You Don’t Need a Weatherman……

Continuing my series on the Ocean Literacy Principles, how the ocean influences us and we influence the ocean. I am not an ocean scientist, but I am an ocean lover and communicator, and I am authorized by my church to be an ocean minister, so I am using these columns to teach myself and maybe others how to read the ocean. This week, weather and climate…..

Ocean Literacy Principles #3: “The Ocean is a Major Influence on Weather and Climate.”

Mark Twain once quipped, “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” The joke is, of course, that there isn’t a damn thing we can do about the weather. We can’t stop it from raining or we can’t force the sun to shine. Weather just happens; we must accept it. So Twain thought.

Sadly, we now know differently, that we can and do influence the weather. Twain (actually, he was quoting his good friend and co-author Charles Dudley Warner, let’s give him credit for the quip) had a 19th century world view on weather. Even in the 20th century, with new technology and satellites, we didn’t progress that much in our knowledge of how humans affect weather.

But now most people (besides our President) taking climate change seriously. Now we know that every time we turn on the ignition in our car or buy imported food, we actually are affecting the weather. And that’s where the ocean comes into the picture. All the CO2 created by our cars and the trucks and tankers that bring us food and goods from far away is making the ocean warmer and more acidic.

Keep complaining about the weather if you want - actually we will probably be complaining more and more, as the weather gets more and more extreme (scientists are now calling it “climate chaos” rather than “climate change.”) But we no longer can say there’s nothing we can do about it.

Here are the sub points of this Third Ocean Principle about weather and climate.

1. The ocean interaction of oceanic and atmospheric processes controls weather and climate by dominating the Earth’s energy, water and carbon systems.

2. The ocean moderates global weather and climate by absorbing most of the solar radiation reaching Earth. Heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere drives the water cycle and oceanic and atmospheric circulation

3. Heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere can result in dramatic global and regional water phenomena, impacting patterns of rain and drought. Significant examples include the El Niño Southern Oscillation and La Niña, which causes important changes in global weather patterns because they alter the sea surface temperature patterns in the Pacific.

4. Condensation of water that evaporated from warm seas provides the energy for hurricanes and cyclones. Most rain that falls on land originally evaporated from the tropical ocean.

5. The ocean dominates the Earth’s carbon cycle. Half the primary productivity on Earth takes place in the sunlit layers of the ocean and the ocean absorbs roughly half of all carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.

6. The ocean has had, and will continue to have, a significant influence on climate change by absorbing, storing, and moving heat, carbon and water. Changes in the ocean’s circulation have produced large, abrupt changes in climate during the last 50,000 years.

7. Changes in the ocean-atmosphere system can result in changes to the climate that in turn, cause further changes to the ocean and atmosphere. These interactions have dramatic physical, chemical, biological, economic, and social consequences.

One reason we were able to ignore climate change for so long is that we took only the short view, we noticed only weather, not climate. The difference between the two, according to NASA is:

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time.

One reason we haven’t noticed our influence on weather is that we think too short term, maybe only as far ahead as the six-day forecast. Climate is the long view, ice age rather than “cloudy with the possibility of showers overnight.” As Al Gore taught us, climate change is completely natural, the climate has always changed, but very slowly. Our challenge now is how fast it’s changing, temperature and ocean chemistry are accelerating at a terrifying speed. And that’s not “natural.” It’s on us.

If Mark Twain was the quintessential 19th century social and weather commentator, Bob Dylan fills the same bill in our time. In his classic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” he sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Weathermen and weatherwomen prefer to be called meteorologists, I believe, and they do base their predictions on science. But as Bob sang on behalf of us skeptics about authority, we don’t really need to check the Weather Channel; we can tell all by ourselves which way the wind is blowing.

Luddites like Trump may deny the obvious changing winds, but even Exxon executives and US Army generals know that the issue is not what is tomorrow’s weather report. It’s climate, and the climate winds of change are blowing strong and hard.

We who live near the ocean can see storms coming across the water and understand easily that weather starts out there. On the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts it’s obvious that hurricanes come from the sea. In the UK they know the Gulf Stream keeps their winters warmer than you would expect at their latitude. But ocean conditions are changing very fast. The Gulf Stream is slowing down and cooling off as well - another European Ice Age may be in the near future. Citizens of New Orleans know all too well that Hurricane Katrina made landfall at such amazing speed because a warmer ocean fueled the storm and greased its landing. We on the West Coast know that “100 year floods” now come every 7 years.

It was Dylan’s lyric that inspired the 60’s radical group, “The Weathermen,” who later changed their name to a more inclusive “Weather Underground.” They wanted people to wake up to how hard the winds of change are blowing, and they did their share of blowing and blowing up to try to effect more change.

The Weathermen began at the University of Michigan. Some decades later some other Michigan students started a business to provide weather data as an app. In honor of their fellow students they named it “The Weather Underground.” I used to think I didn’t need to read the weather report, that I had lived here so long I could predict California’s uniformly wet winters and dry summers.

But climate change has made even our boring weather so very unpredictable and dangerous. These days the Weather Underground app is one of my favorites. I realize I do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

When it predicts rain for week after week, I do, like Twain, tend to complain. But at least I know I can do something about it. I can reduce my carbon footprint. Do my small part to cool down the ocean. Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow.

Copyright©2017 Deborah Streeter