Winds of Change
December 21 2009
THE STORIES WE TELL PROVIDE US WITH A RECORD OF OUR CONTINUING STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND THE PECULIAR EFFECTS WEATHER HAS ON OUR LIVES.
The Hopi people of the southwestern US have a story: During a long drought when corn wouldn’t grow, the tribe began running out of food. Two children made a toy hummingbird that, as they tossed it into the air, came to life. It flew to the center of the Earth and begged the god of fertility for help. And he made it rain.
For as long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about weather, trying, in the absence of scientific certainty, to understand its influence on our lives. In the small body of research there has been on the topic, we’ve found that wind and heat can make us cranky, violent, sick, and suicidal. We honk more horns, have more headaches, kill more people and, according to a recent study, even fight more wars.
“Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” reads the title of a paper published in PNAS in November that looked at the relationship between temperature and armed conflict in the sub-Sahara. Researchers found that violence was more likely to erupt in years with hotter weather. “If the temperature goes up by just one degree, crop yields can decline by 20 percent or more,” explains Marshall Burke, one of the study’s authors. “Since 75 percent of poor Africans are engaged in agriculture for their livelihoods, these small changes can have big influence on their incentives to join rebellions.” It’s a frighteningly simple logic that suggests a frighteningly simpler one: The hotter Africa gets, the more violent a place it will become.
The Hopi had a similar appreciation for the weather, though they made sense of it not through research but narrative. Stories like theirs give us a record of how humanity has coped with and tried to escape the influence of its environment. Many of these stories have been unknowingly shaped by the scientific thinking of their time, reflecting our bizarre and often specious attempts to put scientific explanation behind the still largely mysterious feeling we get that, when the weather changes, so do we.
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