HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 131

Fast forward two centuries since Tambora's eruption, we find a world in which cheap energy
has brought enormous wealth and comfort to the populations of many countries and pulled
untold millions out of poverty. But carbon-driven modernity has come at great ecological
cost. Carbon waste—unregulated and unpriced—continues to alter the essential chemistry
of the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, farmers of the twenty-first century face regional
changes in weather patterns at a scale and pace human beings have not seen since the first
emergence of agriculture ten thousand years ago.
The weather of our third millennium, as altered by humankind, is in fact heading in the
opposite direction to that foreseen by Jefferson and Buffon. Instead of a managed, amelior-
ative warming of the colder regions of the Earth, we now have a runaway climate system
increasingly prone to unpredictable extremes of drought, flood, and storms—something like
the Frankenstein's weather of 1816-17. Summers are increasingly hot rather than cold, but
the net negative impact on agriculture is the same: declining yields and escalating prices on
world commodity markets. For more than a century before the birth of Jefferson, American
farmers had worked to adapt their agriculture to the prevailing weather regimes across the
United States. Now they face the daunting task of maintaining their crop yields in a deterior-
ating, unstable climate, exactly the predicament the nation's agricultural system faced in the
Tamboran decade of the 1810s.
Debates over American climate—epitomized by the Jefferson-Buffon exchange—took cen-
ter stage in the political life of the early republic. Moreover, the 1816 weather disaster
furthered the sciences of climate and meteorology in the United States, at least in terms of
its status as a professional discipline and office of government. It is no coincidence that the
earliest meteorological journal kept by the Army Medical Department dates from July 1816,
in the midst of a national weather emergency. In 1817, as a response to general concern over
climate deterioration, the federal Land Office likewise ordered its twenty regional branches
to begin systematic records of temperature and precipitation. The following year, the army
followed suit under the supervision of the surgeon general. A new, federalized era of meteor-
ological data gathering had begun. 61
Ironically, however, as American meteorology became more professionalized, weather
awareness receded among the general population. The earlier certainties of an ameliorating
climate had vanished post-1816, to be replaced by lukewarm doubt and indifference. By
1825, the author of the national Meteorological Register reported a mere muddle of opinion
on this once galvanizing issue: “some [contend] that as the population increased and civiliza-
tion extended the climate became warmer, others that it became colder, and others that there
was no change.” 62 The daily preoccupation with weather conditions and seasonality—a hall-
mark of the Jeffersonian age—ebbed as an ever-decreasing fraction of the population lived
and worked on the land and the United States developed into the metropolitan-based manu-
facturing society Jefferson foresaw with such clear-eyed loathing. After 1820, climate change
likewise faded from the transatlantic conversation. The United States did not need a moderate
climate—or the promise of one—to attract investment and build industries in the new era.
Undergirding this industrial development, a modern financial system evolved that, for the
most part, insulated ordinary Americans from the vicissitudes of weather and crop yields. 63
One consequence of the long decline of American rural life has been a profound climate
illiteracy among the political class, which reflects that of the citizenry at large. So the Americ-
an public was ill-prepared when, in the mid-1980s—two hundred years after Jefferson's fam-