THOUGHTS ON THUNDER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 23, 1 December 1939, Page 23

THOUGHTS ON THUNDER

By

Ivor

Brown

In "The Manchester Guardian."

HE British summer has been described as two fine days and a thunderstorm. In recent years that has seemed to be an optimistic estimate; the ratio has been two thunderstorms to one fine day. As this article is being written the thunder proceeds, not in its ancient fashion of intermittency, flash-pause-crash, but with a ceaseless growling, which is typical of 1939. This may be aptly symbolic of the European situation, but that situation is bad enough without the addition of climatic symbols. A little serenity in either quarter would be a pleasant change. Meanwhile what dazzles one is not the old-style flash of lightning but an abiding sky full of flame: it is not a peal of thunder but a perpetuity which afflicts the aching head. True, we have had some fine days to excuse this ferocity; but it was the first series of fine days since Whitsuntide, and during July the thunder-clouds were a continual canopy. Why do people repeat the absurd opinion that thunder clears the air? It rarely does so. This summer it has achieved nothing of the kind. One storm has merely " hotted things up" for the next. Aeroplanes or Wireless? There are many folk who attribute our meteorological distresses to man’s inventive invasions of the sky. May not these incessant flights of aeroplanes be disturbing the normal conduct of the clouds? More often the blame is laid on "all this wireless." The men of science nod their heads with a tolerant smile and dismiss such calculation with polite disdain. Certainly there is plenty of "this wireless" going upwards and outwards in‘ the United States, and the heavily populated radio-using States of the north-east have just been experiencing a prolonged, oppressive, and dangerous drought, with its natural circumstances of parched fields and forest fires. Old England has been very wet, but New England has been very dry. Probably the skies of the latter are the more raked and riven by radio messages, wireless entertainments, and electric discharges of all kinds. Yet the rains have passed them by. Final Mastery If man survives his own cleverness, if homo sapiens, as Mr. Wells would say, can become common-sensible as well as mechanically sapient-a prospect which does not seem by any means assured at the momernt-he may before long attain to a final mastery over the weather, summon or dispatch at his pleasure " all the infections that the sun sucks up," and regulate the rainfall by schedule

and by policy. The magician of the future will be a State Council of Meteorology whose members, like Prospero, with electricity their Ariel, will bedim the noontide sun, call forth the mutinous winds, beckon the sun and generally practise " airy charms." To open and release the fountains of clouds already present should not be difficult: something in that line has already been achieved by gunfire. The problem is-to magnetise or disperse the moisture, summoning the breakable cloud in time of drought and dispelling the too attentive " Atlantic depression." Considering what man has done to Nature in the last century, for good and for evil, this last victory over the void. of heaven should not be beyond the scope of his restless and far-reaching science when another hundred years have Passed away.