“La sabiduría de la vida consiste en la eliminación de lo no esencial. En reducir los problemas de la filosofía a unos pocos solamente: el goce del hogar, de la vida, de la naturaleza, de la cultura”.
Lin Yutang
Cervantes
Hoy es el día más hermoso de nuestra vida, querido Sancho; los obstáculos más grandes, nuestras propias indecisiones; nuestro enemigo más fuerte, el miedo al poderoso y a nosotros mismos; la cosa más fácil, equivocarnos; la más destructiva, la mentira y el egoísmo; la peor derrota, el desaliento; los defectos más peligrosos, la soberbia y el rencor; las sensaciones más gratas, la buena conciencia, el esfuerzo para ser mejores sin ser perfectos, y sobretodo, la disposición para hacer el bien y combatir la injusticia dondequiera que esté.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES Don Quijote de la Mancha.
La Colmena no se hace responsable ni se solidariza con las opiniones o conceptos emitidos por los autores de los artículos.
24 de octubre de 2015
The Strongest El Nino in Decades Is Going to Mess With Everything
Drought relief possible in California, dryness in Australia
People, crops, birds, fish all will feel effects of El Nino
It has choked Singapore with smoke, triggered Pacific typhoons
and left Vietnamese coffee growers staring nervously at dwindling
reservoirs. In Africa, cocoa farmers are blaming it for bad harvests,
and in the Americas, it has Argentines bracing for lower milk production
and Californians believing that rain will finally, mercifully fall. QuickTakeEl Nino
El Nino is back and in a big way.
Its
effects are just beginning in much of the world -- for the most part,
it hasn’t really reached North America -- and yet it’s already shaping
up potentially as one of the three strongest El Nino patterns since
record-keeping began in 1950. It will dominate weather’s many twists and
turns through the end of this year and well into next. And it’s causing
gyrations in everything from the price of Colombian coffee to the fate
of cold-water fish.
Expect “major disruptions, widespread droughts and floods,” Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
in Boulder, Colorado. In principle, with advance warning, El Nino can
be managed and prepared for, “but without that knowledge, all kinds of
mayhem will let loose.”
Anomalies representing deviations from normal temperatures. Abnormally warm temperatures shown in red, cold in blue.
NOAA
In
the simplest terms, an El Nino pattern is a warming of the equatorial
Pacific caused by a weakening of the trade winds that normally push
sun-warmed waters to the west. This triggers a reaction from the
atmosphere above.
Its name traces back hundreds of years to the
coast of Peru, where fishermen noticed the Pacific Ocean sometimes
warmed in late December, around Christmas, and coincided with changes in
fish populations. They named it El Nino after the infant Jesus Christ.
Today meteorologists call it the El Nino Southern Oscillation.
Record Event
The
last time there was an El Nino of similar magnitude to the current one,
the record-setting event of 1997-1998, floods, fires, droughts and
other calamities killed at least 30,000 people and caused $100 billion
in damage, Trenberth estimates. Another powerful El Nino, in 1918-19,
sank India into a brutal drought and probably contributed to the global
flu pandemic, according to a study by the Climate Program Office of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As the Peruvian
fishermen recognized in the 1600s, El Nino events tend to peak as summer
comes to the Southern Hemisphere. The impact can be broken down into
several categories. Coastal regions from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest
in the U.S., as well as Japan, Korea and China may all have warmer
winters. The southern U.S., parts of east Africa and western South
America can get more rain, while drier conditions prevail across much of
the western Pacific and parts of Brazil.
El Niño Is Coming Back: Here's What You Need to Know
Threshold Level
During
the first full week of October, temperatures across a portion of the
central Pacific most watched by researchers reached 2.4 Celsius (4.3
Fahrenheit) above normal, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center
said. The threshold at which the Australian Bureau of Meteorology
considers an El Nino under way is 0.8 degree Celsius, said Andrew
Watkins, supervisor of Climate Prediction Services for the agency.
While
the effect on the U.S. may not reach a crescendo until February, much
of the rest of the world is already feeling the impact, Trenberth said.
“It
probably sits at No. 2 in terms of how strong this event is, but we
won’t be able to rank it until it peaks out and ends,” said Mike
Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center in College
Park, Maryland.
“We are definitely hurt by the El Nino,” said Mai
Ky Van, deputy director at October Coffee-Cocoa One Member Ltd., a
state-owned plantation company in Vietnam’s Dak Lak province. The water
level in reservoirs there is down about 67 percent from normal, and
while there is enough for the current harvest, “I’m afraid we won’t have
enough water for irrigation in the next growing cycle,” Van said.
Coffee, Cocoa
Southern Sumatran and Javanese coffee and cocoa crops will probably be hurt, said Drew Lerner, the president of World Weather Inc. in Overland Park, Kansas.
In
addition, fires burning in rain forests in Sumatra, Borneo and New
Guinea, many of them set to clear land, have pushed air quality in
Singapore to unhealthy levels, and the lack of rain resulting from El
Nino is making the situation worse, said Robert Field, an associate
research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at New York’s Columbia University.
Smoke blankets Indonesia in this satellite photo taken by NASA's Terra satellite on Sept. 24, 2015.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
So far this year, about 125,000 people have suffered haze-related ailments, Indonesia’s disaster relief agency said this month.
While much is made of the negative side of El Nino, the phenomenon is more complex.
“It will be a feast or famine climate pattern,” said Scott Yuknis, president of Climate Impact Co.
in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “Some crops will suffer too much rain and
other regions will be hot and dry. The timing of the peak in this El
Nino and how quickly it weakens will also determine the final crop
impact.”
Tea, Too
A drought in Kenya may cut tea
production by 10 percent. However, El Nino-spurred rains may end up
boosting next year’s harvest, Lerner said.
As the atmosphere
changes, storm tracks in the U.S., for instance, are pushed down from
the north, so the region from California to Florida could get more rain.
This is reflected in the latest three-month outlook from the Climate Prediction Center,
which sees high odds that heavy rain will sweep from California into
the mid-Atlantic states through January. Texas and Florida have the
greatest chance for downpours.
While this isn’t likely to end
California’s four-year drought, it would improve conditions. Eliminating
the dryness completely will be difficult because the state is so far
behind on its normal rainfall.
Deficit Remains
“If the
wettest year were to occur, we still wouldn’t erase the deficit we have
seen in the last four years,” said Alan Haynes, service coordination
hydrologist at the California Nevada River Forecast Center in Sacramento.
A
lot of rain in Florida could exacerbate orange crop damage from
citrus-greening disease, as the psyllid that carries it thrives on
moisture, Lerner said. Production will shrink to a 52-year low in the
season to Sept. 30 next year, according to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
Cold-water species of fish will move north or into
deep water, while others will disperse, NOAA said. This in turn can hurt
birds that feed off those fish, causing many to die of starvation or
fly far from their usual territories, said Andrew Farnsworth, researcher
at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.
For Australia, El Nino can often mean drought.
“In
broadest terms, though, we have had 26 past El Nino events since 1900,
of which 17 resulted in widespread drought, so we in Australia have to
manage for drought in any El Nino event,” Watkins said.
The
weather in Australia is also affected by how warm the Indian Ocean gets,
which can lead to rainier conditions. Right now, that ocean, like the
Pacific, is warm; however, all the other signals point the other way.
“The drys are winning out over the wet,” Watkins said.
Hurricane Impact
Another
aspect of El Nino’s scope that would seem positive at first is that
there are typically fewer tropical cyclones, the class of storm that
includes hurricanes and typhoons, making landfall in Australia during
years the phenomenon is active.
“But there is a downside to that
-- inland tropical areas get some of their best rainfall from
ex-tropical cyclones that cross the coast and head inland as tropical
depressions,” Watkins said.
This would have been a benefit for places such as western Queensland, which like California is in the midst of drought.
The
Atlantic Ocean also sees fewer tropical systems because of El Nino.
Wind shear increases across the basin, tearing at the structure of
storms and keeping their number down. While the Atlantic has produced
two killer storms this year, the total number of hurricanes and tropical
storms has been below the seasonal average.
Trenberth said he
hopes all the warning helped people prepare for this El Nino. Planning
could help agricultural economies weather the event better than the El
Ninos in 1982-83 and 1997-98, perhaps leading to more water being
captured for future use and prevent deaths.
“The general thing
about these things is, if you are prepared, it doesn’t have to be a
negative,” Trenberth said. “One of the biggest challenges that may not
be to individuals but to organizations is water and water management.
Can you save that water and manage that water so that, when it stops,
you can still use it?”