Biblically, we Jews identify God with Truth and Truth with Justice. But we also identify Justice in its highest form (tzedakah) with generosity or grace (hesed) and grace in turn with the beauty that finds its source and highest peak in God.

How can we learn about God from the study of nature. What do we learn from the writings of Cicero and the Stoics, Maimonides, and William Blake – and today from the red shift, the anthropic principle, and the challenge of the multiverse?

This chapter looks at the way in which weather has and does affect us, specifically establishing weather as both a productive and destructive force, but also ultimately as an indifferent force. It covers some of the moral categories that go into our assessment of impacts. It also examines our efforts to quantify the impacts, as well at some of the less obvious qualitative shaping effects of weather. Specifically, it challenges the idea of “climate determinism” or “environmental determinism.” The upshot of this chapter is that weather isn't just an event-causing force but a force that affects us; and that inasmuch as it affects us, weather carries good and bad valences that we evaluate and build our lives around.

It is a standing joke in academia that some of the worst undergraduate papers begin with the phrase “Since the beginning of time … ” and then go downhill from there. I easily could’ve started this book off the same way. “Since the beginning of time, people have been talking about weather … ” But in this instance at least, people actually have been talking about weather since the beginning of time – seriously, likely at least since the moment that we could begin talking about anything – and they have been conjecturing and hypothesizing about how weather will affect them. All this to say, I can’t purport to give a comprehensive overview of everything that’s ever been said in a short book like this.

This chapter discusses the various ways in which we've struggled to fight against or live with the weather. It frames this discussion as an exploration of dispositional attitudes and suggests that the moral valence of weather is in part a consequence of the technologies and policies we have developed to mitigate risk. Roofs, gutters, aqueducts, pumps, shades, fabrics, paints, umbrellas, parasols, and sunscreen have all done considerable work to dampen or amplify the impacts of weather on our lives. It also reflects on the three historically significant agricultural revolutions and ties them into the emergence of technologies and policies that we have used to intervene with weather. These technical innovations have themselves also shaped whole economies, transformed cities, and affected the physical landscape in which we live. It stresses in particular how contemporary theorists have sought to capture weather as one of many “ecosystem services,” an actuarial abstraction that further reframes weather, not as an unending cascade of unpredictable hazards, but instead as a gift of free services from nature. In the end, it suggests that this transforms our relationship to weather almost entirely into impact terms. The primary purpose of this chapter is to make a practical point: that weather presents a kind of ongoing, forever-looming natural hazard, but as we've been able to soften the blow of weather through practical and technical means, we have changed how we live and how we view weather.

This chapter explores what weather is, investigating the metaphysics and ontology of weather's various manifestations. It begins by raising familiar examples and then trying to bring these together to get at the concept behind weather. It first examines many instances of weather – rain, snow, sleet, hail, thunder, lightning, clouds, sun, wind, storms, cold snaps, heat waves, clear skies, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. – and discusses the ways in which these examples of weather ultimately fall short of offering a suitable definition. It also covers the ways in which metaphors of weather appear in literature, film, and popular culture, often as indications of tumult or unpredictability. It concludes by bending toward a characterization of weather as a force that functions independently of our own willful activities.

It is a common bromide and accepted truism that if one has nothing to talk about, then one can always talk about the weather. From office parties to high school reunions, from blind dates to cross-Atlantic airline flights, weather is the go-to conversation starter that rarely succeeds in starting the conversation. That makes it particularly strange that a philosopher, a person who generally has too much to say – indeed, who belongs to a class of intellectuals deemed so stuffy and smug as to pride themselves entirely on the alleged depth and meaning of the things they say – would stoop so low as to talk about the weather.

This chapter addresses the tension between human agency and the brute forces of nature by exploring past and present attempts to control the weather. It begins by focusing on the various religious and cultural rituals that people have invoked in attempts to modify the weather. The objective of recounting these cultural practices is to extract from them observations about the underlying assumptions that guide such thinking: For instance, the idea that weather is an intentional force, steered by gods who may be listening; or, alternatively, the idea that nature is a mechanistic system that can, like a complicated thermostat, be adjusted to produce the right temperature. Bearing this in mind, the chapter shifts to a series of intuition pumps, all aimed to suggest that the forces of weather are always outside and alien, heteronomous, and that this heteronomy is encapsulated in the very idea of weather.

This chapter discusses the move to modern meteorology, the science of weather. As meteorology has moved from antiquity through modernity, as we’ve sliced and diced the various aspects of weather into measurable, quantifiable units, we have demystified and changed our thinking about weather altogether. Without question, this conceptual slicing and dicing has increased our understanding of weather phenomena and improved the predictive validity of our forecasts, but it has also in many ways removed us from the most hazardous front lines of weather. The objective of this chapter is more epistemic than practical, to suggest that our relationship with weather has changed as we’ve learned to conceptualize weather differently. The final section of the chapter discusses the ways in which the demystification and quantification of weather has been adapted to characterize weather and its impacts as risk.