2 posts tagged with "Meteorology"

I was sitting on the terrace last Thursday, pipe lit, coffee lukewarm, watching a perfectly unremarkable cumulus drift over the Aegean. Harmless. Decorative, even. The kind of cloud Nikolas Faros would point at with his manicured index finger and call "partly cloudy, temperatures mild." And he would be right, technically, which is the most irritating kind of right.

I should say at the outset that predicting the weather has always been a fundamentally absurd enterprise. The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system with more variables than any civilisation has ever been equipped to measure, and yet we have been trying to guess what it will do next for roughly four thousand years. The fact that we now occasionally succeed is less a testament to human genius than to human stubbornness, which may, in fact, be the same thing.