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Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the others exchange nervous glances. I looked at Joach and then nodded quietly toward them, hoping he would get the hint. I knew he was talking about near-misses because he had survived them, and he was telling us that we would survive this one, but the happy ending in Joach's stories was not what stood out to passengers aboard a potentially doomed plane.

"Oh, and in '37, the Rhone Buzzard," he continued, referring to an open-cockpit glider in which he had broken the world altitude record by climbing to twenty-two thousand feet, "My feet went numb, and my fingernails were blue. I was seeing two suns!" Joach let loose a hearty German laugh. "When I woke up, I was drenched in gasoline."

Just then, the pilot (that morning I had thought of him as my grumpy adversary but now I regarded him as my guardian angel) came on the intercom and told us to prepare for landing. The six of us faced forward in our seats, and when the wheels touched the runway, I felt a hundred pounds of worry slide off my shoulders. The voices of several relieved scientists filled the cabin.

A few hours later, we were back in the hotel conference room for the evening discussion. As the weather maps were being drawn up for the evening, Dev Raj slid into the seat beside me to relate a fact that he had learned from a fellow scientist: The windshield of an Electra turboprop plane had seven layers of glass, and while our plane certainly needed maintenance to address the crack, we had likely been no closer to death on that day's flight than we had on any of the others. A few moments later, the pilot himself appeared at the table. To my great bewilderment, he took a newspaper clipping from his pocket and laid it before me. "Shukla's Plea Denied," the headline read. (On further inspection, I saw that the article was about an Indian politician named Shukla who was fighting a court case.) I couldn't help but smile, thinking of how satisfied our pilot must have been to scare the pushy scientists straight. I figured we'd both gotten what we wanted—he'd proved his point, but we had our data.

At the end of our time in Calcutta, there was no grand ceremony or celebration. Now we would spend months in head-down analysis of the data we had gathered. Over the next few years, more than a hundred papers would be written based on the information our instruments had scraped, sponged, and soaked up from the atmosphere, but on my flight home from India, all I knew was that we had done what we set out to do. It was a victory, but like most scientific victories, a quiet and incremental one. Impaired, low-flying airplanes aside, work as a climate scientist could often feel like this, plodding and methodical, a pursuit not necessarily of better answers but of better questions for next time.

OMENS

Since humans began walking upright, we have been striving for control, for a way to transform the chaos of the natural world into some kind of order. Historically, we'd proven to be pretty successful in this endeavor. We had turned heat into fire, wild animals into companions, tangled fields into food. But there was one thing that had eluded us: the weather. Until fairly recently, humans could barely understand what caused the weather, let alone predict it.

We open apps on our phones to see what we should wear and switch to the news to decide if we should make those outdoor plans, so it can be easy to forget that the numbers we receive—the high temperatures, wind speeds, and precipitation chances—are the products of billions of equations solved on supercomputers and millennia of endeavors on the part of obsessive philosophers, adventurers, and scientists.

As early as the seventh century BC, civilization embarked on formalized weather prediction. Some of humanity's earliest recorded weather forecasts were found on ancient Assyrian tablets preserved in a cave in modern-day Iraq. Commissioned by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and carved into clay by astrologers and magicians, the predictions were largely based on omens—a halo around the sun, for example, or the shape of the clouds. "If lightning flashes from south to east there will be rain and floods," they warned, and "if the voice of the weather god is heard in the month of Tammuz, the crops will prosper."

For centuries to follow, weather prediction looked a lot like this— hard-won knowledge based on omens, which is an old-fashioned way of saying empirical observation. That is, if A often happens before B, then B can be predicted by A. "If the sun is surrounded by a ring there will be rain," and so on. Our ancestors could say what happened but not why it happened.

By the time Jesus walked the earth, people knew a few of these strategies. "You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky," Jesus says in the Book of Matthew. "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather; for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.'"

Meanwhile, near the end of the Western Han dynasty, the Chinese identified the twenty-four solar terms—particular astronomical or natural events—that made up the year's climate and devised a calendar that provided a tidy schedule for farmers and a slate of weather-associated festivals for everyone else. Instead of a single day in March heralding the coming of spring, its myriad glories were celebrated every couple of weeks: Rain Water, Waking of Insects, Pure Brightness.

Monday we begin the book The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer.