Everybody Talks About It : NONFICTION : BRAVING THE ELEMENTS: The Stormy History of American Weather,<i> By David Laskin (Doubleday: $23.95; 241 pp.)</i>

Weather is a slippery subject. Place-bound for one, the most meaningful observations about it, those rooted in experience, have to do with a microclimate at best, a region at most. Weather for most of us is simply time, or the most conspicuous aspect of time, which is reflected in the French and Spanish words for weather, le temps, el tiempo.

In “Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather,” David Laskin has chosen to clamp the subject of weather into three major categories: the weather in history, measuring and forecasting weather and future climate changes. He uses the great East Coast blizzard of March 1993, which affected more than 100 million people, as a point of departure and as the centerpiece of his chapters on the present state of forecasting. In all, he has reshaped the rather amorphous subject of the weather into the bearing of climate on culture, and technological progress in measuring weather events and climatic change in North America.

In the historical area, the book forms a collection of gleanings from archeological and historical sources. Climate changes opened up the Siberia-Alaska land bridge 12,000 years ago, inviting settlement from Asia, as did the warm period known as the Medieval Optimum, during which the Vikings established settlements in Newfoundland around AD 1000, while the little ice age of the Renaissance, Laskin suggests, was a goad to the great age of European exploration and colonization.

The comparatively severe weather of North America, which lacks any east-west mountain ranges to slow arctic fronts, drove American colonists farther and farther west, a flow hyped in the 19th century by railroads and land speculators with the utopian phrase “rain follows the plow”--as for a while it seemed to, into Kansas and Nebraska and eastern Colorado. But those anomalous wet years were followed by drought, eventually yielding the harvest of the Dust Bowl, the greatest ever man-made weather event at least until the discovery of what seems to be global warming.

In the 12th century, climate changes also ended the great settlements of Chaco Canyon, whose descendants resettled into the much diminished but more sustainable communities of the river valleys of northern New Mexico, where their small-scale irrigation practices were adopted and refined by Latino settlers from the 17th century onward. In his 1879 “Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States,” explorer John Wesley Powell pointed out the potential folly of large-scale settlements in the arid Southwest of the sort that now carpet the desert in what Mark Reisner describes as “a beautiful fraud.”

American weather as compared to European has been the subject of both damnation for its severity and praise for its vigor. Pedro Casteneda, a member of Coronado’s exploring party, complained about the Southwest in the early 1500s: “This country is like a bowl, so that when a man sits down, the horizon surrounds him all around at the distance of a musket shot.” Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a great booster: “I prefer much the climate of the United States to that of Europe. I think it a more cheerful one. . . . [It] has eradicated from our constitutions all dispositions to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited from our English ancestors.”

Early colonists were astounded by the violence of the New England climate and strove to read the hand of divine judgment into steeple-cleaving thunderbolts and fatal blizzards. Laskin makes much of Increase Mather’s (Cotton Mather’s father) moralistic observations of the weather, concluding that “the reason we worry about global warming” is not very different from Mather’s Puritan moralizing about the weather.

But, between 1700 and today, the Industrial Revolution and ever-accelerating fossil fuel usage has pumped untold quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with no end in sight. If one cannot establish with scientific precision--for lack of a control model--what exactly will happen, there seems little question about the unprecedented nature of the human-wrought change on the composition of the atmosphere. Laskin indeed concedes as much, but this reader would have preferred a more even survey of the current state of the global warming debate and less polemical posturing.

Whatever will happen, collectively we have excellent systems in place to measure it. Laskin charts the beginnings of the National Weather Service from the days of Jefferson, who was particularly interested in the subject, through the work of Joseph Henry, first director of the Smithsonian, who by 1860 had set us a system of telegraphic meteorology that covered the eastern half of the country, and the various technological advances and bureaucratic developments that led to the establishment of the National Weather Service under the Department of Commerce in 1940.

The first task of John von Neumann’s pioneer ENIAC computer was a numerical forecast run in April 1950, and increasingly sophisticated computer systems and forecasting programs have remained in the forefront ever since. Laskin is particularly good at laying out the present-day collaboration between the National Weather Service’s vast weather data collection systems with its computerized modeling abilities and private weather companies, local TV weathermen and the 24-hour Weather Channel. He presents a very solid argument for preserving the National Weather Service in the face of a budget-slashing Congress, suggesting that no private company could or should fulfill its role, which includes the enormous public responsibility of issuing flood, hurricane, tornado and storm warnings.

Everybody has an interest in the weather and Laskin’s “Braving the Elements” will be of special fascination to apparently swelling numbers of storm chasers and weather buffs.

Reliable five-day forecasts, once thought impossible, are now the norm for much of the country, with 14-day general forecasts no longer unthinkable--that is, unless you live in a mountainous area that is also at the confluence of three major weather systems, as I do. I listen to NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) Weather Radio out of Albuquerque twice daily and then make up my own mind. Perhaps their most reliable forecast is the static-riddled silence that announces that the latest thunderstorm or snowstorm has once again knocked out their transmitter. Then I know we’re likely to be in for some real weather.