And then the rains came...
In this episode, we explore the darker implications of some unexpectedly unseasonal summer rains…
Everything was dry as dust. The soil here is dust - or very little structure to it, anyway, even though things do seem to grow in it fairly well. I was trying to mow what little grass there was, as required by local by-laws here - the bushfire-risk is all too real - but the mower was getting jammed up all the time with dust and dry leaves and not much else.
According to the weather-patterns, it’s nominally an El Niño year: ridiculously hot, relentlessly dry and extremely dangerous - enough to fill anyone in this region with dread, as I wrote here are few months back.
That was the expectation, anyway, along with all of the initial evidence, too. So much so that, a couple of months before Christmas, I’d stored some of my essential papers and other irreplaceable items over at a friend’s farm, as it was more likely than this place to survive any big bushfire.
Yet the weather-gods had different ideas for us, it seems. Sure, it can be hot out here right now: often way up into the high 30s, or above 100˚F in the old measure. Not unusual, of course, for a south-east Australian summer in an El Niño year. But it’s also oddly cold for supposedly peak summer: often below 10˚C overnight at best, low 40sF or less. I’ll need the cooling fans on in the evening, which would be no surprise out here; but I also need the heater on in the morning as well. Not what we would expect…
And yeah, something’s odd, all right, because then the rains came. Four inches of it at first, all in one go - far more than a month’s worth, for this time of year out here. And it rained, and rained, and kept on raining, on and off, for the whole of that damp week.
At last the rain stopped; the sun came out again. And a week later, my dry, dusty soil with barely a blade of grass on it, now suddenly looks like this:
That’s the side-lawn beside the western side of the house. A bed of bee-filled flowers; beyond that, grass already a foot high in some places. That poor old mower of mine is going to need a serious work-out to work its way through all of that…
On the surface, it all looks good. At the least, it means that the bushfire-risk will be a whole lot less this year, maybe right through to the end of the summer. My earlier dread, it seems, just an over-reaction to too much unfounded fear.
Or maybe not - because beneath the surface, often in an all too literal sense, it’s not looking so good at all. A few miles downriver from here, there were a lot of people who’d just finished rebuilding their homes after a supposedly once-in-a-century flood a couple of years ago had smashed through most of their town. But this week, just two years later, they’ve now been hit by another supposedly-once-in-a-century flood, wrecking their homes once more - and they’ll have to start rebuilding everything all over again. And it isn’t just here, either: further up north, in southern Queensland, they’re being hit so hard this year by sequences of back-to-back cyclones that there are whole towns going underwater again and again. There are problems here already with poor availability of housing, and not enough capacity usable space or capacity to build even all of what’s needed right now: so it really doesn’t help to have to add the extra burden created by this kind of large-scale mess as well.
This is a continent that’s usually too hot and too dry, and often in urgent of more water: but right now, hearing the phrase “and then the rains came” is not good news at all.
It’s never been this way here before. There had been all the usual signs that this would be a ‘normal’ El Niño year - but with all this rainfall it sure as heck isn’t turning out like one. And it’s really noticeable how out of line even the everyday forecasts have become: particularly about how cold it’ll get overnight, with pre-dawn temperatures often several degrees below expectation, and afternoon-highs likewise going into overshoots - sometimes even both ways on the same day. Odd indeed.
But that’s the reality of climate-change just starting to ramp up its impacts right now. Yes, technically it’s all ‘global warming’ - that part is right enough. But what really means is that we’re now seeing global weather-destabilisation, with all sorts of unexpected interactions and emergent-effects popping up all over the place, way up in some places, way down in others, all in almost-unpredictable ways.
The real danger here is that climate is inherently a ‘chaotic-system’, with dynamic ‘attractors’ that will, for long periods, keep it actually more stable and self-correcting than a simpler dynamic-system would. But this kind of system is only pseudo-stable: if there’s enough pressure on the system, that seeming ‘stability’ will suddenly fall into full chaotic-collapse, and then stay that way for quite a while, until the attractors in the system can pull it into a new pseudo-stable state again.
(That’s also how and why our planet’s magnetic-poles keep swapping over from north to south every hundred thousand years or so, by the way. And relative to the average, we’re already perhaps fifty thousand years overdue for the next switch-over on that axis. Won’t that be fun if that happens right in the middle of this mess too…?)
This has huge implications for weather-forecasting right now. As one colleague in that field warned me the other day, the computational weather-models built up with so much care over the past few decades were getting steadily better and better every year - but suddenly they’re just not lining up with the new reality in the way that they used to, and supposedly should. And right now, with so many factors changing all over the place, all driven by the same inexorable increase in global temperature, yet each also in their own different and specific ways, there’s no real way to make sense, for certain, as to which way things are headed.
Hence, down here in Australia, in this weird summer-that-isn’t-a-proper-summer, we’re in a nominal El Niño cycle that somehow has many if not most of the characteristics of its opposite La Niña cycle instead. We’re getting more and more of ‘and then the rains came’, when supposedly we shouldn’t.
And if we are heading into a true chaotic-collapse of the current weather-systems, that’d mean that our weather-forecasts are likely to get a whole lot less reliable, especially at the local scale, for quite a while forward from now.
In short, for weather, it’s weird times ahead. So yeah, as in so many other aspects of our lives right now, we’d best get a whole lot better at being ready for whatever weather and more may be coming our way.