Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks – one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, were innocent or simple, but on a second look they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more.
Thanks to generous donations from our supporters, we created “Q & Abe” – a podcast that investigates real questions from visitors to the Cottage. Come on down the rabbit hole with us as we seek the answers – we always start with Lincoln and the Cottage, but we often end up in unexpected places.
For this episode, we’re discussing a question from a slightly desperate visitor to the Cottage this past summer. Along the way we meet the Capital Weather Gang, find out the surprising cultural baggage heat carried in the 1800s, and see if we can actually do anything about how hot it is out there. Come along with us!
In addition to the embedded media player below, you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts. You also can read below for a transcript of the episode (coming soon!)
Callie Hawkins: Hi everybody! We’re looking forward to our special Q&Abe Live episode, which will be happening March 12. It’s virtual, so you can attend from wherever you’re at. Please bring your questions – we know you’re staying curious.
Joan Cummins: We’ll be talking to a spread of experts about Willie Lincoln’s death and childhood illness. Visit us at lincolncottage.org to get tickets. We hope to see you there!
CH: Here’s today’s episode.
JC: Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. Visitors, young and old alike, connect with us from next door and from around the globe.
CH: And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks, one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, seem innocent or simple, but on a second look they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more. Each episode, we’ll investigate a single real question a visitor asked us here.
JC: At President Lincoln’s Cottage, we’re storytellers, historians, and truth seekers, so we called on people whose expertise could speak to all the facets of these questions.
CH: I’m Callie Hawkins.
JC: And I’m Joan Cummins. This is Q&Abe. Come on down the rabbit hole with us
CH: Let’s take that half hour now.
JC: For this episode, we’re exploring a question from a slightly desperate visitor on a tour this past summer: was it this hot when Lincoln was around? This past July we had several weeks with multiple days over 100 degrees, so we were really feeling it – but we also know that part of why the Lincolns came out here to the Cottage was to escape the DC summer heat, so we were excited to get some experts involved.
CH: We first spoke to Jason Samenow, who runs the Washington Post’s weather reporting service Capital Weather Gang. How do we even measure the weather?
Jason Samenow: There are many different types of observing systems we have right now, which include, you know, your old fashioned thermometers, rain gauges, you know, which is basically just a bucket with a ruler on it, and you have old fashioned weathervanes, which show you which way the wind is blowing. But then, of course, we have the automated sensors now, which is what professional weather observing networks use, which are, they don’t actually have old school thermometers, but actually temperature sensors, and they have sensors which detect the wind, they’re called anemometers, um, and, uh, other sensors for, um, humidity, barometric pressure, the amount of sunlight or UV radiation. And so, you know, a whole host of modern weather observing equipment that is what professional observing networks rely on. Some of the automated weather observing equipment is miniaturized, so it’s rather small and it can be kind of a pretty compact unit, like I have one on the roof of my house. You know, for just a few hundred dollars, you can get one of these and, um, sort of be a hobbyist weather observer. And then you can connect those weather observations to your computer, see them live and in real time.
JC: So, how does the temperature now compare to the temperatures Lincoln might have experienced?
JS: I can say with a very high degree of confidence that it is substantially warmer now than it was in the 1860s. We do have very reliable weather observations which date back to the early 1870s, so around 1871, 1872, and that coincides with the beginning of something called the Signal Service, which was run by the US Army, and they took weather observations around the country, including in Washington. Now, if you want to go back farther than that, there actually were weather observations in the DC area during the Civil War. In fact, there was a rather famous weather observer in Georgetown, his name was, uh, C. B. McKay, and he took rather reliable weather observations in Georgetown, throughout the Civil War and through most of the 1860s. But in any event, if we look at weather records from 1870 to today, the average temperature in D. C. has risen about 6 degrees. So if you take all the weather observations averaged through the course of the year, in the early 1870s, the average temperature was in the mid 50s. Now it’s in the low 60s. So we’ve gone from about 55 to 61 degrees as an average annual temperature. An average high in the 1870s was around 84 degrees. Now, during our summers, you know, in the last 30 years or so, it’s closer to 88 degrees. So that’s a pretty substantial jump. We now average about 40 days per summer in which we reach at least 90 degrees. In the late 1800s, that was closer to 24 days per summer. So there’s been a pretty big leap in the number of those pretty hot days. DC’s climate has warmed, you know, five or six degrees on balance, um, since Lincoln’s time.
JC: Jason also mentioned that we get many fewer inches of snow in DC than we used to – we’ve lost 8 to 10 of them. A lot of that, he says, is in the spring and fall, March or November for example, where we now get rain when we would have gotten snow in the past. What’s made the difference?
JS: there are several reasons for why we’ve seen this amount of warming. Uh, one factor is just because of urbanization, there’s more of a built environment, more asphalt, more concrete that absorbs heat more readily, and so that’s one contribution. And then, of course, the other big contributor is just an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 which is in the atmosphere in the 1800s is about half as much as we have now. We’ve seen a 50% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the, uh, 1800s. So, back then it was about 280 parts per million. Now we’re over 420 parts per million.
CH: So we know it’s hot – but what makes it too hot? That seems very subjective from person to person, right?
JS: That’s absolutely right. I mean, you know, depends on obviously how acclimated you are to the conditions. Early in the summer, if there’s a heat wave early on, it feels a lot hotter than it does later in the summer after you’ve been acclimatized to it. And the same goes for cold in the winter. You know, that first cold snap, it’s tough. How used to it you are and also your body type, you know, obviously people who are, who are taller, who have more weight on them, can withstand the cold better, but they also probably get hotter quicker in the summer. So there’s, uh, there’s a whole, um, academic literature on what we call biometeorology, which is people who study, um, how the weather affects people based on their environment and based on, uh, their own physical characteristics.
CH: I’m from the coast of South Carolina, and I grew up just inland enough that we didn’t get any kind of sea breeze. And when I moved to DC, I would roll my eyes when people said “nothing could be hotter than DC” – I was like, “ok, you go to low country South Carolina in July and tell me what you think.” But this conversation was making me rethink that. And, having been out of that part of the country for 20-plus years, I can’t go back and experience it that same way, it’s way too hot for me at this point.
JC: For me it’s pretty much safe to assume that if it’s hot out at all, it’s too hot for me! When Jason mentioned biometeorology, I immediately wanted to know more.
JS: It’s a subdiscipline of meteorology and there’s a community of academics who do research and they try to understand the relationship between weather and human health. So they study how heat affects people, how cold weather affects people, how, um, changes in climate affect people. And they are the folks that, um, also, for example, study how heat affects athletes and help develop the standards for schools, colleges, high schools, when they’re, uh, trying to do like, you know, summer training for football and establishing sort of those baseline levels which are safe and which are unsafe. People were much more vulnerable to weather and climate before we had central heating and air conditioning. And even now, during heat waves in cities, in parts of the United States and other parts of the world where access to air conditioning is limited, that’s where you see large numbers of heat related deaths. I would just say weather related mortality was probably orders of magnitude higher before central heating and air.
CH: So, we actually have two guests named Jason for this episode – we also spoke with Jason Hauser, who is the director of institutional research and accreditation at Lincoln University. He wrote his dissertation on heat in the Southern United States.
JC: We asked him, what did it mean to be “too hot” back then?
Jason Hauser: How people experienced heat in the past, that subjectivity is really important because it allowed a certain plastic quality to the descriptor “hot” to be deployed in certain areas [and] in certain circumstances. So, in Lincoln’s time, hot was, to be hot was to be scared, very often, because of the strong association with heat and disease. Before we knew that the mosquito was the primary vector of diseases like yellow fever and malaria, Europeans and European Americans simply encountered hot climates and disease simultaneously, and so they associated them quite strongly.
CH: Jason Hauser also clarified the relationship between what we know about the literal temperature in the past and how the people living it experienced and described it.
JH: They, they did feel hot more often. Weather itself is, it shapes our daily lives to such a large extent – it shapes what we wear, right? It shapes our societies to an amazing extent, you know, everything from architecture to cuisine to even aesthetic sensibilities, which is, you know, these are what we call collectively culture, right? It can shape culture. It’s so omnipresent that often it’s not as remarked upon as we wish it were. When you go back to the historical archives, you want people saying, I am hot. But then you realize that they don’t know hot, because they really don’t know cold, right? And so when the first time you actually see them commenting on heat, that’s to say, average Southerners commenting on how hot it is and heat, uh, kind of unlinked from disease, right? Is when you’re going to have the industrial revolution, the original textile revolution of the South. What’s really interesting is the 19th century was a pivotal moment for what it meant to be hot. Because not only was that long standing association with disease still a very prevalent idea, but there were new systematic ways to study the effects of heat. The increasing prevalence of the Fahrenheit thermometer, for instance, allowed people like Thomas Jefferson to take very tedious weather recordings. They folded that systematic way of knowing their environment into their systematic ways of knowing anything that is associated with the Enlightenment, including actually racial science.
CH: This was an unexpected side effect Jason had discovered in his research — an association between the climate of where a person was from and what their capabilities were.
JH: People fundamentally believed that people were products of their climates, that human diversity and climate were intimately related. And they started, in the Enlightenment tradition, grandly theorizing about what that would look like, right? And so, they came to the conclusion that hot climates, equatorial climates, were agriculturally productive but also, disease ridden. They were so agriculturally productive and disease ridden, in fact, that they produced very “slovenly” people, in their words. People who were, um, lazy, indolent. There were racial connotations all over what it meant to be hot in the 19th century, to the point that when Mississippi actually seceded from the Union, they blamed the climate of the Cotton South. They said, quote, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce on the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”
JC: But, like many racist frameworks, this theory wasn’t internally consistent – it really lost coherence when you got down to it. It set up an ideology where Black people were supposed to be somehow both very lazy and also the best workers.
CH: Folks in the American South also used the weather to explain other behavior.
JH: Thomas Jefferson, again in his infatuation with, um, measuring the weather, speculated about how it actually shapes .what they were calling at the time increasingly genetic or genetic racial traits, but also just dispositions. Jefferson actually speculated that, uh, creatures like him, which is to say creatures of a warm climate, were more given to fiery attitudes, to romance. They were more given to, um, impulsive behaviors. They were less good at saving their money, uh, all these things – he actually said that you can know where you are climatically by just looking at the character of the people.
CH: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could blame all your failings on the weather? It definitely affects your everyday life, but would we really say it’s a credible reason to be spendthrift?
JC: Jason Hauser explained how this framework of climate dictating disposition resulted in additional intellectual gymnastics. If now white people were living in hot places too, what would that mean for established racial hierarchies?
JH: Most people had a biblical interpretation – most natural scientists – a biblical interpretation of the origins of human diversity, which was called monogenesis, you know, Adam and Eve, the sole proprietors of all progeny, um, basically had a set of racial characteristics and as their kids and their grandkids and their progeny spread across the globe, they adapted and developed characteristics in tune with their environment. That’s a fantastic idea and it’s great if you like to look at the Bible for your evidence of natural science – It is deeply concerning to the people in the Deep South who are living in a hot climate, because they could then become products of a hot climate. And they theorized in no uncertain terms that places like Mississippi could create racial backsliding. In their hierarchical world, that was actually something that was very, very possible. In the 17th century you’re going to see, um, Europeans increasingly meeting with Africans and displacing Africans into colder climates. And they wondered, are these black people going to become white? Right? That was something that was actually part of their worldview that was quite possible. That idea was settled more or less by Josiah Knott, who came up with a new line of thinking. A racial scientist from the mid 19th century who argued, it’s actually polygenesis rather than monogenesis. It’s not one group of people or one couple that populated the world, but rather the divine had created a bunch of different kinds of people and put them in climates amenable to their conditions. And so it makes perfect sense that you would have a white overseer of a predominantly Black labor force in the deep South.
JC: Separate from their racialized concerns, it would also have been physically unpleasant to live in places like low country South Carolina that we mentioned before. How were people looking to deal with this experience?
CH: Jason Hauser described some methods that match up well with what we know about the Cottage.
JH: Now, just as Lincoln escaped every summer to the Cottage, so too did the planters of the deep South. Anything that was away from the coast, away from what they considered disease environments, anything that was on a higher hill that would tempt a breeze, anything that had more vegetation, because vegetation means evaporative cooling, that’s where they would escape to. If you look at the um, pre white flight suburban development of the Deep South, which is to say the pre-air conditioning development of the Deep South, your suburbs are always on hills.
CH: And Jason Samenow confirmed that it is, in fact, likely to be cooler up here than downtown.
JS: You will feel a difference between downtown and um, for areas along the Mall and the Tidal Basin along the Potomac versus places further, into, uh, upper Northwest and other parts of the city, which have more elevation. It does make a difference. In fact, there have been, um, studies, which have looked at how much the temperature can vary over small distances in the District, and you can see temperature differences up to 10 to 12 degrees on a hot day over just a couple miles. So, you could be in downtown Washington and it could feel like 98 or 100 and it feel like the mid to upper 80s in Rock Creek Park. And that’s what this study showed. You, you can – the built environment matters a lot, as to whether you have concrete and asphalt as to whether you have a extensive tree canopy, and also elevation matters as well because when you’re, um, closer to the tidal basin in downtown the elevation is low closer to sea level and even as you just increase by 100 or 200 feet, a little bit more than that, it will make a difference in terms of temperature. So yeah, there’s no doubt that that plays a role.
JC: I was so excited to hear this, because I’ve been telling people for years that “probably” it was cooler up here, and now I can say it’s really for real! We’re lucky to still have much of the green space that would have surrounded the Lincolns.
CH: We’ve been talking a lot about the climate’s influence on people – what about people’s influence on the climate? We asked Jason Samenow how this appears in his work on the weather.
JS: If you are a responsible weather communicator and journalist, responsible meteorologist, you’re trying to put the extremes we’re seeing in weather in context and relating them to the past. And if there are meteorologists who aren’t doing it, they probably should be. You know, obviously on hot days during the summer, or streaks of hot days during the summer when we’re setting records, we talk about how days like this are becoming more likely because of, human caused climate change. When we’re seeing, you know, winters where we’re hardly getting any snow and we’re seeing 80 degree days in January, like we saw last year.
JC: Jason Hauser says that in the 1800s, there was a general belief that humans can impact the climate, but it was pointed in a very different direction than most scientific thinking now.
JH: When it comes to looking at evidence of human enforced or anthropogenic climate change in the past, it has long since been a concern, uh, especially agriculturalist. There’s a dominant ideology in the 17th and 18th centuries that “the rain would follow the plow,” which is a metaphor for, if you want to have a calm environment, you must tame it. And you tame it through orderly agriculture. The reason Jamestown, the reason Virginia was alternately so hot and so cold is because it hadn’t been appropriately tended. Now, this is them asserting European superiority over indigenous populations, of course. But that was the primary reason that there wasn’t an order to that environment yet. And that you could actually mitigate extremes of hot and cold, even within a single location, by simply installing an orderly agricultural regime. So, the idea of climate change, the, the, the language, right, the science, all new, the idea that humans can have an impact on our climate, very old.
CH: We next spoke to Shawna Weaver, a climate grief researcher and mental health worker, who we hoped could tell us more about having a conscious impact on the climate.
JC: I asked Shawna – in that moment where we’re standing in the Cottage, or wherever, thinking wow it is Way Too Hot, we all want to do something about climate change. But how can we make use of that feeling beyond the moment in which we experience it?
Shawna Weaver: A big thing that we can do is create community around climate change and local goals. Any individual is not going to have a solution that fixes everything everywhere, partly because it’s such a massive issue, but also because locally there are different trigger points and there are, there are different priorities based on what we can actually do in that area. Local experts knowing what they can control within their ecosystems plays a much bigger role, I think, than if we’re trying to think globally and solve the problem on a grander scale. And because most people are so far outside of that sphere of influence, it’s so overwhelming and disempowering to think about it anyway. I think that’s part of the responsibility of being a person, is deciding how you’re going to use the energy and the ability to manipulate that we all have. And because we all have it, we all do have control over some aspect of the way this will go. We do all have control over our own homes and where we live and what we drive and what we think about and our intentions and all of that does add up to a greater and greater sphere of positive influence. And if we’re going to influence the world either way, then we might as well be focused on how we can make it better.
CH: I’ve been thinking a lot about the people I know who insist climate change isn’t real. How did climate change become a such a contested and polarizing issue? Why wouldn’t protecting the planet be something we can all agree on?
SW: I think that climate change would be a unifying topic and issue and project for us all to solve together if we all were in the same phase of grief around it, and we’re not. And there are a lot of reasons why we all have such a different perspective toward climate change because climate change is loss. Regardless of how it affects us, it will result in loss and change for every part of this globe. And so that is why we experience grief from it. Grief is the very normal, realistic, emotional journey that we take when we experience loss or change or the risk of a loss or a change. And there is a reason why we all start in grief at this point of denial. It’s our subconscious protecting us from something that it thinks we can’t handle yet. So we will stay in denial as long as we can, whatever it is we’re grieving. Because denial is where we don’t have to deal with the harder things that come after that.
JC: What are some things we might be experiencing that would be unexpected manifestations of climate grief?
SW: Some of us don’t feel climate grief as a sadness or depression if we haven’t directly lost much because of climate change yet. And so we may feel climate change anxiety around what might the next season be bringing. We may feel stressed about immediate weather changes and sad that we can’t do an activity we planned on doing. We may feel a lot of guilt around how climate is changing and our lack of taking action in our personal lives around it. We may feel guilt for kids and what future generations will have to deal with that our generations haven’t fixed yet. Something to remember about any grief, whether it’s climate grief or grieving anything else in our life, these griefs are sitting in the back of our minds all the time. We are always carrying grief, and probably multiple griefs. Mental health is something that If we don’t deal with it intentionally, we will always be dealing with it somehow, anyway, because emotions come out sideways, um, anger is one of those things that pops out, uh, when we least expect it, if we haven’t been doing the work of processing grief. So I think people I think people experience grief, whether they know it or not.
CH: Let’s back up a step. What’s the difference between weather and climate?
JS: Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Climate is basically the statistical average of weather. So you take all of your weather over, um, a season or over a year, you average it together and that’s your climate. In terms of a baseline for our current climate … we look at the last 30 years, so we consider, um, our current climate based on the period 1991 to 2020, that 30 year period constitutes what we call sort of our “climate normal” here in the DC area. So we sort of compare sort of day to day weather based on that climate normal, that 30 year stretch.
JC: I’ve lived in the DC area for almost that entire period, so it’s interesting to think of my memories as part of the baseline for “climate normal.”
CH: And I’ve been in the area for a little less time than that, but long enough to feel like there’s been a change. Jason Hauser reminded us that, as usual, it’s more complex than any one person.
JH: But another important lesson I think we can take from the past when it comes to contemporary climate change is about how we talk about it. It’s about the idea that when we talk about climate, we’re never just talking about the weather. It’s enmeshed in ideas of economy and ideas of political economy, ideas of human diversity. It’s really a, a, a very big, expansive topic that’s not suitable to be addressed by one distinct discipline. And so if we need to bring anything back from earlier understandings of climate, it’s exactly that multifaceted nature of it, that it can’t be put away into a single disciplinary, um, or it can’t be handled through a single disciplinary approach, but rather we have to understand exactly how expansive it is, and when we argue about it, we have to understand we’re not arguing about temperatures, we’re arguing about consequences, very real human consequences.
JC: Shawna gave us a way of understanding why this problem can sometimes feel huge and intractable. You’ll also hear our colleague Haley here.
SW: I think some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about climate grief came from conversations with hospice nurses. And they go into their jobs every day knowing that most likely the patients they work with will be dying on their watch and in their care. And also, sometimes they don’t. And regardless, the hospice nurse’s job does not change. They’re there to ensure that a person and their family experience death with dignity and experience really dignified care. And just like a hospice nurse doesn’t leave somebody alone to die without care for their senses, for their feelings, for their thirst and hunger and fatigue and whether they feel cold or too warm – all of those aspects that go into what a hospice nurse is charged with doing every day – is not necessarily uh, you know, with the mind that this person is dying, but with the mind that this is a person, who is very much alive and therefore has needs, and some of these needs may be things that we can meet to prolong how that person lives, can bring back some quality of life. And when you think about the planet and what is changing and what is dying, I think we can look at our local ecosystems and really understand where something is at risk of being lost, uh, or is already lost. And what does it mean for the people around that space to make it as dignified of a change as possible? Always with the possibility that it may not be the end.
Haley Bryant: You know, climate grief is an experience in which we are, well, maybe three things, the dying person, the disease and the hospice nurse, we are all of these things at once, which feels very different than the experience of losing a family member or something to that extent. So it feels so much heavier that we have to play all of these roles.
SW: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point that part of why climate change is so overwhelming is because exactly in the concept of us as in a hospice situation, we really are all of the actors in one. We are the people who can influence how it goes, we are the people who are at risk of significant loss or death in that analogy. And we are also are the cause of so much of our struggle. And because it is so overwhelming, that is exactly why it is a more difficult grief to move through than our personal grief.
CH: One of the things I’ve learned about grief is that it’s forever, which is both the hardest and one of the most comforting things about it. It’s been really important to me to incorporate it into other parts of my life, which Shawna describes as the sixth stage of the process.
SW: We do in fact have a sixth stage of the grief process, and that’s meaning making. And meaning making is a really important step that is what drives all positive change that happens around the world. And I’m pretty convinced that all beautiful things that we have are the result of somebody making meaning out of a grief that they experienced. Meaning making goes a long way in motivating us to do the right things, to make a good change, um, but it also goes a long way in our emotional healing and community building. I recommend to everyone struggling with climate grief to think through what is most important. If we could relieve ourselves of the strong emotions around whether or not something being our fault has anything to do with what we can do with it, then we can be really excited about opportunities to influence the planet for the better. Humans are really good at manipulating and we will continue to manipulate, I don’t see that changing in our future. We’re very curious creatures, and we have the skill of really complex communication that enables us to even further manipulate in ways we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. And the good thing about that is things like the hole in the ozone layer got fixed because of human ingenuity. So we both caused and solved a problem within our lifetime. And we get to keep doing that.
JC: If you are looking to turn your feelings about the future into meaningful action, we invite you to come reflect with us at the Cottage. It’s what Lincoln came out here to do, and we continue to cultivate that space for others every day.
CH: We want to encourage you to think about: How are you feeling about the weather? How might you reconsider your assumptions about what you or others are capable of? What can we do to keep each other warm – or cool?
JC: This episode was produced by me, Joan Cummins, with Callie Hawkins, Haley Bryant, and additional support from the President Lincoln’s Cottage team. Music for Q&Abe was written, performed, and is copyrighted by, Clancy Newman.
CH: Your support makes Q & Abe possible. If you enjoy exploring with us, please show your support by making a contribution at www.lincolncottage.org. Whether it is five dollars or five hundred, we couldn’t do it without you. You can also support us by hitting subscribe, by leaving a review, or by sharing it with friends.
JC: To the overheated visitor who asked this question, thanks for reminding us that we don’t just cause problems, we can also solve them.
CH: Comments? Questions? Write to us at [email protected].
JC: President Lincoln’s Cottage is a home for brave ideas. Stay curious!
