The Way the Future Blogs

 

Remember the ozone hole? The hole in the atmospheric ozone layer over Antarctica that allowed dangerous solar radiation to come through to the surface of the Earth with potentially deadly effects on life there.

Starting in 1989, international agreements began to cap and then to reduce the percentage of ozone-destroying gases liberated through the use of certain refrigerants and propellants, and scientists around the world began to check on the condition of the ozone hall at the end of every Antarctic winter. This year, meteorologist Murray Salby, with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, announced the first signs of healing of the hole. Admittedly the changes in the ozone hole are small, and somewhat ambiguous, but they indicate that the international collaboration of many countries can in fact succeed in working together to heal an environmental crisis

Now, if we could only all get together on a program of slowing … then stopping … then reversing the flow of carbon compounds into the atmosphere, why, then we’d have some hope that our grandchildren might have a pretty decent world to live in!

 
But, Meanwhile —

The regular run of chronic bad weather news is still with us. Eastern Europe’s summer was the hottest in more than 500 years. In Russia, there were more than 55,000 deaths related to the heat wave. A quarter of the crops failed, there were vast wildfires and meteorological models suggest that somewhat less extreme heat waves will be common over the next 40 years.

Clearly there are other factors — poverty for one, proximity to an ocean with the potential for a tsunami and imperiled nuclear plants for another, both as in Japan 2011. But political corruption —and thus inadequate requirements for inspection and construction of buildings — is a factor that people can do something about.

Six months or so back a local outfit asked me to make some predictions about the future. That’s not my regular line of work, of course. Sf writers do not predict the future, they just speculate about what sorts of futures might come our way, but I was feeling lucky so I took a shot. “By 2050 A.D.,” I said, “the whole stretch of southwestern states from Texas through Southern California will be officially designated a desert.”

And what do you know? This Sunday’s New York Times had an interview with Richard Seagar, head analyst of Southwest weather studies at Columbus University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Asked how long he thought the Southwest drought might persist, he said, “You can’t really call it a drought. . . . You don’t say, ‘The Sahara is in drought.’ It’s a desert. If the models are right, then the Southwest will face a permanent drying out.”

Not the only place, either. The same models that show Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix at risk of becoming “ghost cities,” show the same for more distant urban places like Perth, Australia, whose city planners warn that it may be the first to go.

Want another prediction while I’m hot?

All right. By 2050 the tornado belt, which has slowly relocated closer to my own area in Northern Illinois, will inhabit Canada’s southern provinces, and you can bet on that! (Of course, you might lose.)

   Hal Clement, 1965.

When I first began reading Hal Clement stories in Astounding, I was struck by this new writer’s affection for cloud types and air masses. Had to be a weatherman, I assured myself. Nobody else could, or would bother to, get all that meteorological talk down so well.

When I learned that Clement had been with a B-24 group, I was yearning for more, for so was I; and when it turned out that his bomb group was the 457th, I was fascinated. Mine was the 456th. Near us in the Stornara, Italy, neighborhood were the 458th and 459th; since the Air Force customarily packaged its bomb groups into bomb wings of four groups each, I had always wondered what they had done with our 457th.

Now I know that it was in England, flying right across the Channel to drop its bombs instead of chugging north through most of Europe before they got to a target, as our Mediterranean Theater of Operations bombers did. But why?

Ah, there is no “why” when you talk about the doings of the military.

Even after I met Hal Clement — aka Major Harry Stubbs, not a weatherman but a pilot, he explained; “but of course we had lots of courses in weather” — he didn’t know what had happened to detach his group from its siblings either. All he could tell me was that one day around 1942 or so they’d got orders to draw desert-type clothing and hot-weather instruments, along with the other nearby groups; then the 457th’s orders were reversed, while other groups began flying to Italy, and ultimately they were ordered to England.

And what did I mean, “Why?” Whoever knew “why” anything happened in the Air Force?

Nevertheless we became good friends, and ultimately I became his agent.

 
More to come.

 
Related post:
Hal Clement, Part 2

Jack Williamson
 

The first “Worldcon” wasn’t quite as globally representative as one might have wished; I don’t know that any of the attendees came from any country but the U.S.A and, maybe, Canada. But it was the last chance we had for a real international gathering, because that year of 1939 was the beginning of that event that interfered with everyone’s plans for that sort of frippery, namely World War II.

America didn’t get involved in actual combat until Japan took its ill-advised crack at Pearl Harbor, late in 1941, but that was the end of even the so-called Worldcons. Most fans were male and mostly in their late teens or early 20s, and thus the natural prey of the draft. So, whether called up or volunteering, most of us were soon wearing uniforms.

By 1943, both Jack Williamson and I were in the Air Force and both had wound up as weathermen. I was just beginning. After doing basic training in Miami Beach, I was ordered to Chanute Field, Illinois, to learn how to read a theodolite, plot a synoptic map, operate a teletype and release a hydrogen-filled pilot balloon to investigate the velocity and direction of the winds aloft, after which I would be sent to join some weather station in the capacity of its lowest professional level, as a weather observer, Army Specialist Number 784.

Meanwhile, Jack, ahead of me as ever, had already done that a couple of years earlier. He had then served as a working observer at an actual weather station in the field, until he applied for promotion as a weather forecaster, ASN 787. This required going back to Chanute Field for additional training, and, by the grace of that useful Someone, his orders put him there over the same weeks as mine.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the significance of this chance meeting. It wasn’t a case of two dear buddies getting together for a long-desired reunion. We barely knew each other. What’s more, we didn’t have much free time on either of our schedules, and what one of us did have didn’t always mesh with the free time on the other’s. But I think we both enjoyed the chance to talk science fiction again, even if briefly.

Then our courses ended. Jack went off to an American air base on the way to his permanent assignment, which was to be forecaster for a landing strip on one of the myriad tiny islands that usefully dot the Pacific Ocean for the benefit of bomber crews that can’t quite make it home after a mission, while I went off to spend a year at the weather station on the base at Enid, Oklahoma, before my orders for Italy came through.

Then the war ended. (How quickly I write that down … and how slowly that event arrived in the real world.) All of us now being civilians once more, I wrote a letter to Jack that started one of the longest-lasting and most rewarding relationships of my professional life.

None of that might have happened, though, if it hadn’t been sparked by what was happening in the life of the person who was then my oldest friend, Dirk Wylie. But for that we need a digression, which will happen in Part Next (of I don’t know how many) in the Jack Williamson story, coming up shortly after I get it written.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

A few weeks ago, I responded to a comment by a viewer who signs himself TJIC to say, among other things, that there was a species of penguin in Antarctica which is steadily moving its breeding grounds farther and farther south. The reason it does this is to migrate to colder latitudes in order to try to avoid the warming which messes up their oceanic ice.

That much of what I said appears to be true, but then I went on to say that if the penguins went on migrating in that direction they would sooner or later reach a point so far south that the Sun would never rise at all and it would be eternally dark.

That’s ridiculous. There’s no such place. Simple geometry proves that.

I had misunderstood something my source said — I now suspect that it was something about no longer having any ice to worry about because they were now in the middle of the Antarctic continent — and written it down wrong. So now to all of you I bare my throat and say I’m sorry.

 
There’s one other thing in that dashed-off answer that needs a little elucidation. What I said was, “… at one point in history (the scientific) community believed that the Sun went around the Earth and then, not all that much later, reversed their opinion…”

That’s not exactly wrong. It’s incomplete, though. It’s not just that the world’s scientists habitually look at any two theories presented to them, the old and the new, and say, oh, yeah, that new one is more complete, more accurate and more useful than the old one, so from now on I’m with the new.

That does happen, but it’s only part of the process. The other part is that a number of scientists cling to the old theory until they die, evidence be damned. But then they do die, and the generation of new scientists that follow them grow up with that new theory already embedded in their minds.

So it’s true that at one time almost all scientists believed that the Sun orbited around the Earth, and at a later time almost all scientists believed that the Earth orbited around the Sun. But they weren’t the same scientists.