The American climate can be so quixotic and so destructive that the federal government and the National Weather Service have established a network of 450 radio transmitters across the nation to beam warnings of potential hazards to unwary communities, and commercial radio stations are required to test their civil emergency systems at regular interval. An American cable television channel offers 24-hour coverage of the weather. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is geared to respond to the natural disasters that regularly afflict the nation, and a president or state governor runs major political risks if he fails to react swiftly enough to a civil calamity. The moderation of British weather and the volatility of American weather fit naturally with the character of the two countries. The climate in Britain is hardly ever out of sorts. A windstorm or drought are major aberrations. Except for the swings of daylight, it's sometimes difficult to tell one season from another, so subtle are the shifts in pattern. American weather is the opposite. A meteorological study once concluded that there were two places on earth which could boast the world's worst weather; Gobi Desert and Amarillo, Texas. For extremes of heat, cold, wind, rain and so forth, it's hard to beat Amarillo.

But what is true of Texas is more or less true of the rest of the country as well. In 1995, a heatwave incinerated the Midwest and East Coast with temperatures as high as 43°C reported daily for a week. On average there were 106 complete days of fog in the appropriately named Cape Disappointment, Washington, and in nearby and inappropriately named Paradise 3, 109 cm of snow fell in winter of 1972. In winter of 1993, the windchill temperature in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin touched -33°C.