4. IMPLICATIONS OF A SPACE-DERIVED WEATHER
PREDICTING SYSTEM
Footnotes
1. Interviews with Dr. Jack Thompson, Executive Assistant, Technical Planning, U. S. Weather Bureau, and with Dr. Helmut E. Landsberg, Director, Office of Climatology, U. S. Weather Bureau.
2. See especially House Report of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, Serial B, Panel on Science and Technology, First Meeting, 86th Congress, Second Session (May 4, 1960), pp. 41-42 (which is a part of a paper by Dr. Sverre Petterssen entitled "Expected Developments in Meteorology During the Coming Ten Year Period"). Here are summarized the many non-space activities which must be undertaken in conjunction with space and satellite studies in order to develop an adequate theory of weather.
3. Interview with Dr. Jack Thompson. See also Morris Neiburger (Chairman, Department of Meteorology, University of California, Los Angeles), "Utilization of Space Vehicles for Weather Prediction and Control," lecture prepared for the series "Peacetime Uses of Space" held at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1960; pp. 6 and 7 are of particular interest here.
4. See Walter Sullivan, "U. S. Project Studies Tornadoes With Radar Planes and Rockets," New York Times, May 9, 1960, P. 31.
5. "The conclusions of the past ten years of experimentation emphasize that only through fundamental research in atmospheric science can answers be found to the complex questions involved in weather modification... .
Research and evaluation will be conducted by the best scientific talent, using the tools of physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, and meteorology to solve the problems. The search will in the main be characterized by its long term fundamental approach, and practical results should not be anticipated until a score of new discoveries in the laboratory and in the field has accumulated." National Science Foundation, Weather Modification: First Annual Report, 1959 (Publication 60-24), P. 15. Also: 11 ... there is no known way to affect the weather and climate of an area. Attempts at prevention of hail and lightning and at influencing the formation or movement of tropical storms have so far been unsuccessful. Proposals for modification of larger scale aspects of the weather have taken the form of vague suggestions ... which would require much further analysis before their feasibility could be evaluated." Morris Neiburger (see second citation in Note 3), P. 19 [-20-]
6. For a review of the present situation, which informants tell us has not changed significantly since the article was published, see Francis Bello, "Forecast for Weather Control Brighter," Fortune, Vol. 57 (May 1958), pp. 144-147, 166, 169, 173-174.
7. Reported by John W. Finney, "Waste Is Feared in Space Probes, “New York Times, Sept. 25, 1960, p@ 27. Even in the United States there are organizational problems connected with weather study and development, as is evidenced by the summary of the factors affecting the establishment of the National Center of Atmospheric Research. See John W. Finney, "U. S. Plans Center to Study Weather," New York Times, June 27, 1960, P. 5. A clear summary of some of the data processing and communication problems connected with a weather satellite system is to be found in Dr. Isador M. Levitt, "Satellite Problems Will Become Acute," Newport News, Virginia, Daily Press, June 19, 1960. [NOTE: This paragraph was highlighted with a large exclamation point. - Dan Woolman]
8. Memoranda of arrangements stipulating that the United States will provide weather observation equipment and resident technicians and train indigenous personnel, while recipient nations furnish employees and carry out the observations, have been signed with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Chile, the West Indian Federation, France, the Netherlands, the Antilles, Cuba, and Mexico. [-21-]
9.A highly placed international official, familiar with the impact of innovation on tradition-oriented societies, felt that the prospects of disruption of traditional agricultural production and tenors of life from such technological advances as 3 to 6 month forecasts would warrant the setting of technological motivation schedules and timing which scientists should not be allowed to exceed or accelerate. He proposed that in underdeveloped areas of the world research should be directed toward
establishing what forecast lead-time was necessary to prevent flood and crop losses within existing social and economic structure, and that only forecasts that prevented such losses should be developed. He felt that the scientist should not be allowed to thrust on the world forecasts which it does not immediately need which would be disruptive.
10. Exchanges of weather information now occur between the United States and Red China, through the offices of the USSR, and apparently such exchanges took place even during the Korean War. However, there are profound limitations to these exchanges, as the operations of the World Meteorological Organization indicate. See Philip C. Jessup and H. J. Taubenfeld, Controls for Outer Space and the Antarctic Analogy, Columbia University Press (1959), p. 90.
11. The U. S. Air Force hypothesizes meteorological blackouts over large areas in the event of hostilities and this hypothesis, of course, might be extended to a "hot" cold war situation, See R. M. White, R. F. Myers , and F. W. Ward, "General Design for Weather Observing and ForecastingSystem 443L," Geophysics Research Directorate, Air Force Cambridge Research Center, Air Research and Development Command (AFCRCTN-57-609), December 15, 1957 , pp. 7-12. (ASTIA Document 133846, Library of Congress Reference PB 144602).
12. As precedent and pattern for the development of cooperative regional computer centers, there may be some relevant experience in the extranational support of the so-called International Meteorological Institute at Stockholm, which has received outside support for research from various sources, including grants from the U. S. National Science Foundation, Weather Bureau, and Office of Naval Research (according to Dr. Helmut E. Landsberg), Since by its covenant WMO is restricted to reporting and coordination between national organizations, and is specifically precluded from operations, the covenant would have to be amended to allow WMO direct administrative purview. if this could not be done, regional, continental, or international organizations might be created to administer the centers, or the regional meteorological authority could be added to existing regional organizations such as the Pan-American Union.
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13. The history of the ICY might provide substantive parallels and suggest some of the organizational specifications that might be required to attain and maintain accurate, reliable, long-range, and short-range forecast capabilities on a world-wide basis, Under the ICY arrangements, sovereign nations agreed to exchange data gained from specific explorations undertaken by each as its contribution to the ICY program. Thus each nation took upon itself the responsibility for funding, carrying through, and delivering the findings of its own projects for the duration of ICY. it would be most fruitful to examine the ICY history, to identify the motivations of participating nations and their capacities to conceive and carry through significant parts of the undertaking and to share their findings. Such an analysis might well reveal experience that would be applicable to plans and organization of a permanent international, or at least multinational, weather reporting system. Documents related to the "administration" of ICY are now being collected and studied by John Truesdale, of the ICY Office of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council of Washington.
14. If, as appears likely, the United States continues to be a major, if not the major, contributor of satellite facilities for the development and application of advanced weather theory, it will be very necessary to assess the implications for foreign relations of a vacillating posture regarding 'what we claim we will make unrestrictedly available to the world, and what we subsequently restrict for military reasons. The world-wide reactions of significant publics to our alleged restriction of the Tiros data and then our later claim to have released all of it, would make a worthwhile pilot study on this problem.
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15. Interview with Dr. Jack Thompson. See also "Research and Education in Meteorology" (An interim report of the Committee on Meteorology to the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council: January 25, 1958), included as Appendix A of National Science Foundation/University Committee on Atmospheric Research, Preliminary Plans for a National Institute of Atmospheric Research, National Science Foundation (February 1959). According to this report, "Salaries paid for meteorologists are comparable with those paid other scientists, and are at the top, on a par with salaries of physicists, for those with doctor's degrees .... In view of the high salaries paid to meteorologists having doctor's degrees, it is surprising that there are not more of them.,” (P. A-29) However, as the report also states, "It is well known that careers in the military and civil government services are unattractive to a majority of young scientists. (P. A-18)
16. See House Report of the Committee on Sciences and Astronautics, Serial B, Panel on Science and Technology, First Meeting, 86th Congress, Second Session (May 4, 1960), p. 39 (which is part of a paper by Dr. Sverre Petterssen entitles “Expected Developments in Meteorology During the Coming Ten Year Period").
17. "Research and Education in Meteorology."
18. Major Fields for Graduate Study Leading to the Ph.D. Degree: A Supplement to A Guide to Graduate Study, Washington D. C., American Council on Education (1958), pp. 8-9.
19. That machine learning of this type of phenomena is by no means impossible is evident in the on-going research on the perception. See Philip J. Klass, "Perceptron Shows Its Ability to Learn," Aviation Week, July 4, 1960, pp. 72-73, 75-77, 80.
20. Some sense of the subtlety of this problem is conveyed by the comments of qualified observers that in some countries the appellation "official" renders any statement ipso facto untrue. In such areas it would obviously not make a weather prediction authoritative to claim that it came from official weather sources as an official prediction.
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21. The experiences of organizations such as the System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, in designing large man-machine data processing systems and the appropriate training methods should be valuable for such studies.
22. “Today, vast beehives of scientists are mobilized and organized, under the auspices of governmental bureaucracies that dispose of the resources of whole nations, for the advancement of applied science and technology. Tomorrow, it appears, the resources of the whole world will have to be mobilized by the governments to carry out single-space projects.' The implication for human society is plain. Individuals will have to be brought together in beehives that will have to be combined, in turn, to form super-beehives -- until at last, perhaps the whole of mankind is brought within one centralized organization that operates the civilization of the future, maintaining and regulating the artificial environment that it provides." Louis J. Halle, "The Natural History of Man's Emergence Into Space," in International Political Implications of Activities in Outer Space, Joseph M. Coldsen, ad., RAND Corporation Report R-362-RC (1960), P. 201.
23. The quick history of the rise and fall of the Discomfort Index is told in headlines of articles in the New York Times, June 14, 16, and 17, 1959, pp. 23, 37, and 37 respectively. As of the last date, under pressure from the New York Commerce and Industry Association, the New York Weather Bureau dropped the term.
24. The term "product raisers" as used includes farmers, commercial fishermen, herders, and all those whose activities involve food, fibers, and other raw products growing in a natural weather environment.
25. Gerhard Colm of the National Planning Association was informed while visiting in Japan that in some areas of southern Japan three rice crops per year are now produced by covering the seedlings with plastic sheets, a technique developed at the University of Hokkaido as a means of making more effective use of irrigation techniques. Southern areas that do not need to irrigate but which have been using the plastic sheets have produced so much rice that, according to information given Colm, the Japanese have been able to cut down their rice imports radically. [-25-]
26. Food-raising habits are of course also profoundly affected by habitual and traditional factors concerning eating habits. in underdeveloped countries with highly traditional diets and large portions of the population at poverty levels, unfamiliar food substitutes, particularly if their cost is higher than that of the customary staples, cannot be quickly introduced and distributed, Among such countries, many have the climatic conditions and single-crop economies that would make diversification in agriculture most rewarding, if tradition did not work against it. In India and related areas, for instance, many of those who die during famines do so because they come from a rice tradition and will only eat rice even if it means starving to death in the presence of sufficient wheat, Consumer habits, even in the "developed" West, are rigid regarding food, The British, for instance, would not accept the available supply of cranberries to meet the serious Vitamin C deficiencies due to a combination of dollar shortages and inadequate crops of Haifa citrus fruit even in a period following conditioning to wartime food substitutes. And in the United States complex techniques needed to be developed during World War 11 to shift eating habits. See, for example Kurt Lewin, "Group Decision and Social Change," in Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley, ads., Readings In Social Psychology, Holt (1947), pp. 330344, See also Margaret Mead, "Cultural Contexts of Nutritional Patterns," in Centennial- Collected Papers Presented at the Centennial Celebration. Washington D. C., American Association for the Advancement of Science (1950).[-26-]
27 "Time and again, the unwillingness or inability to look at a whole operation, to take all the parts into consideration, has been fatal; and then, all too often, the glib judgment of 'too backward' or 'too resistant for cultural reasons' has glossed over the problem of inadequate approach. Or, where we have concentrated on training a very few specialists (with, incidentally, no special preparation for the problems that exist where they will work), we have later wondered why they have accomplished so little when they got home or why some of them, who were eager learners and sympathetic students, later became very hostile to our schools and/or American life and the United States. I am thinking here of my own experiences in working with highly trained Chinese; also the comments of a few people who have real access to intellectual Latin Americans in various countries; also the difficulties (and ultimate failure) of more than one international project, of which UNESCO's Pilot Project in Fundamental Education in Haiti is a small but telling example; also the hostilities that sometimes developed among Germans after foreign-trained German specialists returned home; also the ambivalent, often openly hostile, attitudes of the French.., Unpublished materials I have read on the Burmese experience with American aid indicate some of the kinds of difficulties both sides get into -- that then can be translated into all sorts of political tangles -- when the initiator-receivers do know very well what, in general, they want but are not sufficiently technically competent to work out the full dimensions or to judge the adequacy of a plan that is submitted to them when the responder donors are perfectly competent to devise an overall, technically excellent plan but have no notion of what the dimensions of its application are so no one on either side ever really understands what was the nature of the hitch. The repercussions of such a failure may seem minimally important at the time (in some countries); in others there may be tremendous snowballing effects." (Correspondence with Dr. Rhoda Metraux, Associate Director, Project on the Factor of Allopsychic Orientation in Mental Health, American Museum of Natural History. See Mote 30.) [-27-]
28. Organizations such as the Bureau of Social Affairs of the United Nations and various offices in the International Cooperation Administration are acutely aware of these factors, and either have under way, or would like to have under way, detailed studies clarifying the social aspects of economic and technological change, See, for example, Isabel Kelly, "Technical Cooperation and the Culture of the Host Country," prepared for the Community Development Division of I.C.A. (June 1959). of particular interest are the Cornell University studies in "Culture and Applied Science," including the deliberate and controlled experiments in introducing technological innovation into a farming community 250 miles northeast of Lima, an Indian area of Peru, at the hacienda of Vicos. See J. Collier and M. Collier, "Experiment with Applied Anthropology," Scientific American, Vol. 196 (January 1957), pp. 37-47.
29. Human Relations Area Files should be especially useful for answering many of these questions -- or at least getting first approximations to answers, For example, long-range weather forecasts, albeit nonscientific, may be relatively frequent in nonliterate cultures or undeveloped areas. After all, we ourselves have the tradition of Ground Hog Day, and in many parts of the country the thickness of the covering on "woolly bear" caterpillars is considered an authentic indication of how cold the following winter will be.
30. "However the weather predicting system is worked out -- whether through a series of nationally supported centers, regional centers, internationally controlled and supported centers, or some combination -this is clearly a multi-cultural problem. In the last twenty years, anthropologists have developed considerable skill and have accumulated a large amount of experience in working on problems of this kind. Very careful cultural studies of some of the complex societies involved are available and could be used as a basis for the specialized studies necessary here, and highly qualified personnel could be found who would know how to study in detail the process of large-scale, complicated change." (Correspondence with Dr. Rhoda Metraux and Dr. Margaret Mead). See also Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, eds., The Study of Culture at a Distance, University of Chicago Press (1953).
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31. The following remarks are pertinent when considering the cost and benefits problems involved: "All peasants, and in fact all farmers in all countries, are subject to two risks: one on the production side, and one on the demand side. The risk on the demand side arises due to the impossibility of predicting the price which their crop will fetch. and this uncertainty can be mitigated or eliminated by governmental price support or price-guarantee programs. The risk on the supply side is mainly due to uncertainties of the conditions under which agricultural production is carried on, and here the chief factor is the weather. Other things being equal, the more primitive and technologically backward a given agriculture is, the more important will be the influence of the weather on a given crop. This follows from the fact that the more highly developed the agricultural technology, the more substitute factors of production in lieu of land inputs -- and it is to the land input that weather is tied. Some superficial surveys have yielded in fact that whereas in the United States land inputs account by value for less than 1/4 of total non-human inputs in farming, in India the corresponding proportion is around 80%. (More than superficial surveys are not available presently, especially not for India).
"Although I assume that there will be technological improvement in Indian farming, given the density of rural population, and given the low level of available capital, it is doubtful whether by 1975 Indian agriculture will be on a technologically very much more advanced level than it is now and the most important non-human input will be land. Hence I anticipate that the relative importance of weather predication in India in 1975-1980 is likely to be considerably greater than in the United States. But since weather constitutes one of the major uncertainty factors on the production side in agriculture, any improvement in long-range weather forecasting is likely to be of relatively greater importance in a farm economy such as that of India as compared with, say, the United States, simply because the proportion of inputs whose productivity depends upon weather is going to be relatively much greater than in technologically more advanced agricultures. 11 (Excerpt of letter from Dr. Bert F. Hoselitz, Director, Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Exchange, University of Chicago.)
32. Interviews with Dr. Sherman E. Johnson, Chief Economist, Agricultural Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, and Consultant to the Ford Foundation, India food resources project, and with Dr. Melvin L. Upchurch, Assistant Chief, Agricultural Adjustments, Research Branch.
33. Interviews with Drs. Johnson and Upchurch, [- 29]
34. For a general description of the economic problems of U. S@ agriculture and its ability to fend for itself politically, and the governmental mechanisms underpinning these activities, see Kenneth E. Boulding, The Organizational Revolution, Harper (1953), chapter on "The Farm Organization Movement," pp. 109-130.
35. In the words of Richard L. Meier: "As populations increase in the poorer parts of the world there is an increasing dependence upon marginal water supplies. The third Five Year Plan of India, recently released, must depend heavily upon multiple cropping of land (requiring a broader distribution of water and fertilizer) for increased food production and much less upon improved seed, pesticides, etc. Snow cover in the Himalayas and the strength of the monsoon, both major phenomena that depend upon world-wide meteorological conditions, will more and more affect Indian food supply.
"The failure of a monsoon to bring a significant amount of rain, which may occur as frequently as once a decade in some regions, will certainly cause increasing distress as population increases. Two such disasters in a row would exceed world relief capabilities and so result in very large scale loss of life, the breakdown of government, and so create political crises, In these circumstances long-range weather prediction may uncover economic and even political emergencies, Increasing population depending upon more marginal supplies of water make these large scale catastrophes more and more likely."
The sequence of events anticipated for smaller areas afflicted with exploding populations is taken up in Richard L. Meier's book, Modern Science and the Human Fertility Problem, Wiley (1959), Chapter 3.
36. For statistics regarding the involvements of governmental credit institutions in American agriculture, see U. S. Department of Agriculture: Agriculture Research Service, The Balance Sheet of Agriculture, 1958 (Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 201) (November 1958), pp. 17-25, and U. S. Department of Commerce: Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1959 (eightieth edition) (1959), Tables 559, 561, 562, 563, 828, 832, 837.
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37. See House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on National Security and Scientific Developments Affecting Foreign Policy, Relative to the Establishment of Plans for the Peaceful Exploitation of Outer Space, 85th Congress, Second Session (May 20, 1958), P. 4. Also see J. C. Thompson and C. W. Brier, "The Economic Utility of Weather Forecasts," Monthly Weather Review, Vol., 83 (November 1955), pp. 249254, and U. S. Department of Commerce, Weather Bureau: Agricultural Weather Forecasting Service Pilot Project for Mississippi's Delta Area, Report of Implementation and Initial Operation During 1958 (Submitted as requested in the report of the U. S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, 85th Congress, Second Session): USCOMM-WB-DC (April 1, 1959), pp. 1-2.
38. There is already in existence in the U. S. and various other countries a considerable amount of research that is related or can be used in findings that bear on these matters. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture has for some years been conducting four regional "Cooperative Interregional Projects" in cooperation with the Agricultural Experimental Stations and Land Grant Colleges of the Mountain States, the Great Plains area, the North Central, and the Northeastern States. Weather data, including air and soil temperature readings, rainfall, humidity, etc., are being recorded over a period of years to enable valid daily probability projections for weather factors to be made on the basis of historical weather averages. The data are being correlated with others on the effects of weather variation on many aspects of plant, animal, insect, and disease development, and now constitute a significant part of the information required to establish lethal and. optimum conditions for various agricultural products, as well as a climatological atlas for the United States regional climates. See internal Unpublished USDA Documents, Annual Reports of Cooperative Regional projects, Agricultural Research Service, USDA, for 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956. Somewhat comparable studies are being undertaken elsewhere around the world; the final result could be an international agricultural climatological atlas. [-31-]
To establish what kinds of weather information American farmers needed, and also to determine how this information could be best interpreted and communicated to them in their terms, the "Delta Project" was undertaken in 1958. An area-wide teletype circuit was established linking Weather Bureau facilities with farm broadcasters and telecasters and other mass outlets, and a reporting network was established to provide detailed information on such matters as wind direction and velocity and soil temperature. Two trained agricultural weather forecasters were added to the Weather Bureau's local staff to interpret meteorological information and couch forecasts in terms understandable to farmers, and Agricultural Extension workers were trained to counsel and advise farmers on what to do about forecast weather. The program proved to be of considerable aid to farmers growing a very weather-vulnerable crop, cotton, in a high weather-risk area. See U.S. Department of Commerce, Weather Bureau, etc., as cited In the last section of Note 37.
39. The increase in travel and outdoor recreation and the rise in the standards of facilities expected have been notable since the end of World War II. Marion Clawson, of Resources for the Future, Inc., estimates the demand for outdoor recreation facilities as increasing significantly faster than population growth and the rise in national income. See his Statistics on Outdoor Recreation, Resources for the Future, Inc. (1958), P. 7.
40. See Footnote 23. See also Senate Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations on H. R. 7349, Department of Commerce and Related Agencies Appropriations, 1960, 86th Congress, First Session, pp. 463-469.
41. Here input-output analyses may be especially useful.
42. Bruce C. Netschert and Sam H. Schurr, Atomic Energy with Reference to Underdeveloped Countries, Johns Hopkins Press (1957). See also Sam H. Schurr and Bruce C. Netschert, Energy and the American Economy, 18501975, Johns Hopkins Press (1960), and the statement by Dr. Homi J. Bhabha to the Atomic Industrial Forum Annual Conference, November 3, 1459, Washington, D. C.
43. See, for example, Gilbert F. White, "Industrial Water Use: A Review," Geographical Review, Vol. 50 (July 1960), pp. 412-430. Dr. White is quoted in the New York Times, July 3, 1960 ("Scientist Doubts Water Scarcity," P. 25) as saying.- "The data currently at hand suggests that growth in industrial water use need not be as large as predicted and may be smaller .... Water supply is clearly of growing importance in the economic life of market economies, but it is not necessary or even often a decisive factor in industrial location. Its part in limiting present or future economic growth in most areas is doubtful."
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44. See Edward A. Ackerman and George 0. G. Lof, Technology in American Water Development (Published for Resources for the Future, Inc.), Johns Hopkins Press (1959), pp. 237-251.
45. An example of the application of hypothesized better weather information to fuel-supply planning is found in "Weather Information Applied to Fuel Supply Planning," by Charles P. Smith, a paper presented to a session on weather forecasting sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Research on Weather Forecasting of the American Petroleum Institute, 36th Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 12, 1956.
46. For stylistic simplification, the rest of this section will refer only to the consequences of fuel shortages in excessively cold periods, although it is recognized that, with the growth of population and the increasing use of air conditioning, excessively hot periods also present critical fuel production and utilization problems.
47. See Charles E. Fritz and Harry B. Williams, "The Human Being in Disasters: A Research Perspective, "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 309 (January 1957), pp. 42-51. See also Jeannette F. Rayner, "Studies of Disasters and Other Extreme Situations:
An Annotated Selected Bibliography," Human Organization, Vol. 16 (Summer 1957), pp. 30-40; and Martha Wolfenstein, Disaster: A Psychological Essay, Free Press (1957).
48. Two of the many examples available will illustrate this assertion: "The city authorities of Ocean City did not consider the storm in itself particularly dangerous. The state police and Coast Guard perceived the storm as a potential agent for the loss of life and property. The possibility of the transient population leaving a particular storm and their exodus terminating in a panic was perceived by all in authority .... Of the ten interviewees, not in official positions, six defined the situation as not serious. All six had had previous experience with storms, and had suffered no loss in previous storms. All six rejected the authorities' appraisal of the situation. That is, they did not change their minds and decide the situation was serious. They chose not to leave. For five of the six, economic factors, such as the need to remain with property or fear of a subsequent financial loss if evacuation occurred, seemed to exert considerable force in the decision against evacuation." From Hurricane Barbara: a study of the evaluation of Ocean City, Maryland, August, 1953, published by the Committee on Disaster Studies, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council (Dec. 1, 1953).
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"Typhoons have a characteristic pattern. First, warning is always there, but it is difficult to predict just how bad the typhoon will be.... When the warnings are fairly clear, the probability is that it is not just a bad storm.
The village chief will usually instruct the magician or magicians available to go to the sacred places of the village to try to contact the supernatural involved, and to ask that the typhoon be halted. Such action is a public responsibility of the village chief and the village magicians. At the same time, chiefs and magicians at the district level, having more prestige and more powerful magi , will be concentrating their efforts to the same end." From "Typhoons on Yap," by David M. Schneider, published in Human Organization, Vol. 16 (Summer 1957), pp. 10-15
49. In connection with (a) see Harry Bixler Williams, "Some Functions of Communication in Crisis Behavior," Human Organization, Vol. 16 (Summer 1957), pp. 15-19.
50. "Even with reliable knowledge about a probable danger, however, it is difficult to effectively warn a large population which cannot directly perceive the danger of a disaster. First there is the question of whether the warning should be issued or not; next, if the answer is affirmative, of how it should be given. The official who makes these decisions worries about what people will do if he has warned them and the disaster does not occur; conversely, he worries about what will happen if he does not warn them and the disaster does occur." Charles E. Fritz and Harry B. Williams, "The Human Being in Disasters: A Research Perspective," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 309 (January 1957), p. 43.
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51. For example, it might be in the interest of one forecast source to reduce the amount of food grown in a particular season in another region. Thus, one forecaster might predict no payoff from marginal land farming, even though his data in fact indicated a good likelihood that such farming methods would be profitable that season. Given the extra effort and investment involved, the very fact that two forecasts differed might dissuade farming of the marginal lands and hence less food would be produced. Since for at least part of the period under consideration it is unlikely the,: the predictions will be highly accurate, a "mistaken" prediction need not permanently disenchant the "loser" nation about the forecasts of nations on which they acted.