On Monday, in view of the weather forecast, I put in for a
day of Annual Leave the next day -- my most direct and least traffic-hassled
route to work tends to flood out
in moderate rainfall. (Look for
more of this as the infrastructure deteriorates.) It turned out to be a wise decision.
There is nothing so pleasant as being indoors, with nowhere
you need to go, and a stack of fascinating reading-matter, while the rain pours
down in torrents. And more
torrents. By day’s end, we’d
received six inches.
Today at work, a colleague mentioned that she had gotten
“more than five and a half inches”.
That seemed an odd combination of vagueness with specificity (the way
the media, attempting to be breathless, will say “more than 137” dead or
whatever), so I asked her what she meant.
Turns out she has a rain gauge,
which only goes up to five and a
half inches, and it overflowed.
So, the companies that designed rain-gauges did not anticipate
a gullywasher such as we are getting now.
Kind of like in the old cartoons, where Elmer Fudd would get really
angry and a thermometer would appear over his head (while steam shot out of his
ears), chronicling his rising temperature -- until it exceeded the maximum the
thermometer could report, and the top would blow off it.
Disturbing.
~
Time was, weather was about the least controversial thing a
body could jaw about; so that was
what you’d jaw about, out visiting on the porch of a Sunday, avoided the awkward topics, and passing around
the pink lemonade.
No more.
Mention “climate change” in mixed company (Republican/Democrat), and
watch the crockery fly.
Extreme weather
is the new Godzilla -- much to the benefit of disaster flicks,
since
in point of actual fact,
gigantic monsters, whether fire-breathing or otherwise, never did threaten
humanity, whereas climate change really might.
This
summer’s big disaster flick is “Into the Storm”.
I considered taking my wife to go see it, since, although we
don’t much favor disaster flicks (seen one seen ‘em all, really), this one,
being meteorological, piqued my curiosity (I almost wrote “whetted” my
curiosity, but that’s wrong:
appetites are what you whet, whereas what you pique is curiosity), owing
to a much, much better movie on the topic, “Take Shelter”, which we have
examined in considerable depth-psychological detail
here.
But the trailer and the reviews both
indicated that the thing is trivial.
~
While seeking an appropriate extant Word document in which this brief note could be
filed, I stumbled upon an earlier meditation, in my diary from back in April of
2000, when our family lived in Princeton, New Jersey. It turns out to be kind of a time-capsule. Evidently I was in a buoyant mood, and
could write,
Americans are actually getting down
to a clear-headed science-based optimistic endlessly inventive mood, with no
real imperial military ambitions to destabilize things as during the Cold War
or Viet Nam.
(I blink, reading this now.) It was the optimism that naturally blooms with the beginning
of a new millennium. This was
before 9/11 -- and before the disastrous Presidential election of November
2000. I still recall my mood: utterly delighted that, in Al Gore, we
actually had a candidate who was way, way ahead of the curve as politicians ran, on the two big
issues that faced us:
(1) Internet security
(2) Global climate change
Then instead we elected a simpleton -- or Florida did, or a
bare majority of the Supreme Court did -- who had no clue at all about either
of those issues, and who then
swept them off the public square by his rash adventure into exactly that
Sisyphean folly he had campaigned against -- nation-building (in Afghanistan)
-- and then (perhaps having read somewhere that to be considered a great chief-executive, it helps to have
been a War President) launched an elective war (not even a preventive war)
against -- well, it was probably supposed to have been Iran, which is what the Vulcans wanted, only somebody couldn’t
spell so we attacked Iraq
instead. Whatever. They all wear turbans -- can’t tell ‘em
apart.
Here, then, a meditation upon meteoro-metaphysical disaster,
before the actual disasters of this past decade and a half.
~ ~ ~
(9 April 2000)
Yesterday was breezy, balmy. I
stepped through the glass patio doors into exquisite, temperate, flower-scented
air. Spent all day sunning
in shirtsleeves, watching the branches blossom. A baby squirrel whose nose we've been seeing poking out of
the squirrel house (put up three years ago, in hopeful expectation of tenants,
but until recently occupied only by birds) ventured forth for the first time,
started to slip down the too-slick sides, looked down, and scurried back to
safety for just one more day.
* * *
I once heard that Japanese begin
their letters with a reference to the weather – an expected piece of
preliminary business, like the "Dear –" of ours. Since that day I have often followed that practice myself. I like linguistic structure, be it
end-rhyme or Arabic amatory preludes.
Yet today meteorology is
the meat, not just the antepast.
Though up late, and though this is
Sunday, this morning I somehow woke early – something about the light. And looked out and drew back and got my
glasses and looked again. A silvery mist, almost like a glaze of snow. Or even, a sort of commotion in the
air. In fact – it's … snowing. Hel-LO-o!
April! Birds we haven't
seen for weeks are back at the
feeders. The baby squirrel,
needless to say, is nowhere to be seen, no doubt curled up back inside with a storybook.
The other day I heard a lecture by
Sir Martin Rees, anent the End.
He
showed a slide, merely as prelude, of our galaxy and the Andromeda Nebula
crashing into each other like a couple
of SUV's on I-95.
Then he laid out
a timetable of hapless expansion, gathering darkness, stars winking out – and then,
like some hereditary tares come suddenly to foul fruition,
the very protons start to melt ("
The sun, mother, give me the sun!"). – Later I read a review of Robert
Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy", which dwells on the spreading chaos of
the Third World, and predicts that this will be our lot as well.
The one scenario is speculative and
remote, the other speculative and counter-intuitive. Outside my window there is something concerns me more. Since I sat down to write, an inch has accumulated,
and now it has been joined by a stiff wind. In a weird way,
I'm more worried about the weather than about anything else. Which is to say, really, I'm not
worried about much of anything these days. I have never been so bullish on America as I am now, both
absolutely and relatively to the rest of the world. Much of the planet is going to hell in a handbasket, but
that has always been the case:
most of history hasn't even been history, but prehistory or parahistory,
so primitive or so disordered there's been nobody there to record it. What counts is that somewhere,
something is working: that as the
dinosaurs die, the marmots are breeding; as the imperium falls, the monasteries
are forming; that while Muscovites
Kosovars and Ugandans slay one
another or commit suicide,
Americans are actually getting down to a clear-headed science-based
optimistic endlessly inventive mood, with no real imperial military ambitions
to destabilize things as during the Cold War or Viet Nam. If this sounds callous, observe
that even were the whole world a settled Eden, it would still be but one glowing
spot in the soup of doomed protons.
The current issue of The New
Yorker has a piece on all this.
It points out that meteorological worry-warts are nothing new, citing
Increase Mather's book Remarkable Providences of 1684 (soon to be a
major motion picture) as one of the first "weather thrillers" of the New World. It speaks of boomers, bored by prosperity, surfing for
storms as they surf for sports.
And of how global warming, the real story of current times, is seldom
mentioned on the television, partly because it's so gradual – no sudden story –
and partly because there are no visuals:
you can't see heat.
Anyway, the worry. It has nothing to do with the Increase
Mather subtext wittily mentioned by The New Yorker, "in which
extreme weather is taken as a sign of cosmic displeasure for our failure as
stewards of the earth". Nor
am I misled by "weatherporn", with its hyping of uncharacteristic
stories. I never watch the Weather
Channel, don't even own a TV, and was made well aware what a crock it all is
when, last summer, the family headed down towards a prepaid week’s vacation at
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and were stopped in our tracks by the approach of
Hurricane Dennis. We broke our
journey at Baltimore, and then at Washington, touring enjoyably and keeping a
weather eye on CNN, which was giving breathless coverage as of major disaster,
with dark mutterings about evacuations and maybe martial law. But we noticed that they kept running
the same damned interview, with a wet distraught bedraggled mother, who had
just arrived at the beach and now was packing up her station wagon to leave
again – ran it for three days,
without telling you when it was recorded.
– When we got to Myrtle Beach, all was sunny, they'd barely seen
rain. We had the normally-crowded
water park all to ourselves.
No,
the worry is primarily mathematical. Civilization is like a little wooden
chip tossing on a sea of hydrodynamics.
Hydrodynamics is notoriously computationally thorny; and now we know,
from chaos theory, that it is actually theoretically intractable, even in
principle. In practice, for
unknown and unknowable reasons, things have been quiet for the last few
geological moments, since that last spot of bother with the Ice Age. But there is no reason whatsoever to
assume we shall long escape fluctuations that are par for the course in the
planetary scheme of things, yet which on the fragile human scale are
monumental. I also have a nervous
concern, though nobody mentions this, about the sun itself. It too is a big fat hydrodynamic
globe, but unlike us, with our large solid core wrapped in a thin mantle of
unstable weather, it is hydrodynamic all the way down. And it is right now in a state – does
anyone notice this? -- of uncontrolled all-out total nuclear explosion. Always has been. (What a way to run a
solar system!) There are no moderator rods to slip down into it. It is fueled by processes that make
Chernobyl look like a toaster oven.
That it has been stable from second to second, let alone year to year and
for all of recorded history – here, indeed, history as recorded in rocks, not
merely on parchment – is a miracle.
* * *
Jesus,
this is getting serious. Since
writing that – and riffling through the magazine, then distractedly surfing the
Net, reading the LA Times even before most folks get it out there (it's
five thirty in the morning where they are) – another inch has fallen, and
another half inch risen, whipped by the wind. What are the birds thinking? They
have their internal programs, their mechanisms. Snow means: get your butt to Florida. But (they chirp to themselves) – didn't
we just come from there? -- It's like a repeal of Spring.
Hmm, wonder what Web Weather is
saying about all this. "An
end-of-the-world warning is in effect for our area until six o'clock
tonight." Okay.
* * *
It snowed till midday, accumulating four inches. By midafternoon, every bit of it had
melted, as though it were fairy-dust.
By five, we were staring into a cloudless sky.
Round where we live anyhow, forecasters tend to err on the
side of predicting rain. I guess
they figure that if your picnic is trashed by an unforetold downpour, you'll be
angry at the meteorologists, whereas if a day turns out fine after all, you'll
be simply pleased and won't give the failed prediction of rain another thought.
