Was it really a dark and stormy night?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/magazine/8500127.stm Version 0 of 1. Sometimes a detail seems too good to leave out - even if its veracity may be a little shaky. But when trust is at stake - such as over climate change - resist the temptation to embellish, writes Lisa Jardine. Given the British obsession with it, it is curious how little attention historians pay to the weather. Preoccupied as we are today with meteorology and climate change, this begins to seem like a glaring omission. So when a recently published book about the Royal Society included the information, that the evening of the very first meeting of that august scientific body, convened at Gresham College on 23 November 1660, was wet, I was immediately intrigued. "The Royal Society..." the essayist wrote, "...has been doing interesting and heroic things since 1660 when it was founded, one damp weeknight in late November, by a dozen men who had gathered in rooms at Gresham College to hear Christopher Wren, 28 years old and not yet generally famous, give a lecture on astronomy." I have done research on the history of the Royal Society and on Sir Christopher Wren myself. That passing remark about the weather brought me up short. I was taken aback that I had not known it was raining when the founder fellows convened. It would have been a nice piece of "colour" to have included in my own biography of Wren. Sir Christopher Wren's debut at the Royal Society may have been damp So I consulted Wren's contemporary, Samuel Pepys, for confirmation. One of the many wonderful things about Pepys' diary is that it is packed with everyday detail, including such apparently mundane topics as the weather. On the date in question he had several opportunities to remark on it. "This morning standing looking upon the workmen doing of my new door to my house, there comes Captain Straughan, the Scot, and he would needs take me to the Dolphin, and give me a glass of ale and a peck of oysters, he and I. Home and dined, and in the afternoon to the office, where till late, and that being done Mr Creed did come to speak with me, and I took him to the Dolphin, where there was Mr Pierce the purser and his wife and some friends of theirs. After they were gone Mr Creed and I spent an hour in looking over the account which he do intend to pass in our office for his lending moneys. We parted about 11 o'clock at night. So I home and to bed." Not a mention of damp. Indeed, it seems unlikely that carpenters would have been erecting his new door had it been wet. All other sources I have been able to consult suggest that the years 1650 to 1660 in England were unusually dry. As he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a physician) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt John Aubrey on Sir Francis Bacon I can only conclude that the author of the essay had decided it was likely to have been wet in London in late November and popped in the word "damp" to add vividness. (No doubt any reader who knows otherwise will send me the almanac reference to the occurrence of rain on this particular date.) Once in a while, keeping an eye on the weather throws up a useful piece of historical evidence. When Alan Stewart and I were completing our biography of Sir Francis Bacon, it was he, as I recall, who voiced scepticism about the weather as described in the standard account of how the Father of Modern Science died. Thanks to Bacon's near contemporary John Aubrey, the manner of his death has entered folklore. Bacon was enthusiastic about innovative ways to conserve organic matter, Aubrey records in his Brief Lives, including the properties of extreme cold which might prove useful in food preservation. Deep and crisp and even "As he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a physician) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment at once. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman gut it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings, but went to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been laid-in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of suffocation." Bacon did indeed die at the Earl of Arundel's Highgate home in April 1626. But once we had noticed it, it did not take long to discover that no "snow lay on the ground" that spring. As regards the illness that overtook him on the road through Highgate, Bacon, as it happens, left us a written account of the incident. Before he realised how dangerously ill he was, he wrote to Arundel to apologise for having to prevail without warning upon the hospitality of his household. Bacon had, he wrote, been conducting experiments into the prolongation of life, in London. On the journey home he was overcome by violent vomiting and forced to break his journey. The experiments in question, he indicated cryptically, had been self-experiments - conducted on his own person. FIND OUT MORE... A Point of View, with Lisa Jardine, is on Fridays on Radio 4 at 2050 GMT and repeated on Sundays at 0850 GMTOr listen to it <a class="" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qng8">here later</a> "I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius. For I also was desirous to try an experiment or two, touching the conservation and strengthening of bodies." Pliny the elder died on the slopes of Vesuvius from inhaling toxic gases emitted by the volcano. Bacon implies that he had tried a more controlled experiment on himself, inhaling substances he believed might prolong his own life. He too, however, brought about his own death in the process. Thanks to our noticing the anomalous weather, the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography includes two versions of how Sir Francis Bacon met his death. Evidence tampering Today the whole world is preoccupied with climate change, and predicting the weather. The mainstream scientific view is that unless we take drastic measures, climate changes our own activities have set in motion over the past 150 years will, within a comparatively short time, threaten the survival of the human race. Scientists need to be vigilant about sharing the truth with the public It is hard to persuade people of the need to act unselfishly now, so that future generations, in a world we will never know, may survive. Science, as I have said here before, does not deal in certainties - the best it can do is convince us on the basis of strong probabilities, and that depends on trust. So the mishandling of data on climate change by the IPCC, uncovered over the past few weeks, is particularly damaging. "It becomes difficult to resist the blandishments of the sceptics," the Telegraph commented, "if a purportedly scientific document cannot be wholly relied on." Last weekend, writing in the Observer, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change tried to redress the balance of opinion: "We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO2 concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change." On Radio 4's The World This Weekend he continued: "Yes, it was bad that a mistake was made, yes the IPCC needs to reform its procedures. But the truth is that it doesn't undermine decades of climate change research and the overwhelming majority of scientists say that." But if the evidence was tampered with elsewhere, retort the sceptics, why should we believe them here? Which brings me back to that recent retelling of the story of the foundation meeting of the Fellows of the Royal Society. No-one is suggesting that because an author slips an engaging adjective into their narrative, for which there may be no actual evidence, the truth of the entire story thereby falls to the ground. Whether it was wet or not, that meeting did take place. But those whom the public at large trust to be vigilant on their behalf, especially, I believe, in the science community, bear a heavy responsibility when it comes to the means they use to inform and persuade. Whenever they set about convincing us of the truth of whatever they want to communicate, it is incumbent upon them to adhere scrupulously to the very highest evidence-based standards. <hr/> Add your comments on this story, using the form below. <a name="say"></a> The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/">Terms & Conditions</a> |