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The United States may be riding high today as the world's sole superpower, but it wasn't long ago that our country was dismissed as distinctly second-rate -- inferior to Europe in culture, economic prowess, even climate. Indeed, climate most of all. In the mid-18th century, the famous French naturalist Comte de Buffon published an influential tract arguing that America's soggy, chilly climate made it singularly "unfriendly" to all forms of life, including human. Choked with dank impenetrable forests full of stagnating waters and "noxious exhalations," America, according to Buffon, would "never produce anything but humid creatures, cold men and feeble animals." The fact that Buffon had never set foot on our shores didn't matter a jot: he could smell out a wretched climate from across the ocean.

This was a national slap that cried out for vengeance and the avenger was none other than Thomas Jefferson. In his 1787 volume, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson demolished Buffon's theory of degeneracy point by point, demonstrating that America's climate, far from being inferior to Europe's, was in fact wonderfully conducive to nurturing large, healthy animals and robust, intelligent people. Unlike Buffon, Jefferson spoke with the authority of detailed local data, especially on climate and weather, which he observed and recorded scrupulously every day of his life.

History, of course, has proven Jefferson right. Our American climate may be more extreme and varied than Europe's but that doesn't make it "unfriendly" to life. If anything, it makes life in terms of weather anyway, more interesting.

The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive, with major support provided by the National science Foundation.