Predictable

Puddock Hill Journal #79: A building drought and dire warning—or nothing to see here?

Halloween season is a good time for whistling past the graveyard.

It is entirely possible we will have received no rain whatsoever at Puddock Hill from October second through the end of the month. The last time we had any measurable precipitation, just seven hundredths of an inch fell. That was the first of the month—a small fraction of an inch. Not enough to dampen a tabletop, let alone hydrate a tree.

The 10-day forecast promises nothing.

My rain app shows a deficit of about an inch over the past seven days versus historical averages, a 3.67-inch deficit over the past 30 days, and a 5.22-inch deficit this year so far.

The National Drought Information System indicates that our area has entered moderate drought conditions (D1), with 20% of Pennsylvania in some form of drought (D1-D4) and 41% abnormally dry. The experimental Multi-Indicator Drought Index (MIDI) predicts moderate drought impacts for nearby Philadelphia extending five years, although it calculates that our immediate area will be normal.

How accurate is any weather prediction in a time of changing climate? Who knows? People complain that weather forecasts are unreliable, but predictions rely upon 30 years of backward-looking data, and due to unprecedented atmospheric conditions, new data gets wonkier every year.

Thirty years, incidentally, is the rule-of-thumb period for defining more dependable climate versus transitory weather.

In the East, according to Weather Underground, more than two dozen cities have received no measurable rain in October. “The Lower 48 as a whole was on its second-driest pace on record through the first two-thirds of the month.”

This may merely be an aberration, but it is frighteningly consistent with predictions that the jet stream—and the precipitation it brings—will move north for long periods due to anthropogenic climate change.

Not coincidentally, just this week a group of climate scientists wrote an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers warning of “serious risk of a major ocean circulation change in the Atlantic.”

This warning has nothing to do with the building drought in the eastern United States, but both have everything to do with burning fossil fuels.

The matter in question is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which, among other things, drives the gulf stream that keeps northern Europe temperate. “The AMOC, the dominant mechanism of northward heat transport in the North Atlantic, determines life conditions for all people in the Arctic region and beyond and is increasingly at risk of passing a tipping point,” the scientists write.

They continue:

Regarding the risk of tipping the ocean circulation in the Atlantic, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] concludes that “there is medium confidence that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will not collapse abruptly before 2100, but if it were to occur, it would very likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns, and large impacts on ecosystems and human activities.”

Recent research since the last IPCC report does suggest that the IPCC has underestimated this risk and that the passing of this tipping point is a serious possibility already in the next few decades. [Emphasis mine.]

The consequences of this are almost unimaginable to those who have lived our lives until now in a stable world climate—which is to say ALL of us. A collapse of the AMOC will make more intense storms and droughts look like party tricks.

The impacts particularly on Nordic Countries would likely be catastrophic, including major cooling in the region while surrounding regions warm. This would be an enlargement and deepening of the ‘cold blob’ that already has developed over the subpolar Atlantic Ocean, and likely lead to unprecedented extreme weather. While the impacts on weather patterns, ecosystems and human activities warrant further study, they would potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.

Many further impacts are likely to be felt globally, including a shift in tropical rainfall belts, reduced oceanic carbon dioxide uptake (and thus faster atmospheric increase) as well as major additional sea-level rise particularly along the American Atlantic coast, and an upheaval of marine ecosystems and fisheries. [Again, emphasis mine.]

In exactly eleven days, approximately half of our fellow citizens will vote for presidential and congressional candidates who deny human impacts on climate. Even if more sensible candidates prevail, they will likely not have adequate leverage to pursue the urgent steps necessary to forestall the coming catastrophe.

Out on the road, we’re driving with the windows down in late October—a high of 81˚F predicted for the last day of the month. Talk about whistling past the graveyard.

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A few weeks ago, I came in from the garden and wrote this poem:

The Indelible Consequences of Pretending

That year I read the Bhagavad Gita
To parse out the meaning of the universe
But it was just an Oppenheimer thing
Empty as the gutters between pages
Sinkholes in tracts of thawing tundra
Houses falling into the sea on outer banks.

There is importance in the weeds we hoe
The trees we fell for a better view
The insects we battle unto death
Invisible creatures writhing in soil.
There is poetry in the fallow field
Left to its extravagant chaos.

That year I catalogued flowers where
They rose lushly of their own accord
At the edges we concede to them
And the small drab moths we ignore
Or swat when we forget to close the door
Because they intrude upon us.

That year I read the Bhagavad Gita,
Ancient wise souls who lived among
The creatures of the earth and
Understood everything we have forgotten
So that we fool ourselves
Into thinking that we know

In order to accept what we have done.

                                          — J.E. Fishman

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The deep roots of these Atlas cedars (not native) no doubt benefit from their proximity to the big pond: