That Weather Machine

We are fascinated by the idea that a vast and invisible weather machine hovers over the Pacific Ocean--here pumping air pressure up, there forcing it down, wrestling winds into curious paths, putting air temperatures on a roller coaster. Jerome Namias, the esteemed meteorologist of the Scripps Oceanographic Institution in San Diego, understands the machine far better than we do, and we are grateful to him for trying to explain it.

Still and all, now he tells us. Now that the brown stain on the plaster over the fireplace is spreading and the roofers are either too busy with more serious problems or, worse. the roof is too wet to work on. Now that the trickle that started in the dead of night has destroyed the casing of the Oxford’s Unabridged Dictionary and the dictionary itself may or may not recover from the onset of damp. Now he tells us that the dreaded El Nino is back.

True, he did tell us five months ago that California was in for a wet winter. But we can’t be blamed for putting that out of our minds during Southern California’s long January summer. And “wet winter” did not register the way El Nino would have, carrying as it does the memory of 800 deaths and billions of dollars in damage around the world the last time it struck during the winter of 1982-83.

There is consolation in the fact that even for a researcher as creative and dedicated as Namias, weather forecasting is still an art struggling along the difficult path to science. Witness the second and third opinions among meteorologists that El Nino may not be coming back. There is also a lesson. Don’t wait until it rains and the dictionary is threatened to get the roof fixed.