Understanding weather moderation
“Prediction is difficult, especially the future.” - Niels Bohr
AT the turn of the nineteenth century, French mathematician and astronomer, Pierre- Simon La Place (1749–1827) proposed that if we only knew the starting point and the mathematical formulae we could predict all things from our present circumstance into a distant future.
Combined with Emmanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) belief that we can only know things via the five senses, the Kant/La Place cosmology became the most widely accepted world view of the 20th century.
But things started changing with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s discovery in the early sixties of the ‘strange attractor’ and the ‘butterfly effect’.
These ideas gave rise to chaos theory, whose non-linear explanations laid La Place’s notions of predictability to rest. At the same time Alan Turing (1912–1954), the mathematician whose insights deciphered the
Nazi Wehrmacht’s Enigma Code, applied non-linear mathematics to problems of complexity and bio-chemical morphogenesis and the fact that living organisms not only run down and disperse, but they also run up in a process Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), called syntropy. In short, chaos theory showed that life consistently arises on the borders of chaos.
Lorenz found that tiny changes, much like a butterfly beating its wings, could produce profound changes downstream. He also found that weather systems self-corrected around unknown anchor points that held the patterns in place even though such ‘strange attractors’ were difficult to pin down.
Small wonder that chaos theory emerged from the mathematics of weather and biochemistry. Weather itself exhibits many of the characteristics of living organisms.
The trend in 20th century science was to limit variables by taking things apart and studying their pieces, while scientists who studied complex variables as systems were relegated to the fringes and, in many cases, ridiculed. Lorenz and Turing, however, studied whole systems where variability was unavoidable and profound. Ultimately complexity won and Chaos Theory, a new branch of physics, was born.
Science is a process of exploring the boundaries of what we know in order to discover new things. Even though old ideas die hard, science is always on the cusp of change. The old, over- simplified reductionism of the 20th century is gradually giving way a new quantum age where more and more scientists deal with complexity on the order of Avogadro’s number1.
Chaos
Chaos is defined as “a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order”. However, Chaos Theory accepts that out of apparent chaos highly ordered behavior can arise from seemingly hidden causes. Also, due to equally obscure factors, the existing patterns of order may return to what appears to be chaos.
For example, writer Michael Crichton points out not only is the origin of dinosaurs obscure, but whatever caused their sudden demise is similarly hidden. All we have is theories.
Just consider the nineteenth century assumption of the inevitability of entropy, otherwise known as the second law of thermodynamics. This assumption works really well to explain what happens in lifeless systems like machines or dead bodies. But it fails to explain how chaos flows toward order in living systems.
What is missing is life. As Nobel Prize winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) pointed out, “Living organisms have the remarkable ability to draw a stream of order to themselves.” Life is dynamic. a process the source of which seems transcendental as we can graph the process but we cannot point to its causes. Life arises out of time and likewise it subsides, even though within a given life- span its expression of order can be profound.
Chaos Theory seeks to identify variables in dynamic systems whose behavior gives rise to order. Examples abound from biological processes and natural ecologies to weather systems.
The butterfly effect
Arguably the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century was Lorenz’s discovery that weather systems oscillate in self-organising patterns on the borders of chaos, subject to shifting with even the tiniest change.
A butterfly in Brazil may, by flapping its wings, cause the Mississippi River to flood. This discovery marked the point where science awakened from La Place’s dream that if one knew the mathematical formulas and had enough data the entire course of the universe could be computed. Here was reason to believe we humans can and do exercise free choice and the choices we make matter.
The butterfly analogy was a picturesque metaphor that may have been inspired by plotting the points arising from Lorenz’s weather prediction program. From some points of view this graph looked rather like a butterfly, lending romance to Osborne Reynolds’ (1842–1912) fluid dynamical dictum that a microscopic change at a point can effect large scale changes in the medium. Even though weather cycles show strong evidence of being self-correcting, they apparently oscillate between certain extremes, and fine nudges can alter what happens downstream within these extremes.
El Niño/La Niña
Warmth drives the world’s weather, and the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water, is the largest source of warm, moist evaporation. Thus weather scientists have long studied the irregular but periodic shift of warmth between the eastern and the western Pacific Ocean known as the Southern Oscillation or the El Niño/La Niña cycle.
With El Niño the eastern Pacific becomes noticeably warmer off the coast of South America, generally around Christmas. This maximizes evaporation and the resulting rising moisture climbs the steep slopes of the Andes Mountains, loading the upper atmosphere with moisture. Easily the world’s longest mountain chain, the Andes runs north to south straddling the equator and is second only to the Himalayas in height.
In the region of Ecuador and Peru the lower atmosphere where weather happens - called the troposphere - swells to almost 15 km above sea level to the tropopause where the lower atmosphere meets the stratosphere. The moisture
rich evaporation of an El Niño means more moisture reaches higher altitudes before cooling and sliding off poleward down a gradient called a thermo cline toward the polar vortexes where the troposphere is only about 7km high.
At the poles what was warm near the equator has cooled prior to falling down the polar vortex and recirculating toward the equator via storms. Paradoxically more and harsher winter storms are just as much a sign of global warming as more and stronger summer cyclones, since both summer and winter storms are driven by warmth.
While El Niño means more precipitation nearer the poles, it also means droughts for large parts of the world, including most of Australia. Of course, an El Niño can only go on so long before the increased evaporation brings in enough cold currents in the lower ocean to cool things off and shift the balance of warmth back across the Pacific.
On the other hand, La Niña is a condition of elevated warmth in the western Pacific. Interestingly, not all the moisture that evaporates from equatorial oceans rises into the upper atmosphere to fall down the polar vortexes. Depending on various seed factors - which chaos theory seeks to identify - summer evaporation from equatorial waters can drive summer storm cycles in the lower troposphere. These are called monsoons, and they drop most of their moisture in summer. When a La Niña feeds moisture into the lower atmosphere of the western Pacific there is no wall of high mountains in the west to lift evaporation into the higher regions. La Niñas drive global rain cycles. This is especially important for Australia as ordinarily the Australian mid-continent is arid and hot, which drives moisture upward so that little rain results. A La Niña means an especially rich river of warm, moist air flows out of the Indian Ocean (the world’s warmest ocean) and western Indonesia across Australia, from northwest to southeast and this is known to bring rain.
Global warming
Taken as a whole, world weather oscillates in a remarkably self-correcting pattern where warmth, light, tone and lifeforms are the organizational factors. Though the jury is out on how long and how much global weather can correct itself, it seems that in recent times there has been a global warming trend and weather has become more extreme.
This is more apparent in brittle environments like Australia and South Africa as compared to Europe or North America. Global warming is clearly occurring in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere where vast areas of permafrost have thawed. But lest we forget, the slight elevation of temperature in our equatorial oceans results in far more evaporation, which down the track means increasingly extreme flooding.
Global warming increases evaporation, accelerates the thermo cline and ramps up world weather because of the increase of moisture in the atmosphere. Though initially chaos sends moisture aloft, because of the organizing effects of warmth, light, tone and life, weather systems show a high degree of organization, dropping more moisture on well-vegetated, carbon rich regions and less on sandy deserts or bare soils.
While some environmentalists forecast global warming will increase desertification, the inverse seems true. Greater and greater desertification is bringing about global warming. Greater desertification means we are losing the ability to lock up sunshine and store it in the biosphere as soil carbon, forests and green fields.
The spread of deserts arguably is caused by human activities, but deserts do not spread because of warmth. Warmth, from the global viewpoint, means more water enters the atmosphere in a chaotic state giving rise to stronger organization, more and bigger storms and increased rainfall. Global warming means more water enters the atmosphere as evaporation, and what goes up must come down.
For whatever reasons whether conceptual, political or economic, fossil fuels and CO2 emissions get most of the blame for global warming. Yet, this may be an illfounded belief. Forest clearing, overgrazing, strip mining,
urbanization, desertification and destruction of ocean ecologies have markedly reduced vegetation and increased barren surfaces. Earth’s capacity to store sunlight by carbon capture is failing. We cannot continue to strip the landscape bare by overgrazing, cultivation, summer dry fallow, mono-cropping and consuming humus with nitrogen fertilizer. These practices all ensure that more and more rain falls in fewer and fewer places - and when it does there is less and less to keep it from running off as a flood. Australia is already a land of droughts and floods.
The Australian picture
Several thousand years ago the Australian interior was lush and green summer monsoons were the norm throughout the mid-continent. However, this gradually dried up as the seed factors related to moisture and organic matter declined. Over the last several thousand years the use of fire in environmental management made the interior of the continent progressively drier. Today central Australia often records the highest summer temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere. This means that even as the huge evaporative column of moisture coming off the Indian Ocean slides southeasterly down the thermo cline across Australia it usually is kept aloft by rising warmth and light acting as a radiator. Anything that reduces the carbon capture potential of vegetation increases the radiator effect, which tends to result in prolonged droughts.
Of course what sustains the rain forests of Far Northern Queensland and coastal New South Wales are trade winds that bring in storms along the Great Dividing Range. Usually, however, these hardly have enough strength to reach the interior to join up with weather systems out of the northwest or winter storms out of the Bight.
However, in the 2010 northern summer, July and August, the storm cycles of the northern Indian Ocean monsoon were particularly intense in the lower atmosphere, dropping huge quantities of moisture as rainfall along the Indus River and in the eastern Hindu Kush. The result was massive flooding in Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan while Russia experienced drought and extensive forest fires. This recycled warm surface water to the Indian Ocean while suppressing the influx of colder Antarctic currents, yielding record high ocean temperatures.
What followed was the combination of evaporation off the Indian Ocean with a La Niña in the western Pacific. Ordinarily Australia’s mid-continental area is arid and hot, driving moisture upward so that little rain results. However, since the river of evaporation flowing across Australia was so abundant the result was an extremely wet monsoon across the outback.
Australian weather
Periodically, central Australia catches a La Niña summer where flooding occurs not only along rivers flowing into the Pacific and the Murray/Darling but also over the outback and the Lake Eyre Basin, which in some places is below sea level.
In the southern summer of 2009-2010 Australia had two cyclones sweep down out of the top end into the interior dropping enough moisture out of the northwest, in Queensland and Northern New South Wales to reach all the way down to Lake Eyre and relieve an extended drought. This combined with stronger, moister winter storm systems from the Bight which collided with systems out of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Indian Ocean and danced a lazy waltz back and forth across the outback delivering refreshing winter rains. The result was widespread greening and cooling over the Australian interior as spring returned. The evaporation from this green, cool spring combined with the intensification of evaporation out of the warmer- than-usual Indian Ocean bringing one cycle of rain after another into the interior, and by Christmas this was causing massive floods on rivers draining into the Pacific, into the Murray/Darling and into Lake Eyre. When Lake Eyre fills up the evaporation drives summer thunderstorms in the mid-continent for a few years afterwards - which meant some good years for the Outback and in the Riverina.
Blame looks backward
There is a persistent mentality of whinging and blame, looking for a scapegoat for what is a natural, global phenomenon, the La Niña/El Niño cycle or southern oscillation. Some say the cause of recent floods was HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project), or secret weapon research combined with chemtrails. Another story is that someone without caution was playing with Reich Cloudbusters. There’s even the theory that the US Navy’s nuclear arsenal at Diego Garcia, along with thousands of tons of depleted Uranium 238 used in armor piercing explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan, has disturbed the ethers. While such things may well affect local weather, blame points to helplessness and these things should be questioned as causes of floods or droughts. Global weather is a massive self-correcting system and Australia has alternated between droughts and floods for many thousands of years. I like to look for what I can do to moderate these weather cycles, and re-vegetating the earth is a good place to start.
What can be done
Though I’m not in politics, I find the blame game selfdefeating, and – Hello - we have to deal with this effectively regardless of what governments and industries do. Let’s keep in mind that central Australia has been drying out for thousands of years, during which vegetation has become more and more sparse. As mentioned earlier, when we do get rain in parched areas the result is flooding because of so little vegetation there isn’t much to slow down run-off
and charge aquifers when it occurs. This can be remedied. The spread of deserts means even light rains become floods. From an environmental point of view to reverse desertification we need to slow down, absorb, conserve and ensure the steady flow of whatever water falls.
I’m greatly impressed by the insight and understanding of Peter Andrews in restoring vegetation, slowing down run-off and rehydrating the Australian landscape.
The Land Restoration Imperative spearheaded by former Governor- General, Michael Jeffrey, brought together in October 2009 a wide spectrum of talent from all across Australia to get behind Peter’s environmental restoration insights - which are a key part of any program to restore the Australian environment to the far wetter conditions that once prevailed. Of course, everyone who attended had a different piece of the puzzle, and somehow Peter wasn’t quite the poster boy everyone wanted a photo with.
Nevertheless, the idea of a national initiative along our creeks and rivers and throughout our rough country to revegetate our landscape, slow down run-off and store water in our aquifers is a timely idea. The fact that the state of New South Wales has spent over 2.5 billion dollars to rip the willows out of our waterways and speed up run-off is a classic absurdity. Slowing down, spreading out and soaking up floods feeds their bounty to the landscape, which is something we should all participate in for future Australia.
This could then co-incide with Aboriginal legends of a time soon to come when Australia turns green. Mining turns renewable resources into non-renewable ones, but agriculture, Australia’s other economic engine, if rightly practiced, would pay its own way in reversing this trend.
Nevertheless, turning floods into opportunities will require a national shift in consciousness, which is what Chaos Theory is all about - identifying those complex, almost undetectable factors that give rise to order.
As vegetation grows and cools the landscape, it catches carbon. As rural landscape architects we have our work cut out for us. ☐
Footnote:
Avogadro’s Number is the number of atoms in a gram atomic
[1] weight - which is the weight in grams of an element’s atomic weight. This number is 6.02 x 1023 or 602 sextillions atoms and could be written as 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. For example, boron’s gram atomic weight is 10 (atomic weight units). Since solubor
AWU is 20% boron, 50 grams of solubor will contain 10 grams of boron or an Avogadro’s number of boron atoms. If we had 50 milligrams of solubor this would contain 602 pentillion boron atoms. 50 nanograms - which would require magnification to see - would still be 602 trillion atoms, 50 picograms is 602 billion atoms and 50 femtograms is still huge at 602 million atoms. Attograms takes us to 602 thousand atoms and 60 zeptograms finally gives us 602 atoms of boron. Most folks are unfamiliar with imagining this.