How to predict ‘terrifying weather’ (or deadly nature metaphors)
Skaidra Trilupaitytė
This text was inspired by images of natural disasters captured under risky conditions in several 2025 documentary films – The Twister: Caught in the Storm, directed by Alexandra Lacey, and the multi-part documentary Katrina: Come Hell and High Water by Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee. The first tells the story of how, in May 2011, a natural force destroyed the town of Joplin, Missouri. Fragments of authentic footage (as many witnesses at that time increasingly recorded their surroundings with smartphones) help recall the story of how recent high school graduates, moments after their commencement, survived a tornado of rare strength – nicknamed ‘the monster’ – and its tragic aftermath.
Although the approaching storm had been well known, the scale of the tornado surprised even the experts. Suddenly, within minutes, the city was destroyed and lives were lost. Some of those who agreed to appear in the film now recount that early May afternoon, when darkness suddenly fell and the end of the world descended on everyone. Even after many years, it remains difficult for some to speak publicly about their experiences and the consequences.
The other documentary shows Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans in 2005. The trajectories and consequences of the storm, long tracked by meteorologists, still came as a shock to many, despite forecasts and institutional preparedness. The film focuses on personal stories, with footage selected from what was shot on home video cameras (not yet on phones). The residents of the city – famous for its distinctive Black musical culture and vibrant carnival atmosphere – tried to remain optimistic even when contemplating the worst scenarios. Evacuation options for the poor were limited. Some recalled their experiences of surviving earlier hurricanes, believing that people would manage again. Many did not. For after the hurricane had swept through, the poor-quality levee structures that had protected the city for decades collapsed under the water pressure, floods engulfed much of the city, houses were submerged, and bodies alive and dead floated past. Those who survived waited far too long for help – calling desperately for water and food amid catastrophic conditions. The social and psychological scale of the destruction had terrible consequences.
Heart-wrenching dramatic stories are created by people, not by the elements. Weather forecasts based on the latest scientific methods and mathematical models are not meant to frighten intentionally; meteorology does not speak of apocalypses of biblical scale or of punishments for human sin. Usually, it simply warns of approaching extreme weather. Yet today it is also said that because of climate change, caused by the species homo sapiens, our familiar experiences and forecasts – as well as the traditional knowledge of how to deal with the consequences of natural disasters – are becoming less reliable. Oracles have long been replaced by professional interpreters of weather; and without the trained eye of a meteorologist, few would understand the colourful swirling patterns that appear on screen, crossing boundaries of land and sea, bearing the names of people and deities. Everyone can see in news reports the vivid maps of storms forming somewhere, their centres glowing red, yet serious analysis of the warming, sharpening climate becomes ever more complex. Satellite images, like those ‘caught’ together by cameras (and today by phones) showing hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes, may seem to contemporary internet users like majestic landscapes by
J. M. W. Turner. Meanwhile, scientists studying diagrams will insist that only mathematical models or meteorological charts can convey an accurate image. In such a historical situation, myths reflecting the human stance in the face of existential danger may become more meaningful than the dry, often incomprehensible explanations of natural scientists.
Earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes have long caused turmoil in people’s minds. Therefore, in different societies over the centuries, abilities to survive under the conditions of cataclysms gradually evolved – in some places, extreme phenomena had been observed more often than in others since ancient times. The frenzy of a superhuman nature that claimed victims was once explained through various parallel narratives drawn from religious cosmology and magic. Reflections on tragedies long coexisted with old eschatological visions and moral teachings that resurfaced under certain political circumstances. The observation and deciphering of natural signs, especially of celestial bodies – a method that eventually took root in the modern history of science – inspired attempts to organize human life and understanding of the world accordingly. By the early nineteenth century, however, the power of religious interpretation to reshape the history of the Earth and the geological development of the planet had ultimately weakened.
And so, at a certain point, Western thought based on science simply became unable to grasp nature both as an object of study or as something inhuman – that is, self-sufficient and immanent. This object became increasingly incomprehensible to us; as Bruno Latour observed, “If Nature is not made by or for human beings, then it remains foreign, forever remote and hostile. Nature’s very transcendence overwhelms us, or renders it inaccessible.”1 Rational thought, having embarked on a project of critical purification and detailed explanation of relativism, imperialism, domination, guilt, and other concepts, merely multiplied hybrids. In the twentieth century, climate came to be assessed only as a ‘natural’ factor in history, while collective ideas and notions of ‘attitudes toward nature’ were analysed separately in the history of literature and mentality. Many explanations of natural catastrophes evolved under the influence of competition between different, even contradictory, plots that stirred the human imagination.
The dynamics of contemporary imagination were, of course, accelerated by the rise of mass media and new sources of knowledge in the twentieth century. They quickly became inseparable from popular media and democratic information channels, which eventually began to present complex achievements in various scientific fields in simplified form. In this context, metaphors and philosophical insights can naturally be set against cold computer simulations. Timothy Morton proposed treating climate change or global warming as a hyperobject that cannot be grasped or fully comprehended in an individual mind. Meanwhile, Emanuele Coccia argued that the planet Earth now fully reveals itself to all humanity at the same moment, with all its storms and strange grimaces of the weather that happen somewhere constantly. On screens broadcasting news, we can see on a global scale what consequences arise from events taking place far from us. Perhaps not accidentally, when speaking about climate events of recent years, Coccia suggested turning to animism, and claimed that meteorology, rather than biology, geology, or ecology, should form the essential perspective on living beings. Life is climate, not metabolism. Even geology has become a branch of meteorology; according to the Italian philosopher, everything that is alive is a contingency of climate, the short-term result of a chain of weather conditions.
Alternatively, resisting Coccia’s insights, one could argue that humanity is no longer capable of perceiving cataclysms on a global scale because of the flood of messages that enters our field of vision every day and fragments and levels all tragedies. The intensifying field of communicative stimuli in social media relentlessly provokes questions of universal responsibility that lie too far from everyday life and are periodically voiced, if at all, mainly on the platforms of international organizations. The rational technocratic discourse, for its part, prioritizes optimistic expectations and even offers quick ways toward ‘smart solutions’. In this way, deeper anxiety about the planet is quietly suppressed. But human nature itself encourages us consciously (or even unconsciously) to hope for a better future; perhaps these natural instincts made some brave residents of New Orleans not to worry too much about the terrible forecasts.
Seeing sensational headlines reporting disasters, or events flashing on our phone screens from somewhere far away, we struggle to name them in our everyday language. Contemporary media allow dramatic cataclysms to be produced with special effects. Some enthusiastic users of these media are even flooded by (dis)information tsunamis. Mythical and artistic metaphors of good and bad weather continue to operate in our consciousness as if nothing happened2, while meteorological terms help express what knocks us off balance. For instance, February 24, 2022, struck like lightning in Lithuania – Russia’s predatory attack on Ukraine shook our entire public sphere and ignited emotions of fear and anger that spontaneously united our region, at least in the first year of the war. In Ukraine, Russia caused an ecological catastrophe, but while people are being killed, environmental damage is spoken of less. Yet, just as in premodern times, we once again rightly reason about (super)natural evil, about existential doom.
Natural forces do not depend on the whims of heavenly deities, nor on our sins, and the Earth is hardly concerned with the (still only hypothetical) decision of homo sapiens to abandon consumer capitalism in order to reduce the pollution of the planet. Reading divine signs in the sky in old Europe, in attempts to calculate the Day of Judgment, significantly contributed to new computations based purely on mathematics and the natural sciences; later, however, religious explanations of the world themselves became no longer necessary. In the documentaries mentioned at the beginning of this article, tragedies are revealed through the memories of individuals who experienced them. Instead of horrifying aesthetics, we heard the grievances of ordinary people who suffered misfortune, accusations toward institutions, moments of emotion – more than one witness broke into tears while recounting old events. Some of the victims were determined to rebuild their cities and their lives. From all these fragments we ultimately learn at most only what we already knew – borderline experiences etch indelible spiritual scars. Our biological eyes often see danger coming too late, right out of thin air, and the mind fails to read the signs or recognize warnings and the signals of ominous silence. Over time, individual existential terror and collective trauma in human consciousness may be softened only by metaphors that console the human soul and veil questions about the meaning of everything.
1 Bruno Latour, Mes niekada nebuvome modernūs, Vilnius: Homo liber, 2004, p. 35.
2 It suffices to recall numerous emotionally charged expressions that ‘naturally’ connect a specific social event with the state of the sky. We often hear that at a moment important to us ‘even the sun came out’, or that on a day of misfortune ‘the sky opened up’.
