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Most pilots say the objective is to fly around thunderstorms and icy clouds. But for three decades, Peter Hobbs has been ordering his aviators to fly him directly into raging storms.

Only in the thick of cumulonimbus can the cloud microphysicist gather the data he needs to understand the origins of precipitation. Hobbs has spent his career seeking the answers to the mysteries of rain, spending thousands of hours calmly crunching data while some white-knuckled pilot navigates his flying laboratory through electrical storms and ice clouds.

It is an obsession, and one deeply ingrained in the human psyche: the desire to understand the mystery of weather, and perhaps to control it. Peter Hobbs, a man with his head firmly in the clouds, winging in the rain.

Guests:

Peter Hobbs, founder and director of the Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington

Ken McMillen, retired Navy commander and pilot for CARG for 13 years.

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One of the pioneer environmentalists John Muir, put it this way, “In a war between humans and animals, I’d take the side of the bears.” Well, it’s happening. Not here, but a group of American conservationists says it is do or die time in the African wilderness.

In the vast and barely governed Central African Republic, poachers have killed an estimated 95-percent of the wildlife in search of ivory and bush meat, setting fires, flushing out and massacring elephants, rhinos, monkeys and cats. The government is too poor or too disorganized to stop it, but it has given permission to privately funded eco-warriors to step in.

A western charity raising money, raising arms, and raising questions about the value of life, human and wild, poaching the poachers.

Guests:

Tom Clynes, Contributing Editor to National Geographic’s
Adventure magazine and author of the article, “They Shoot Poachers, Don’t They?” in the October issue

Dr. Bruce Hayse, Founder of Africa Rainforest and River Conservation (ARRC) and family practitioner in Jackson, WY

Richard Carroll, PhD, Africa and Madagascar Expert for the World Wildlife Fund.