Another Voice

28 March 2009

In economics, as in meteorology, the basic theory is both boring and largely useless

When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now.

This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension the explanation of wind. Warm air, heated by the sun, would rise; and cooler air would waft in to take its place. Thus (I appreciated) a light breeze might waft from the cool sea to the warmer land during the day; but, by night, as the land grew cooler than the ocean, the airflow would reverse and a breeze blow from land to sea. All around the globe, as air pressures dropped or rose in one place or another, air would be sucked from one place to another to rebalance. And Mr van Aswegan demonstrated how rain was made when bodies of warm, damp air were caused to rise, and cool, and precipitate their moisture.

Our physics teacher, Mr Murphy, even demonstrated the effect with a different medium, water, showing how warm water (dyed with ink) rose as heat was applied by a Bunsen burner beneath. Oh yes, these explanations were clear enough to me, and intellectually satisfying. Those novelty ‘lava lamps’ filled with coloured oils that rose and fell in slowly mutating globs that became fashionable (for the first time round) in the 1960s when I was at school seemed to offer a pleasingly graphic demonstration of the effect.

But what neither Mr van Aswegan, Mr Murphy nor the lava lamps explained — and nobody tried to — were storms, and gales, and the sheer violence of the elements as observed in nature. The picture logically implied by Mr van Aswegan’s physics was (as I understood it) of a gentle, continuous rebalancing of pressures, so that the moment a pressure difference emerged between one patch and another, a little air (or water) moved from the area of higher to the area of lower pressure, until pressures were equalised.

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