Where Is Our Rough Beast?

We are standing on the campus at JPL. It’s midweek and the trees are dripping with rain. Bill Patzert stares up at the sky.

He grabs my arm. “Look!” Patzert says. “Tropical clouds! Just like Hawaii!”

He’s a desperate man, of course. But who can blame him? Patzert is an El Nino expert, one of the foremost in the nation. He was, in fact, the first scientist to ring the alarm over the present El Nino hovering off the South American coast.

That would be the huge, carnivorous El Nino that was going to swallow us like a gecko swallows fat worms. You know, without blinking.

The El Nino that was so big it brought Al Gore to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for a “summit.”

The El Nino that, thus far, has failed to show in Southern California.

That’s right. El Nino Desaparecido.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are having a perfectly average winter here in our desert-by-the-sea. We get a rain, then some sunshine, then another rain. If the weather forecaster got it right, we may be getting another rain as you read this Sunday morning.

But no El Nino. And today is the first day of February. Since our rain season ends in March, that means the rain monster has only 60 days to appear. If at all.

The no-show has left Patzert and other members of the El Nino oligarchy looking for signs that they have not been forsaken. Thus all the excitement over Patzert’s sighting of tropical clouds.

The clouds--and sure enough, they look like Hawaiian clouds--suggest to Patzert that, just maybe, a cycle of moist air is starting to roll into Southern California from the central Pacific. El Nino air.

“I can feel it,” he says. “In the next week, we’re gonna see some storms hit.”

You gotta give Patzert credit. He’s willing to stick his neck out. As for the rest of the El Nino crew, some aren’t so sure.

John Christy, for example, tracks El Nino’s effects on global temperatures at the University of Alabama. Every day the satellites feed the numbers into Christy’s office, and every day they tell him that this El Nino is a flop.

“For some reason it’s just not happening,” Christy says. “Nobody really knows why.”

Christy confesses that the situation makes him a little nervous. Back in the heady days of last fall, when El Nino fever reigned, Christy was getting phone calls from all over the world. Some wanted to know how El Nino would affect cocoa crops in Africa. Or whether they should go long on petroleum futures.

It was as if the El Nino scientists owned some secret knowledge about the future. Christy appeared on TV week after week, dispensing advice on the weather beast slouching toward us.

And now, no beast. Christy fears that payback time is coming for weather scientists. The El Nino bunch may never appear on TV again. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that this will just reinforce what people believe anyway: that you can’t predict the weather.”

Could be. To be fair, though, the El Nino scientists were not totally skunked in the first half of the winter. Some parts of the country have seen some El Nino-related weather, albeit mild.

That includes the Gulf Coast and Northern California, both of which have received above-average rainfall. And New England did get that ice storm.

But you see what I mean. It hardly adds up to a Godzilla winter. And here in Southern California, which almost washed out to sea in the ‘82-’83 El Nino, we’ve gotten zippo in the way of storms off the Pineapple Express. Just the usual rains. A normal winter for a normal time.

Should this nonevent continue, will the scientists get fingered for the blame? Most likely. Back in the early ‘80s, seismologists announced that they had achieved a breakthrough in predicting earthquakes. They poked their sensors into the ground and waited. No predictions resulted. None, at least, that were followed by a quake.

These days, nobody listens to seismologists who claim they can tell you when the earth is going to move.

I mean, if scientists are going to play the part of shaman, maybe they should practice their magic in the back room before they trot it out for the public.

But the El Nino affair represents a more interesting phenomenon than mere scientific hubris. Not for nothing did one scientist refer to the El Nino frenzy last fall as “the O.J. of the scientific world.”

El Nino brought the possibility of doom and human drama. In these years of normalcy, we love that. We don’t have much doom anymore. We don’t have much drama.

So when one scientist noted that the El Nino mound of warm water off South America contained 100 times the energy consumed annually in the United States, it was like watching a preview of “The Lost World.” The beast was coming!

That’s how you get a dozen TV trucks parked outside the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as they did last fall when scientists held an otherwise obscure “workshop” on coastal flooding. In our era, if you don’t have real drama, then a maybe drama will do.

In fact, the scientists continuously laced their comments with all the qualifications appropriate to weather forecasting. They knew, even then, what they didn’t know.

“El Nino has never been predictable,” said Patzert.

“I would not be awfully surprised if the storms don’t happen,” said another oceanographer.

It did no good. The TV trucks and newspapers pumped Armageddon throughout the heartland, and we bought the Armageddon because we wanted to. It amused us.

And who knows? The scientists may get the last laugh. Dan Cayan, director of climate research at Scripps, regularly measures the temperature of the water just off the Scripps pier. It’s warm, much warmer than usual.

He also measures the height of the tides. They’re high, much higher than usual.

So El Nino is there, lurking. As Cayan notes, in the ‘82-’83 winter the big storms did not begin until late January and kept coming through February and March. That basic pattern could still be repeated this year.

Patzert, for one, believes it will. He has noticed that the mound of warm water off South America thus far has hugged close to the coast, a position not favorable to sending big storms into California. But soon he expects the warm water to move farther out to sea.

When it does, Patzert says, California better look out for trouble.

“I’ll bet you 10 bucks that it happens,” Patzert says. “Those storms are just waiting.”

I’ll take that bet and, hey, I almost hope he wins. We need the drama.