Mark Twain is famous for saying: “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”
Actually he got credit for something that a friend of his said.
Certainly the weather is something that has preoccupied us since biblical days. And in New York and its suburbs weather is still the No. 1 topic of conversation year round.
The wrenching snowstorm that's toppled trees and snarled traffic, causing deaths and injuries and general mayhem, is the latest disaster to befall us. But as we look back, it’s clear that weather has often determined major events in human history.
In the Old Testament, God sees the wickedness of man and decides to send a great flood to cleanse the earth. He excepts one righteous man, Noah, and directs him to build an ark to hold a male and female of every species on earth. Noah loads the ark and then the rain comes, flooding the earth. The waters recede and Noah and his family and the animals leave the ark and eventually re-populate the planet.
The vicious snowstorm that wreaked havoc on us this past weekend doesn’t compare to what God did to Noah’s contemporaries. But it, once again, indicates what the wrath of bad weather can do to all of us.
Back about 200 A.D., the story goes, a Chinese leader used the weather to defeat his enemies. He sent out boats under the cover of fog to steal tens of thousands of arrows from the enemy. And, later, Zhuge Liang used the same arrows to win a decisive battle.
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In the Punic Wars, about 200 B.C., whole fleets were lost in battle. In a real sense, both Carthage and Rome lost.
About 700 years ago, the Mongols attempted to invade Japan. Hundreds of vessels assaulted the coast twice. But a typhoon came and a driving wind and heavy rain swamped many of the ships, killing thousands of sailors and driving the invaders back to China.
In 1812, Napoleon led his army into Russia, Czar Alexander I cleverly retreated, eluding the 600,000 French troops. The Russians followed a scorched-earth strategy, denying food to the French. And bitter winter weather forced Napoleon to retreat to France. He had lost most of his army.
In World War II, Adolf Hitler proved he had learned nothing from history. Like Napoleon, he took on the Russians in “Operation Barbarossa.” It was one of the worst winters in recorded history. Daily temperatures fell to 40 degrees below zero. Hitler believed the invasion would be over by winter. He had issued no winter clothing to his troops. An entire German army was defeated at Stalingrad. Winston Churchill said the Russian defeat “tore the heart out of the German army.”
And in more recent days, 1969 to be exact, right here in New York City, one mayor, John Lindsay, nearly lost re-election because he mishandled a snowstorm. Another mayor, Michael Bloomberg, failed to clean up in another snowstorm -- the infamous "Snowpocalypse of 2010" -- and lost a lot of credibility at the time.
