Lessons on Climate Futures from Wind’s Tempestuous Past: An Interview with Author Simon Winchester

A newly published history of the wind turns to sea gods and early wind turbines to show how today’s challenges to renewable energy repeat a centuries-old pattern. 

The wind has been associated with gods since early human history. And like gods, it can be fickle. 

In its most violent form, wind can tear cities apart and fuel disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. But in its gentler moments, wind powers life, joy, and innovation. It scatters seeds that sprout into plants, lifts kites flown by children on drafty days, and propels ships that can traverse oceans. Wind is even a saving force against climate change — a source of clean energy that can help phase out fossil fuels, the burning of which releases greenhouse gases that warm the Earth.

(Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers)

In his new book, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester chronicles the myriad ways in which the wind plays a role in our everyday lives — from cataclysmic to messianic to downright mundane. “Wind, in short, seems a universal,” Winchester writes. “Air in motion finds its way into just about every activity and inactivity of man, beast, plant, and thing that exists in the world above its waters.”

The expansive history Winchester writes about underscores the wind’s paradoxes. Wind is a harbinger of disaster, yet an engine of innovation; a destructive force strengthened by climate change, yet a victim, potentially being brought to stillness by it. He explores these ideas not through complex formulas and esoteric physics, but through a personal affection for the weather, animated as a child listening to high seas forecasts on the BBC.

Ahead of his book release, Winchester sits down with The Xylom to discuss the tempestuous history of wind and what it teaches us about confronting a climate-changed future. 

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JASON P. DINH: Why did you write this book? 

SIMON WINCHESTER: The Guardian, where I worked as a journalist, published a piece about the “Great Terrestrial Stilling” — the idea that the world's major continents were experiencing, for some inexplicable reason likely related to climate change, a slowing down of the wind. That seemed so counterintuitive and puzzling because of ever-more devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. I thought, No one ever seems to write about wind. It's this invisible thing. So I decided to dig into its history. 

JPD: Why should people interested in climate change read this book?

SW: Wind is the sharp end of climate change. Rising temperatures are reshaping how winds behave. 

To give you a classic example: The reason Hawaii became popular for living and recreation is because the northeasterly trade winds were known with total predictability and regularity for centuries past. But in the last 50 years, the number of trade wind days has declined from 291 days per year to 210 days by 2009. Why is that happening? Well, it's undeniably climate change.

Climate change is deleterious to us in so many ways. I didn’t want to write a book about climate change per se, but if I could seize upon one aspect of it — wind — then it could be a good way for people who are vaguely interested to become wholly interested.

JPD: How sure are we that a Great Terrestrial Stilling is happening? What is the mechanism? 

SW: It's still open to debate. In contrast, a lot of people now think there's a great wind re-acceleration — a strengthening of the wind — going on.

But the first argument supporting the idea of global stilling is that, with climate change, the temperature differential between the atmosphere around the equator and that of polar regions is lessening, making winds more benign. The second argument — which seems implausible to me — is that the surface of the world is getting rougher. There are huge buildings going up all over the world, disrupting steady wind flow. 

The jury's out. But if winds are indeed slowing down, the effects would be considerable. That would affect the speed at which weather systems reach certain parts of the world, as is the case in Hawaii. There would be scientific and economic consequences — including devastating impacts on wind energy. But it hasn't been proven yet. 

JPD: You write that wind isn't something that we can see; we can only see its effects. How did the earliest human civilizations make sense of this invisible force?

SW: Inevitably, early civilizations blamed or ascribed wind to gods as a form of punishment or reward. This goes back to the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans, right up to the Egyptians, and then to the Greeks, who had numerous wind gods — the Anemoi from which we get the word anemometer (instrument used to measure wind speed). Virtually no secular civilization in ancient times ever conceived of a rational explanation until Aristotle. 

Aristotle wrote extensively about why the wind blows. He proposed that warm air rises, leaving a void into which cooler air moves — and this movement of air is wind. The idea was brilliant and had nothing to do with gods. And then, two thousand years later, at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire came along and codified it into a scientific explanation.

JPD: One story you recount is that of 19th-century inventor James Blyth, often called the grandfather of wind turbines. It seems like he faced organized opposition from a nascent fossil fuel lobby, much like today’s renewable energy. Could you summarize that story and reflect on the parallels with the present? 

SW: James Blyth, an engineering professor at what is now the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, owned a holiday home in Marykirk, a village on Scotland’s North Sea coast.

By Blyth’s time, the mechanics of electricity were well understood — a coil of copper spinning between magnets would produce a current. Blyth realized he could harness the wind to do this. So he built a vertical spindle windmill on the roof of his house — and it worked perfectly.

He powered about 25 newfangled light bulbs in his little house, where he read and cooked with electricity created by the wind and generated for free.

He even had enough spare energy to offer his neighbors down the road. But, surprisingly, they turned him away, believing any electricity not generated by coal was the devil’s work. They had clearly been scared off by coal merchants, as wind-generated electricity would damage their business.

This trend repeats throughout history. Charles Bush, an inventor in Cleveland, and Bill Heronemus, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also faced similar resistance in the 19th century and 20th century, respectively. By then, the coal, oil, and natural gas industries had matured and were not going to give up their stranglehold over electricity generation without a fight.

The same thing persists today, with people in the current presidential administration in league with ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies, arguing that that's how electricity should be generated — not with wind or other renewables. 

JPD: In Blyth’s story, the idea that wind energy was the devil’s work seems to harken back to classical notions of wind as a divine or supernatural force. Do you think the early coal industry was tapping into some primal human instincts toward the wind?

SW: I do think so. The region where eastern Scotland departs onto the North Sea — one of the stormiest bodies of water on the planet — ships regularly sank, and it was said to be a dangerous place with sea monsters and angry gods. Undoubtedly, it was easy to contrive a myth that wind-powered electricity was the devil’s work. It was easy for the fossil fuel lobby — even 120 years ago — to manipulate the human mind, much as they do today, into believing that electricity came from diabolical forces.

JPD: What surprised you the most when exploring the history of wind? 

SW: It has to be the effect of wind on world politics. A striking example of that was in the 1980s. I was in the kitchen in Oxford, where I lived at the time. A news bulletin was interrupted: Swedish scientists had detected radioactivity blowing over their country due to an atypical wind pattern. They worked out that it had come from Chernobyl, in (present-day) Ukraine. Had the winds been blowing in Ukraine as they normally do, then this plume of radiation — a telltale sign of a nuclear power plant disaster — would have swept into southern Russia, allowing the Soviet regime to cover it up.

Mikhail Gorbachev later said that Chernobyl was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union — and the world learned of the meltdown due to the unusual, aberrant, non-customary wind blowing from Kyiv over the Baltic to Scandinavia. 

JPD: If someone wrote a second edition of this book a hundred years from now, what kind of stories would you hope that it features?

SW: That's a very interesting question. Obviously, I hope for the best. But even in the worst outcome — if the wind were to still, if we were caught in doldrums that vastly increased the temperature of the planet, if only the cockroaches were left — then that would be a dismal but fascinating book. 

Even then, I have a naive feeling that the Gaia hypothesis makes sense. Earth itself is a living being; we're privileged to be passengers on it. The planet has a self-regulating mechanism, and it will deal with climate change. We may not survive. We may ruin it for ourselves. But Earth will carry on.

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