An Aussie, Kleeman felt “great sympathy” for the house metereologists of Chicago’s commodity-brokerages who gambled last summer that an  El Nino-induced  drought in Australia would ruin the wheat crop and drive up American wheat prices. When the subcontinent’s September rains fell normally, the brokers took a shellacking..  “They naively assumed that El Nino is a hundred-percent sure-fire predictable, when it’s a fundamental fact of nature that weather is unpredictable beyond a certain point.”

      It was this fact that spawned Ed Lorenz’s chaos theory. A metereologist at M.I.T., Lorenz, while struggling in l961 with a primitive computer model for long-range weather forecasting, accidentally discovered what he called “the butterfly effect.” A small perturbation can have devastasting consequences on the other side of the world. The motion of a butterfly’s wings over area 51, Nevada, U.S.A., can eventually cause a storm over the Bermuda triangle. The existence of inummerable, unmeasurable little effects like this is what Lorenz refers to as chaos. If you want to know more about the theory, I recommend James Gleick’s superb book, Chaos. 

       Chaos is what make a mockery of the attempts to model the weather, of what Gleick describes as “the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic  predictibility,” to the entire notion on which the Western rational world view is predicated, that there is a fixed, replicable state of reality out there that obeys, and can be reduced to, certain rules and laws if only we can figure out what they are. When in fact the weather is non-linear, completely flakey, chaotic, everything that adjectives like “mercurial” and “nebulous” imply.  It is more like a Japanese koan, a Zen riddle (the most famous is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”) that is “dark to the mind, but radiant to the heart,” and is designed to frustrate and short-circuit intellectual problem-solving. Which is why whenever I hear a weatherman say, “the temperature is ten degrees warmer than normal,” I wonder what he is talking about. What is his baseline of normality ? 50 years ago ? 100 ? 1000 ? 100,000 ?

      Examples of chaos are all around us. When Air Force two stopped to refuel at Elmendorf Air Force in Alaska, I fired up my pipe and studied the random traceries, the catspaws of snow swirling across the tarmac. That was chaos. So was the smoke curling from my pipe. Clouds are a prime example. Gleick describes  a stormy afternoon at Los Alamos, New Mexico, “when the sky shimmers and trembles with the electricity to come, the clouds stand out from thirty miles away, filtering the light and reflecting it, until the whole sky seems like a spectacle staged as a subtle reproach to physicists.” The impact of chaos on the world’s weather engine and on its biological systems is huge and ultimately unknowable. Late every August over the last ten years, for instance, I have been going to a mossy platform in the woods behind our house to see if any chantrelle mushrooms have appeared. The number of chantrelles and where they pop up is always different, influenced by a host of factors— the amount and sequencing of precipitation over the summer, where the light breaks through the balsam-fir canopy, the availability of nutrients, variations in the fertility of the mychorrizal root system under the forest floor, of which the chantrelles are the fruiting bodies, and a host of other factors about which I haven’t a clue. It’s a classic chaotic situation. Predicting where and how many chantrelles are going to appear in any given August I suspect is impossible. How are  the epic gridlocks in Lagos, Nigeria affecting  Alaska’s Stellar’s sea lion population ?  In some way, undoubtedly, but who knows ?

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      The science may not be completely in, but this is nothing new. Academia is usually several decades behind what is really happening. I realized this when I was an undergraduate in the late sixties and took a course in geology. My personal interest, as a mountain climber, was in orogeny, how mountains are built. But the only explanation the  geological establishment accepted at the time was the upwarping of geoscynclines, the “baked-apple theory” (silt  is washed by rivers on to the continental shelf, which eventually slumps under their weight; a depression forms, the edges contract, and it is uplifted,  much like the repoussé wrinkles of a baked apple).  Not until the seventies was the theory of plate tectonics (the earth’s surface is composed of  fluid plates that keep ramming into each other; for example,  the boot of Italy slammed into Europe and heaved up the Alps)  finally embraced by the mainstream. Currently a battle is raging in archaeology between the Clovis firsters, who insisted that there were no humans in the New World prior to remains of Clovis man, found in New Mexico 11000 years ago, and the heretics who are producing a growing body of evidence that man arrived in the Americas far earlier, which the firsters continue to find reasons to reject, just as the defenders of an early site Clovis man replaced did early in the century. 

      Eventually the dam will break on Clovis man, just as it will on the hypothesis of enhanced global warming.  More science is coming in all the time. Lonnie Thompson, for instance, a paleoclimatologist from the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, has been taking ice cores from high tropical glaciers. He has some from Tibet that show the past fifty years have been the warmest in the last ten thousand, and others from Bolvia that show the past 50 years have been warmest in the last 6,000. Because 50% of the earth’s land mass and 80% of its population are located in the tropics, and the warming of these land masses will produce the greatest amount of moisture that will have the greatest effect on global temperature, Thompson feels that it is  imperative to core these fast-melting glaciers; they will yield the most telling data. He is also convinced that a warmer climate may induce a permanent El Nino.

      The same message is coming from so many sources— melting glaciers, dying frogs, drowning island states, ice cores, the recent spate of revved-up, back-to-back El Ninos— that it is becoming  impossible to ignore. After a while the growing body of  evidence, even if much of it is anecdotal, reaches a critical mass and begins to have statistical weight. But what does it for me, what makes me willing to take the leap and buy into the idea that human emissions are heating the planet and changing the weather, is the  increase in the frequency and violence of  extreme weather events—  that I and many others have been noticing anecdotally, and metereologists have been working up statistical data on over the last ten years— sudden deluges, floods, blizzards, unseasonal frosts, heat waves, droughts, tornados, supercaines, typhoons, cyclones, hailstorms, icestorms.

      The National Climatic Center’s David Easterling is a fellow convert. “I think warming is a reality,” he told me. “It has been warming since the seventies except for two years after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in l991 [which spewed an estimated 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere up to about fifteen miles where they circulated around the world and deflected the sun’s rays, reducing the mean global temperature by two degrees for the next two years]. Something is going on. The question is whether it’s severe enough to cause major problems. And it isn’t just the warming, it’s the rainfall changes that are already starting to occur. We’ve seen an increase in heavy rainfall events, defined as two or more inches in twenty-four hours, and of rainfall in general, particularly in the more northerly latitudes of the United States and Canada, which are consistent with rising temperature.”

        We had a heavy rainfall event in our neck of the woods two Novembers back, which produced the worst recorded floods in Adirondack history.  It started raining buckets on the afternoon November 11, 1996, and when it finally let up the next morning, bridges and culverts had been swept away, roads were gone, and hamlets like Peesleeville and Black Brook were completely cut off. Our town got six inches and incurred millions in damage. A year and a half later some of the bridges are still out.. But this was only one of several wierd weather events that have happened since we moved up here. The heave weave of ‘88, the March blizzard of ‘93, when the snow drifted twenty feet over the sliding glass door on our second-story deck and we were marooned for three days, until Ray Manley finally came up with his backloader and dug us out. The following January 16, when it hit 65 degrees, and the Reverend MacFarlane Fish and I played golf.  The blowdown of July 15th, l995, when a derecho, a rare straight-line windstorm with gales of a hundred miles per hour or more, knocked down in less than half an hour virtually all the trees in a swath a hundred miles long by three hundred yards wide, mostly in the northeastern part of the park. There have been several 80-degree swings in 24 hours since we’ve been here, which old-timers tell me never used to happen. And our region isn’t known for being particularly unstable. It’s isn’t in an earthquake zone or a tornado belt.

       I spend half my time traveling around the world, and everywhere I go people have a similar litany of recent bizarre visitations and the same question : are they a harbinger of worse to come, preliminary fireworks for a much bigger show, the unraveling of the entire weather system ? The only word for what is happening is koyanisqaatsi, a Hopi Indian term meaning out of whack, out of joint,  discordant, discombobulated, everything going faster and faster.  Like the week after I got back from Kyoto, an unprecedented ten inches of snow fell in Mississippi,  but meanwhile up in South Dakota it was shirt-sleeve weather, and people were out hitting golf balls. The weather has become like a man who has sprouted breasts passionately entangled with a woman who has suddenly broken out with a beard.

     A partial catalogue of the past year’s “anomalies,” as these extreme events are also called, should suffice to reinforce the point.  Yuma, Arizona gets its entire mean annual rainfall in an afternoon as the remains of Hurricane Nora sweep through in late September.. A few weeks later, the town of Beeksher, Israel, suddenly finds  itself  kneedeep in hail, which has never happened. Months earlier, on Easter Sunday, l997, Boston gets its third-largest blizzard— thirty inches— on Easter Sunday. A few days later it is sixty degrees. A similar pattern (the worst early blizard since l957, killing fifty thousand head of cattle; the following week it’s back up to sixty)  repeats itself in Denver in late October. A mid-January frost strikes the interior of Florida and northern Mexico. Arkadelphia, Arkansas is hit by an F4 twister that takes nearly 30 lives; another F-4 twister claims 27 victims in Jarrell, Texas; Tropical Storm Danny dumps more than 12 inches on Mobile, Alabama; Cyclone O1B rips through eastern Bangladesh in mid-May, leaving a million people homeless; typhoons Opal, Peter, Rosie, and Tina take turns battering  Japan. Shattering storms wallop the Iberian Peninsula; fast-rising floods kill at least 31 people in the aptly-named Spanish province of Extremadura, the usually-parched province whence the conquistadores hailed. The world-record, 236 mile-per-hour gale sweeps through Sri Lanka.

        I asked George Woodwell what’s with all these extreme events of late ? Is it that the atmosphere is a closed system, so that when you heat it up it becomes like a pressure cooker, and all this violent energy tries to escape and shoots out in every direction ? Sort of, said Woodwell. “As the earth warms, it has a greater capacity to evaporate water, and the water vapor contains latent heat energy which circulates around the globe and is released when the vapor condenses, driving winds and contributing to storms. The higher latitudes are getting heated more rapidly than the middle ones by a factor of two to three, and may be getting wetter. Precipitation is being dumped in great gobs. But at the same time the midcontinental arid zones, the deserts of the Southwest and Southeast Asia and their eleven counterparts in the southern hemisphere, are expanding, and the world’s breadbaskets, its commodity--producing belts, are being desertified. Climatic zones are changing and migrating at the same time.”

      On New Year’s Eve I called a friend who lives in Richmond, outside London, and she said, “It’s so warm here it’s peculiar. The hedgehogs are breeding like mad.” I called a friend in Dallas, where it was sixty degrees and a flash flood, unheard of in winter, had just swept through, taking several lives. “It’s a wonder there are no tornados,” she observed. But chez nous we were en plein hiver. The mercury that night went down to 25 below. We had forty people over and danced till dawn. A thought crossed my mind, and not for the first time : wouldn’t it be grand, a great prank by the cosmic prankster, if all this global-warming business turned out to be a hoax ?

       The following morning I called Tom Lovejoy, and said, “We’re having a little trouble getting worked up about global warming up here. It’s 25 below.” And he said,  “Don’t confuse the climate with the weather.” The usual definition of weather is that it is the day to day stuff, the quotidian dishing up of  atmospheric theatrics, the daily installment of the ongoing soap opera, which is climate, the long-term trend. “The weather” is a conversation starter or filler, a perfunctory exchange of banalities with  people one doesn’t know very well about the elements from which we have largely succeeded in insulating ourselves. I  like David Laskin’s definition : is the subjective experience of climate.  “Weather is our internal experience of daily atmospheric change,” Laskin writes in his book, Braving the Elements : The Stormy History of American Weather. “It is a human fabrication-- a compound of rainfall and ritual, economics and air pressure, science and superstitition, desire and expectation..” Wallace Stevens addresses this strong subjective component in his poem, “The Snow Man” : 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pinetrees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think 
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves....

      Which is just how everything looked in the Adirondacks a few days later.

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