An El Nino Is Coming! (Possibly)

It was difficult Tuesday to worry about winter. The sky was blue, the sun hot. By 10 a.m. the La Jolla beach was packed with sunbathers and surfers. Half-naked children built castles in the sand. Above the beach, however, in a tiny auditorium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a team of scientists was working hard to make California imagine a coming assault of rain, blizzard and flood.

They came loaded, these scientists, with stacks of charts and bar graphs and computer models. They spoke of the Southern Oscillation Index and the average daily wind speeds recorded at Lindbergh Field. They described worrisome shifts in the Pacific trade winds and spikes in the water temperatures off the Peru coast. A fish expert reported an abnormally high mackerel count. An oceanographer talked of abnormal waves.

What it all meant, the scientists said, was a coming El Nino; and most Californians will grasp at once what that implies. Since the rollicking winter of 1982, a winter of swamped beach towns and battered piers, El Nino has become part of the regional disaster shorthand, taking its place with such potent terminology as Santa Anas and the Palmdale Bulge. To issue a news release headlined “Impact of Impending El Nino Subject of Workshop” is to guarantee a packed house, which is what they got Tuesday at Scripps.

The crowd came from all over. There were beach town city managers, sheriff’s deputies, county disaster coordinators, oceanfront property owners, park rangers, science correspondents and a crew dispatched by Dan Rather himself. They came to hear how bad next winter will be. It was, oddly enough, the one question the scientists could not answer.

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Daniel Cayan, director of Scripps’ Climate Research Division, spoke first. He explained how, over the past few months, oceanographers have developed firm data to indicate an El Nino current is developing in the Pacific. The trade winds and water temperatures indicate an “event,” as he called it, of 1982 dimensions. In that year the warm water translated into an onslaught of fierce, wet storms that blew in on what’s called “the pineapple express.”

Yet, Cayan quickly added, a similar El Nino current was recorded in 1977--a year of record drought in California. “This is not a cast-in-concrete sort of event,” he explained. “There are a lot of qualifiers here. Every event is different.” As the uncertainties were explained--air pressure patterns, for example, could push any storms into the middle of the ocean, meaning much rainfall for fish and ships at sea--one could sense frustration building among the attendees.

They wanted a simple, Farmer’s Almanac prediction; Cayan kept interjecting modifiers like “potential” and “perhaps.” They snapped out of it, though, when another speaker said his computer models had forecast rainfall in some cases at “300% of normal.” Now this was more like it. This was something to take back to the City Council and pry loose some sandbag money, a prediction on which to hang a headline.

“He’s a lot more positive,” one fellow in the audience happily whispered to his seatmate.

“I mean,” he went on, “he’s more positively negative.”

The scientist’s bolder tone seemed to rankle one of the reporters in the auditorium. He stood to more or less accuse the speaker of trafficking in alarmist statistics. “I’m certainly not trying to be alarming,” responded Nicholas Graham, who runs the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction. These were not, he explained, his predictions: He put data in the computer, and the computer spit back the models. He sounded a bit wounded.

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Watching these scientists on stage, their foreheads pouring sweat, their audience frowning at every note of uncertainty, it became clear how difficult a dance they had been called to perform. Like geologists who study earthquake dynamics, like ultrasound doctors who delve ever deeper into the mysteries of the womb, Cayan and his colleagues, in effect, have evolved themselves into an ethical dilemma.

The more they learn, the more they understand about the correlation between ocean waters and global weather, the more they will feel obligated to hold workshops like this, to warn. To not share their developing evidence would seem reckless, inhuman.

At the same time, long-range weather forecasting always will be a dicey business. There are too many variables. And to sound an El Nino alarm, only to see nature pull its punch, is to risk a seat on the bench next to Chicken Little and the geologists who kept issuing those 95% earthquake alerts for tiny Parkfield.

“We could end up,” Cayan acknowledged, “looking a little silly.”

Pray that they do--and, meanwhile, enjoy the rest of summer, and repair that roof.