weather forecasting history

I recently wrote about earthquake forecasting and how many scientists think it is essentially impossible. But it is interesting to compare that with the state of weather forecasting in the 1800s:

Before the Royal Charter storm, FitzRoy had been agitating in London for government funding for collection of weather data. He and other Victorian men of meteorology knew that the more they could parse what the weather had done in the past, the better they could warn what it might do in the future. FitzRoy called the concept “forecasting.” To show just how ludicrous that idea seemed at the time, Moore unearths a telling 1854 Commons debate. When a scientifically enthusiastic member of Parliament suggested that amassing weather observations from sea and land could someday mean “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand,” laughter broke out raucously enough to stop the proceeding.

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