Weather or Knot

Weather is weather, only more so

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/weather.htm
05/25/08

It’s raining out there.

That may not seem that extraordinary. After all, we are in the Pacific Northwest, if barely, and late spring rains are common. A few years back we got an inch of snow on Memorial Day, so rain really isn’t cause for comment.

But this year, and this week, have been different. This has been one of the wildest weeks we’ve seen as far as weather goes. It started out with record-shattering temperatures in the mid to upper nineties, breaking record highs for the date on four days, and the record high for the month on two days. Then it turned cold, and temperatures plunged into the upper twenties.

Then the winds came. Strong, cold winds, a steady 30 miles an hour. Winds like that are rare at our house, which is on the leeward side of the mountain. They’re also unusual for the area in late spring. One gust, estimated at 70 miles an hour, destroyed a large cedar about 100 yards from our home. Meanwhile, the town of Weed, which is usually windy on the northeast side of the mountain, was experiencing no wind at all.

And now, rain. Given that we’ve hardly had any rain at all since the start of February, everyone is happy to see it. The pine forests were already as dry below 4,000 feet as they are in July. We were looking at a truly terrifying fire season.

We had an unusually harsh winter. I even wrote about it (“How Do You Like Our Winters?”), noting that it was a cold, snowy winter much like those the area experienced in the 50s and 60s. I noted “1993, the year of the Great Snow, was an exception: we still had patches of snow in our north yard as late as the Fourth of July.” That year, the snow was five and a half feet deep on the ground on December 31, and it took over seven months to melt away. This year, a few days after I wrote that piece, the snow was six feet deep on the ground. I wondered if we might end up with snow still on the ground in August. In 1993, I remembered, it never did snow again after that big storm, and the spring was mild. If it stayed cool and wet, we could see snow lasting into late summer.

It didn’t stay cool and wet. Instead, it stopped raining altogether, and warmed up. The last of the snow vanished from our yard in the first week of May.

From the viewpoint of a firefighter, it was the worst possible combination: heavy, early snowmelt, and warm, dry conditions. Already, the forest has heavy bracken, and already, that bracken is drying out.

The rain that’s falling now won’t change any of that. Barely a centimeter has fallen over 36 hours, and it’s been rain of a type you might see in London England, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. The mist gets thicker, droplets form, and grown and move down, getting the sidewalk wet. It qualifies as rain in much the same way as George W. qualifies as normal intelligence.

But the emotional release, the sense of relaxing and refreshment makes a difference that will last for a few weeks. In the morning, we don’t find drifts of pine pollen on our windshields, and for a few days, the dust is knocked down.

The Weather Channel has been transfixed with elation over all the tornadoes the center of the country has been getting. I don’t mean to present them as ghouls, but when you are allowed to talk about nothing except the weather (what’s known in Ottawa, Canada as “normal conversation”) then it’s forgivable when the weather does something interesting, to show at the very least a sense of relief. I always felt sorry for weathermen on Los Angeles TV stations. Except for the rare rains, and the occasional Santa Ana wind, they pretty much are reduced to a daily grind of “night and morning low cloud,” “smog in the inland empire,” and “pleasant temperatures throughout the basin.” I imagine they even have it worse in Honolulu, where about the only reason for a weather forecast is to impress the tourists.

This doesn’t relate to climate change. Individual aspects of weather don’t, of course, any more than the size of individual snowflakes tells us much about what sort of winter to expect. Twain once said that climate is what we expect, and weather is what we get.

But at the same time, climate is an accumulation of weather. Climate isn’t about rain on any particular day, but how many days in the year it rains on average. Changes in climate mean changes in weather, but because weather is normally variable, the changes don’t seem as noticeable. Thus the weather might seem quite ordinary, except that the daffodils are blooming two weeks earlier than they used to. Or, as happened here, the snow melted several weeks faster than we might have reasonably expected it to. Climate change usually means changes on a bigger scale. Hurricanes go where they didn’t use to go, such as the coast of Brazil, or more frequently, as with the north coast of Australia, which has had more hurricanes in the past three years than the rest of their recorded history combined.

Climate change is a imperceptible changing of the tide lines, lost in the twice-a-day cycle of the tides, but visible in photographs from twenty years past, when the vegetation grew 20 yards further out towards the ocean. It’s visible in the slow stretch of arms of vegetation up the slopes of a mountain, even as the mountain gets snow every winter and melts every spring.

The BBC reported yesterday that vast cracks had appeared in the arctic ice, presaging an early breakup and perhaps even greater melting than last years’ record. This despite the fact that the northern hemisphere experienced one of the coldest winters in the past quarter century.

The right wingers were ready, of course, with a “official government finding” that was, in fact, a posting on Daniel Inhofe’s blog, falsely claiming that ice was growing at a record pace in Antarctica. For anyone who is staring at the top of the globe in puzzlement and wondering if “Ellesmere” is Canadian for Antarctic, it’s on the other side of the planet. That’s why polar bears, who are arctic, don’t eat penguins, who are antarctic, even though they would doubtlessly find them easy to catch and perfectly delicious. (There are other, more involved reasons why penguins don’t eat polar bears).

It shows the difference between short term weather and long term climate. We had an extremely cold, wet winter. But now our snow pack is gone, and people are murmuring about drought.

Winter struck across the entire northern hemisphere with a ferocity that the records tell us used to be commonplace, but which we are not used to any more. And despite that “harsh” winter, the ice pack is threatening to melt back even further this year than last year’s record melt back. Despite what that crackpot Inhofe thinks.

While Inhofe was trying to create the impression that arctic ice was thinner because antarctic ice was thicker (or whatever the hell it was he was trying to claim), the “Streetinsider” website (“If you’re not inside, you’re outside”–I swear that’s what it says) ran with the lurid claim that 31,000 scientists had signed a petition against global warming.

Turned out that it was the same petition from ten years back, which was gathered online by an outfit calling itself “The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine” and consisted for the most part of one crackpot in a Quonsett hut in a field in rainforest Oregon. Signators included the Spice Girls, the cast of MASH, and a surprising number of the Looney Tunes cartoon characters.

Sounds to me that if these guys are outside, then they desperately need to be inside, where they can get help.