to hear that in early America they were thinking about climate change, but people might not be surprised to know that they were linking in one way or another, climate and God or climate and religion. Would you say that’s the case Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: I would say that’s the case. I mean the Bible itself has any number of references to not wanting to make God upset and God changing the weather, His clouds and pillows of smoke and great floods. So the story of God’s power over the climate is really as old as the story of Noah. There is a really important sermon delivered in the early 18th century by Increase Mather called ‘The voice of God in stormy winds’, where he essentially claims or affirms that natural processes behind storms where God’s will and that you have to control your behavior, police your behavior in order to get the weather that you want, or the climate that you want. Which as you can imagine, in the Massachusetts Bay colony with freezing winters and I’m sure you know, not terribly comfortable summers much of the time, a lot of people are going to take heat of. And it’s a pretty handy way to try to get people to behave the right way if you think that you can control the weather in the meantime.

Joanne Freeman: And indeed, I think people did take heed of that. So I think for sure as you just suggested Nathan, there’s this major religious stripe in the way people are thinking about climate. But then on the other hand, certainly in the 18th century, there’s a sort of more naturalist approach to it too, which sounds very highfalutin, modern and scientific. But on the other hand, I think people at the time, certainly in the old world, they were assuming that the climate in the new world made new world life of all kinds, inferior, right? So it’s naturalistic, but there still enlightenment-esque sort of drawing broad patterns and grounding them in the old world.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. And your guy, Jefferson in fact Joanne, pushed back on these notions that the climate was inferior or I guess more accurately, he accepted them and said that, “Americans are doing something about that.” Cutting down all these forests, they are cultivating the land and that in turn is actually improving the climate. He actually advocated for Spain cutting a canal through the Panamanian isthmus, not just to send ships through it, he liked that idea, of course, but he believed that cutting down all those trees would continue this effect on the climate, making more temperate, making it more livable for all of North America.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. Now that is a thing I did not know about Thomas Jefferson.

Brian Balogh: That’s why you need to listen to Backstory more often.

Joanne Freeman: Clearly, clearly. Wow. So yeah, it makes sense that Jefferson would broadcast this around the world.

Brian Balogh: Probably if you didn’t know it Joanne, probably means it’s not true. And I’m getting in a hell of a lot of trouble here. where we’re going with our amazing researchers who have never been wrong about anything. So I’m sticking with that.

Joanne Freeman: I always believe you, Brian. I always believe you. So that has us in early America, I would assume that this topic is going to change dramatically when we move up into actually the neck of the woods that you guys are more normally in, which is a more modern era. How do things fundamentally change about people and how they feel that they are or aren’t controlling the weather?

Nathan Connolly: Well, one of the things that is surprising to me every time I revisit this, is just how early the climate change conversation is going, right? So again, I totally embrace my identity as a 20th century guy, but we can’t claim in the 20th century to have created the conversation on climate change. There are sources going back to the 1820s, where French scientists for instance were talking about a hothouse effect connected to human activity, right? The changing the climate of the planet. In 1859, the London morning post has a lecture from a man named John Tyndall, an Irishman, a scientist who’s talking about the atmosphere and its effect on heat and the absorption of heat on the earth’s surface. In the 1890s you have Swedish scientists who are doing the same thing, talking about the effect of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground. That’s a title from one of these journals, right? The Philosophical magazine in Journal of Science to be exact. So all of this to say that the 19th century-

Brian Balogh: I still subscribe to that Nathan.

Nathan Connolly: I believe it. I believe that you owe them some money last I checked. So the thing about the 19th century is as much as we want to think of it as an era of still rural America or as a time when the concerns of the 20th century are not present, they’re absolutely there in the way that people are thinking about their evolving relationship with the globe. Now they think it is true though, to your point, Joanne, that for your average farmer, they’re much more concerned with how to get the rain that they want. So the idea that you might, for instance plow fields and somehow rain clouds will follow the plow, that was still a widely held idea among many Americans in the 19th century. Or the idea that battlefields were places where rain essentially followed because the releasing of gunpowder into the atmosphere, created rain clouds, an that was an actual writing that came around the civil war. But the idea that climate change was something we should be mindful of that was still largely confined to smaller scientific communities.

Brian Balogh: But what’s amazing since both you and Joanne have confessed to learning so much about this topic, what I’m always amazed at is the degree to which going all the way back to the 18th century, they really were talking about climate, not just the weather. I understand that Increase Mather thing was about a very bad windstorm, thunderstorm, whatever. But you know, Jefferson and all of those people that Professor Chaplain was talking about, they’re talking about real climate change in the journals you just cited, Nathan. That’s climate change, that’s not weather. Most of the stuff that I’ve looked at in the 20th century actually until the 1960s or so, was much more about altering the weather rather than altering the climate. And why is that? I’m not a scientist. I can’t be exactly sure, but my sense is, in the 20th century, which is always the best century, scientists began to recognize just what a powerful thing climate is.

Brian Balogh: For instance, when they developed the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, they realized that these incredibly massive weapons, so powerful, were nothing compared to a regular thunderstorm, not to mention a hurricane, and that in turn was just a weather event that was minuscule compared to the regularity, the predictability of climate. And they began to realize in the 20th century just what a powerful and to many, somewhat permanent thing climate was. Which is not to say that they didn’t realize that it has changed, there were ice ages, et cetera. But it was an extraordinarily powerful, almost framing device for human life and the rest of life on the earth.

Joanne Freeman: Wouldn’t you maybe also say though, my sort of 18th century hunch would be part of why they’re thinking about climate and not weather, is because they are thinking in a kind of enlightenment kind of a way about big patterns and about whishing across time. And that what you’re talking about in a sense is power. The outgrowth of power. If you have power, then you are going to start thinking in a really concrete way about being able to change weather.

Brian Balogh: I think that’s exactly right, Joanne.

How Air Conditioning Changed America

For most of American history, 90 degrees Fahrenheit could be the death of you. In our ongoing series, Days that Changed America, Salvatore Basile tells us why the invention of air conditioning was a game changer.

Climate change; invention; technological innovation; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: This summer is record breaking heat has had people sweltering in Tokyo subway trains and Oslo apartment blocks. In Los Angeles, it was 108 degrees on July 6th. The day before in Algeria, the temperature reached 124 degrees. In California, which endured the hottest July on record, wildfires still rage. And in heat like this, you just want to get into your home or your office building and switch on the air conditioning. But of course for most of human history there was no such thing. In our series, ‘Days that changed America’, Salvatore Basile discusses the enormous impact of the invention of air conditioning.

Salvatore Basil: I’m Salvatore Basile and I wrote the book. ‘Cool. How air conditioning changed America.’

Reporters: Thank you for checking in with me. It’s Total Weather.

Reporters: We are following the extreme heat wave, creating dangerous conditions.

Reporters: At 9:00 AM Nine, we’re already in the mid 80s.

Reporters: The concern right now is for the elderly.

Reporters: There’s a chance it could even be the hottest day we’ve had so far this year at the 102 mark-

Salvatore Basil: Dealing with hot weather during the 19th century and years before was a very difficult thing for all of humanity. A day that changed America was July 17th, 1902, the day that Willis Carrier, the 21 year old engineer, patented his apparatus for treating air, otherwise known as air conditioning. Something that has changed not only the way we live, but how our cities look and even how we wash our windows. Electric fans had been invented in the 1880s. They were incredibly expensive at the time. Many people couldn’t afford this and they would just retreat to their fire escapes. There were some inventors who would start systems that used fan ventilation, blowing air over ice. There was one theater in New York City that used two to four tons of ice each performance. One of the strangest Ways of getting around heat was what were called refrigerated beds. One of them was developed around the 1860s by an inventor who constructed a gigantic cupboard as a headboard of a bed, with levels that would hold chunks of ice, levels that would hold pieces of activated charcoal to absorb what they call the offensive odors, and the idea was that gravity theoretically would draw air into the bed, over the ice, over the charcoal and inject it right onto the heads of the sleepers.

Salvatore Basil: This bed did not make much headway. A printing outfit in Brooklyn, New York. They’d gone through two years of wasted paper, days where they had to actually shut down because of humidity, heat. They dealt in color printing. If the printing presses did not register the paper exactly, you wound up with a blur and a mess rather than a color image, and they needed to do something. So this company asked if there were some system that could reduce humidity in the plant, and this was given to Willis Carrier. He tried a couple of remedies, one of which was to blow air through a cloth that was saturated with calcium chloride, which would pull water from the air and all it did was spatter chemicals all over the place. That wouldn’t work. So eventually he came up with a system of blowing air over chilled pipes, and it turned out that this worked. Not only did it reduce humidity, but as a bonus, employees were suddenly more comfortable.

Salvatore Basil: The principle of blowing air over cold pipes is basically what you see even today in your own home system. You have a compressor with a refrigerant in coils, the pipes that is chilled and the air is drawn through it, which cools the air and extracts humidity. It’s the same thing. And it began to catch on because companies had realized that summer heat, summer humidity could destroy a lot of their work. There would be investigators who would sneak thermometers onto a floor of a factory and find temperatures of 135 degrees. If you were say a chewing gum manufacturer or a chocolate company, you would literally have to shut down production entirely during the summer, which was ruinously expensive. It began to spread throughout the industrial world.

Salvatore Basil: But at the same time, Willis carrier realized that this could be called also comfort air conditioning, providing comfort to people. This was an outlandish idea because at the turn of the 20th century, most people’s thinking was still Victorian and their idea was, “Tough it out. God made hot weather, so you should put up with it.” No one was able to remove clothing because you just didn’t do that. Consequently, when you had a man who was wearing woolen underwear and a shirt and a waist coat and a frock coat, and at times of summer, overcoat, many of these men would just collapsed in the street. And ladies with multi underskirts and petticoats and a corset, and corset covers, they would collapse as well.

Salvatore Basil: Every newspaper had a daily column of deaths from heat. They would list the people’s names and carefully list where they had dropped.

Reporters: Philadelphia. 20th July 1905, 15 fatalities and 90 prostrations due to hot spell. August 22nd 1908, Humboldt, Kansas. Five deaths an attempted suicide and more than a dozen prostrations were results of the intense heat.

Reporters: Several of the deaths reported were those of persons who had fallen while asleep from fire escapes. The victims are Arthur Teague, aged six-

Reporters: John Seckel aged 35 years-

Reporters: Mary Michelle.

Salvatore Basil: It wasn’t until about 1960s and 70s that air conditioning began to drop in price enough that it became universally popular. This was something that was for rich people. This was for fancy occasions, but at home you had fans. I grew up in a house that used about seven or eight fans in various rooms. When I moved to New York city myself, I bought the cheapest fan I could and I carried it from room to room with me. Memorial day 1925, which is another date that changed history. It was Willis Carrier again, who developed a type of compressor system which made it possible affordable for a theater to be air conditioned. This was installed at the Rivoli theater in New York, blazing on the marquee refrigerating plant, and while it took a while for the system to really get running, once it did, everyone was astonished because they weren’t fanning themselves, they weren’t uncomfortable. And while the initial system had cost them, and this is 1925, $65,000, they recouped that cost in extra ticket sales in three months.

Salvatore Basil: And the reason that this day is so important is because it is the first time in human history that the ordinary person, not royalty or any of the above, had an affordable refuge from the heat. And in America at least people took to it instantly. Now, the nationwide growth of affordable air conditioning began in the early 1950s. Areas of the United States that were previously considered not that inhabitable, became attractive. By the late 60s, the population of Phoenix tripled. Dallas, Texas doubled, Tucson quadrupled. The majority of these people who moved there were older and politically conservative. By 1980 southern states had gained 29 electoral college votes and this helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the white house. Indeed, there is a new political demographic which was something of a surprise and everyone had to deal with it.

Salvatore Basil: One of the things that air conditioning has done which is underrated by much of the population, is that it has changed the look of every city. Where skyscraper architecture in the 1920s and 1930s had always dealt in very slim soaring spires because you could not have office space that was that far from an open window. It was simply not possible. Now with the advent of air conditioner, the idea of the boxy glass building with windows that would not open was considered the new norm, the new ideal. If you had what was called deep space in a building, this was now perfectly all right, because it was cool. You could have windowless offices. And because you had windows that would no longer open, one of the things that you did have to have was the gondola that hung outside every single office building for window washing.

Salvatore Basil: The international energy agency estimates that we now have in the world 1.6 billion air conditioning units and that, that will increase by 2050 to 5.6 billion. Now this is a huge demand on energy resources. There are people who have asked that Americans and people around the world trY to do without air conditioning, which is ridiculous. In modern life, air conditioning touches every part of your daily existence. If it is steaming in mid-August and you had a decent night’s sleep, it’s probably because you have air conditioning. And if you work in a steel and glass office building, your windows don’t open, and the air conditioning system is the reason that you don’t suffocate. And if it’s summer and you grab a candy bar, you can thank air conditioning for your snickers. If you see a movie or visit a restaurant, your whole environment is air conditioned. And if any of this makes you sick and you go to the doctor, your doctor’s examining room is undoubtedly windowless, and without air conditioning, none of that could exist.

Salvatore Basil: It is everywhere nowadays. So rather than getting rid of it, we need to learn how to make it better I would say. Willis Carrier was devoted to the idea of air conditioning. He died in 1950, but he was still on the job. He was still pushing all the time to try and extend the reach to, try and improve the process. I think we should be grateful to him. I know that I am.

Nathan Connolly: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @Backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Paddington Bear and [inaudible 00:31:31] And as always thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Brian Balogh: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the national endowment for the humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell memorial foundation and the Johns Hopkins university. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Voice over: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of Richmond. Joanne freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.