The Atmosphere at the 'Farmer's Almanac'

...While other journals are filled with news of the very latest goingson about atoms, rocketry and trips to the moon, the reliable Almanac deals with Captain Kidd, stage coaches and weather forecasts...

...The movements of the earth, the planets and the stars give us the seasons and the changing years...

...First, there is astronomy...

...When the Old Farmer's Almanac moves from the realm of astronomy to that of meteorology, it is looking for trouble...

...It begins: "The lead editorial of the December, 1960, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society—that society to which most of the seriousminded weather scientists (including ourselves) belong—bemoaned the fact that members as well as non-members were at times guilty of inadvertant "overstepping of the bounds of sound ethical practice,' 'unfair competition and fee-cutting,' and 'quackery.' It asked, and rightly so, for a 'sustained sense of responsibility' on the part of its members—and in the most serious cases of quackery a quiet separation from the society...

...Since the disappearance of Henry Ford's flivver, there has been no other nearly its equal...

...But this fine old publication is now troubled by the assaults of modern thought...

...In fact, even the Almanac closes its serious discussion by saying: "Weather and weather-forecasters always have been—and still are—one of the few reliable sources for smiles and chuckles...

...One of its most conspicuous features this year is a two-page editorial entitled "What's Wrong with the Weather...

...The Almanac has no cause to feel ashamed or defeated because its forecasting is criticized or classified as quackery...

...Mysteries, after all, are our salvation...

...Its circulation figures must be in the hundreds of thousands...

...I am happy that, like the ocean, this great sea of air at whose bottom we carry on our life still remains in large part an unsolved riddle...

...From another passage in the editorial, I gather that there are more than 17,000 licensed weather prophets in this country, and one authority on the subject is willing to assert that Congressional and other investigations revealed that only 278 of these were not quacks...

...These are the basic motions of the universe, and all are interpreted in regular markings in the Almanac's little calendar...

...Real quackery was defined as "extravagent claims of amazing accuracy in casting day to day weather six months—or six years—in advance" The Almanac's editors seem to take this criticism of weather forecasting in stride...

...At the time Robert Thomas started the publication, in 1792, he probably did not realize that he had a distinguished predecessor...

...The weather is determined by the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is a wild combination of gases which extends many miles away from the earth and over the arid and frigid poles...

...There is no threat to the life of the 170-year publication, I am glad to say...

...And that was the start of this whole business of weather and forecasting it...

...Since then the study of weather has developed into a great and useful profession...

...Meteorology is not really a science...

...Perhaps the equanimity of the hit-or-miss forecasters arises from the fact that their materials are selected from two completely different sources...

...The signs of the Zodiac, to which the Almanac editors are impressively faithful, are merely the classical symbols of the abiding features of our lives: the moon with its changing quarters, the evening and morning stars changing positions with the regularity of palace guards, the great constellations wheeling majestically through the heavens...

...In 1743, Benjamin Franklin had created the very first weathermap by tracing a storm from Philadelphia to Boston...

...I know it is easy to laugh at the expense of weather prediction...

...Younger sheets keel over almost every day, but the old settler with Benjamin Franklin and Robert Thomas on its cover goes sturdily on...