Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  Locally, their effects have been noticed for centuries. The first is familiar, but it bears repeating: the inflow of warm water in the eastern Pacific halts the cold upwelling rush of nutrients; all the anchovetas vanish from the waters off Peru; other sea creatures die; noxious gases from rotting marine carrion bubble up from the sea; boats have their paint blistered by the scum of acidity.

  Globally, a host of other phenomena can develop in tandem, all probable knock-on effects of these particular changes in this, the world’s biggest expanse of seawater. The expanse, it is worth restating also, of heat-catching seawater—for the catching of solar heat is ultimately what this meteorological drama is all about.

  So during an El Niño6 there can be, among other things, major flooding on the South American west coast (with the current-warmed humid breezes rising above the Andes, the humidity condensed and then precipitated out as rain or snow). During this phase, there can be droughts in northern Brazil, but severe rainstorms near Rio. Cyclones and typhoons tend to form in the Pacific more centrally than usual during an ENSO warm phase, and since the storms spend longer times tracking their way westward over larger expanses of warmer seas, they can grow and accelerate and deepen, and thus can be much more violently destructive when they finally reach land.

  The 1982–83 El Niño, one of the strongest ever known, was memorable for its cascade of events. The trade winds weakened. Sea levels in the eastern Pacific began to rise (up to a foot higher along the coast of Ecuador). Eastern sea temperatures shot up. Fur seals and sea lions began to die off the coast of Peru. Deserts in eastern South America were drenched with rain, grasshoppers swarmed, toad populations went through the roof, mosquitoes came in clouds, and malaria cases skyrocketed. There were droughts and forest fires in Java, terrible storms wracked the coastline of California, there was flooding in the American Deep South, ski resorts in the American Northeast reported warmer weather and lackluster business. All told, the economic cost of the 1983 El Niño was estimated by the U.S. government at eight billion dollars—and of course for every malaria-related death in Ecuador or for every village burning in Sulawesi, boundless misery.

  That was an extreme event. Even during a modest El Niño the effects can be widespread and unexpected. Drought can affect Hawaii, drastically lowering the sugar crop (and before 2009, when Dole pulled its business out, the pineapple crop, too). Forest fires can and do sweep across Borneo; monsoon-dependent crops can wither and fail in India. Sea lions and elephant seals die in the waters off California; unanticipated fish and squid appear in the waters off Oregon and British Columbia. A supposedly moderate El Niño in 1877 triggered a two-year drought in China and the deaths of nine million people from starvation. The polar jet stream can be nudged farther southward during an El Niño event, making winters in Canada more acutely cold, forcing more rain to fall in the southern states, cooling everything down—and shortening the growing season for Florida oranges. Northern Europe is colder and drier, Kenya wetter, Botswana drier. The effects are legion, the lists endless (and at times, seemingly contradictory), the concerns global.

  And the matter of global warming is a constant concern, underpinning or overlaying everything. The differing scales of the events involved are irksome to those employing statistics to help spot trends and links. The wildly complex mechanics of an El Niño oscillation occur over fairly short intervals, for instance. The best-known parts of that equation, the Walker circulation and the ENSO, operate at fairly short intervals, in three- or four- or five-year cycles.

  It can become very much more complicated than this. Yet other, more arcane atmospheric and oceanic phenomena—such as the Kelvin waves and Rossby waves that move quantities of ocean hither and yon around the subsea boundary between warm and chill waters known as the thermocline—are similarly swift in their operation. As are the so-called Hadley cells and their more northerly cousins, the Ferrel cells, which operate in the atmosphere rather than the sea, and which bring much rain, and swirl about under the majestic impress of that westward and world-dominating force which was discovered in Victorian times by the Frenchman Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, and which bears his name today.

  All these named phenomena operate in relatively rapid, time-lapse motions. As does a final main, named component of the entire Pacific process, and perhaps the fastest of them all: it is known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation. This is best described as a traveling wave of unusual atmospheric behavior. When functioning as normal, it brings periods of hot storms and blustery rains to the tropical western Pacific, and it does so every thirty to sixty days.

  Global warming, though, operates with very much more languor than this. Most mathematical models suggest that the central tropical Pacific will not rise in temperature by three degrees Celsius7 until the end of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the level of the sea will have risen between one and three feet, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How will those two long-term changes affect, or else be affected by, the El Niño warm phases expected during the remaining decades of the century? It would be at least convenient to know this, because the world’s weather is entirely born of this phenomenon, and substantial changes like these either are caused by it or are the cause of it.

  Little is certain, though the computers hum. One recent observation that has produced consistent enough results to be called a discovery is that the Walker circulation, Sir Gilbert’s lasting legacy, has steadily weakened over the last sixty years. Moreover, it has done so, with weakening trade winds its most obvious demonstration, at a rate that is entirely consistent with the rising temperature of the Pacific’s surface. And as will be recalled, a weaker Walker circulation is linked with the start of an El Niño warm phase—which suggests, to put it most crudely, that if this trend persists, the world could find itself in a state of more or less permanent El Niño conditions.

  And that, with its corollary of ever more extreme weather events in the western Pacific and over the North American continent (to say nothing of a total permanent collapse of the Peruvian fishmeal industry), could cause long-term changes to human behavior, to the siting of cities, to the planting of crops. But little is certain. Thanks to the new computers, and to the fascination with Pacific weather, global forecasting is less of a crapshoot than once it was. But out in the Pacific it remains a mystery of daunting complexity.

  Yet a consensus of a sort appears to be building. It is all to do with heat, with the radiation from the sun, and with the manner in which the planet deals with it. Not a few climatologists are coming now to believe that because of its immense appetite for absorbing the solar heat, the Pacific could in time actually be seen as the savior of the world’s living creatures. It will be so by taking in all that destructive heat from the sun and from the excesses of carbon emissions and, rather than allow it to scorch dead the inhabited earth, employ it to warm itself up, slowly and sedately, as befits the dominant entity on the planet, and thereby enable itself to carry the world’s heat burden on its own.

  The effects of all that absorption of warmth will be locally dramatic, for sure. As the American admiral fretted, there will be bigger and more destructive typhoons; there will be more super Tracys, more stupendous Haiyans. There will perhaps be a more urgent need to evacuate islands that will be inundated more swiftly than was thought. Maybe there will be bigger snowfalls in the Cascades and the Sierra. Maybe no anchovies will ever be caught again off Peru. Maybe the forests of Sarawak will be consumed by fire.

  Locally, there will be mayhem. But globally, less so. The planet, perhaps, will manage to heal itself. The world and its creatures will survive, and all will eventually allow itself to come back into balance, just as the geologic record shows that it survived and returned to balance after any number of previous cycles of excess and danger. And once that happens, the Pacific Ocean will be seen, uniquely, for what many climatologists are coming to believe it to be: a gigantic safety valve, essential to the future of the planet

  The oce
an’s monstrous size puts it in a position to let the planet go thermally wild for a time, to wobble dangerously. But then, like a formidable gyroscope, the Pacific will dampen the excess, will help bring sanity back, and will restore calm, serenity, and normality.

  The Pacific Ocean as the world’s pacifier—the thought is maybe born of all too little science. But it is a thought endowed with poetry, and is now held by many. And in the gloom-dimmed world of today, even such a thought is surely a most welcome one.

  1 Clockwise-spinning cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere, counterclockwise typhoons (Chinese for “big winds”) in the Northern, and similarly configured hurricanes in the Americas comprise this Aeolian family, together with the plagues of tornadoes and waterspouts in the cadet branch.

  2 The indigenous Muslim Moro people, living largely in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, have been engaged in independence wars with various Manila regimes for many years. For many reasons—not least because the Moro leadership has openly allied itself with China—the United States has been offering the Philippine government military aid, with some U.S. personnel on the ground on the Mindanao battlefields.

  3 It was left to Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, to take immediate issue with the admiral, by famously declaring that God was the only one with the authority to alter the world’s climate.

  4 Normal sea-level atmosphere pressure is 1013.25 mbar—or, in the old style, sea-level atmosphere would typically support a column of mercury that rose 29.92 inches in a vacuum tube. The highest pressure is generally to be found in parts of Siberia, up to 1050 mbar. The lowest pressures at sea level are invariably to be found in the eyes of tropical storms.

  5 Most of Tip’s two-week progress was through the open ocean, so casualties were lighter. But there were a number of collateral incidents—most notably at a U.S. Marine base near Tokyo, where the intense winds collapsed a wall that in turn dislodged fuel pipes from a farm of gasoline bladders. A river of fuel coursed down a hill and into a barrack block, and was ignited by a space heater. The resulting fire killed thirteen marines.

  6 Some meteorologists now refer to this as the ENSO warm phase and to the reverse, what is still traditionally called La Niña, as the ENSO cool phase. The relative lack of ambiguity and confusion will be likely to widen this practice in coming years.

  7 The warming rate slowed down dramatically in 2008, to the glee of those who believe that climate change alarmism is all piffle. Climate statisticians, who acknowledge the existence of a global warming hiatus, insist that this is merely a cyclical event, and that the upward trend will resume and continue so long as fossil fuels continue to be burned with such careless abandon.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 7

  HOW GOES THE LUCKY COUNTRY?

  . . . Australia! You are a rising child, and doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, Voyage of the Beagle, 1836

  Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.

  —DONALD HORNE, The Lucky Country, 1964

  The moment when, on the perfect, warm spring afternoon of Armistice Day 1975, a serving Australian prime minister was suddenly sacked by a representative of the British queen, ten thousand miles away, is still known and remembered, from Perth to Sydney, from Hobart to Darwin. It is recalled simply and starkly as the Dismissal. As with Watergate, the Blitz, or the Tsunami, the economy of the description belies the enormity of the event.

  It was a quite unprecedented happening, unforgettable in its staging and its consequences. It was the highest of dramas in a country long burdened by the lowest of politics. Its leading characters were petulant, pretentious, and power-hungry martinets. No one came out of it well: when the dust from the fight had cleared, there were, and deservedly so, no identifiable winners.

  But it marked a turning point for Australia, by some accounts a belated coming-of-age for the only country in the world, and a very new one, that so massively occupies an entire continent. If this country of twenty-two million is now starting to play a major role in the life of the new Pacific—and it is by no means entirely certain that it has the will to do so—then this one November moment, this rather ludicrous demonstration of faraway Britain’s dwindling power over its long-ago colony, was when it all began.

  The man sent packing that day was Gough Whitlam, a sleek, imposing, silver-haired and silver-tongued barrister who was seductively charming but with the temper of a honey badger. He had been Labour prime minister for three years, and his rule, which started in 1972 after a quarter century of indecorous political drift,1 had sent shock waves through the Australian establishment. In his first ten days in office, he and a colleague took charge of all the government ministries (ruling as what Whitlam called his “duumvirate”), pulled the last Australian troops out of Vietnam, ended the conscription that had put them there, and freed all those imprisoned for evading the draft. He supported equal pay for men and women, increased funding for schools, and ensured land rights for the country’s aboriginals.

  He gave independence to Papua New Guinea and formally opened diplomatic relations with Mao’s China, and then continued on his merry reforming way to change, and drastically, the inner workings of his country: by introducing universal health care, free university schooling, no-fault divorce laws, votes at the age of eighteen, and a set of swingeing tax reforms.

  He ended the British honors system, which had long allowed the monarch in London to bestow knighthoods and medals on the citizens of a country that now delighted in its classlessness, and wanted little or nothing to do with the fiddle-faddle of nobiliary enrollment. (The system was revived in 2014.) Under Whitlam, the country also began its abandonment of the British anthem “God Save the Queen,” and eventually replaced it with, not the jaunty and traditional “Waltzing Matilda,” but the anodyne and fantastically dull “Advance Australia Fair.”

  The nation, “God’s Own” as its happier residents have long thought of it, had never seen anything like it: a politician doing in government exactly what he had pledged to do during his campaign, and doing it fast—“crash through or crash” was Whitlam’s mantra—and overturning Australia’s social status quo in a matter of weeks. His popularity among the no-nonsense armies of Australia’s working “blokes,” and many of their spouses, soared. He was for a short while widely regarded as the best prime minister the country had ever had,

  But only for a short while. All his achievements, so many of them won at enormous cost to the taxpayer, helped to concoct a formula that was ready-made for political disaster. And given that so many popular politicians unwittingly flirt with hubris, the disaster was not long in coming. It had much to do, as ultimately the whole scandal had, with money.

  It was one specific spending scheme that triggered his government’s spectacular fall.

  Late in 1974, in the aftermath of the worldwide oil shock and its associated economic turmoil, Whitlam launched an attempt to insulate Australia from any such energy-related problems in the future by boosting the country’s immense and untapped supplies of energy. Specifically, it needed to create a number of large new mines to extract coal and other of the many minerals with which Australia had been blessed, to build a giant new gas pipeline, and to electrify a long series of freight railways in the country’s southeast. Constructing all these would cost the then-staggering sum of four billion dollars, an amount of proposed spending very much in keeping with the Whitlam government’s reputation for profligacy on a heroic scale.

  The energy minister, a financially unsophisticated former used-car salesman, heard rumors at a late-night cocktail party that a Pakistani trader in London could lend such a sum, denominated in then freely available petrodollars. Moreover, the trader could lend the money at knockdown interest rates, an arrangement that could be secured simply in exchange for paying the trader a $100 million commission.

  Such a plan seemed to the minister not only c
onvenient, but also just—in that by doing the deal, the impoverished West (as Australia regarded itself) could now get back some of those dollars it had given to OPEC and assorted other oil-trading villains who had conspired in the decade’s savage oil price increases, and which had wreaked so much damage worldwide. The minister didn’t smell a rat; nor did he ever imagine that the trader might be a less-than-honorable man, though he had been given advice from London that the trader was, if not necessarily a crook, then at least deeply unreliable. So secret negotiations got under way.

  Inevitably, with the Australian press being tireless in pursuit of malfeasance, news of these secret talks broke open, and Whitlam’s political opposition scented blood. A Melbourne newspaper produced telexes showing that the car salesman–minister had lied to Parliament about the talks, and though he was promptly fired for doing so, the opposition (a coalition of anti-Whitlam parties led by a smooth, Oxford-educated up-and-coming politician named Malcolm Fraser, and which narrowly controlled the Australian Senate) forced Whitlam into a corner. They pressed home their advantage with a simple threat: Whitlam must call a general election, which by now he would be likely to lose; and if he didn’t, the Senate would refuse to authorize any further money for the running of the government.

  Whitlam, stubborn and proud, refused to give way. Accordingly, Fraser did as threatened, called his parliamentary colleagues to order, and cut off the government’s money. It was a simple, if devastating, crisis. And because of the uniquely British manner in which the Australian government was run, its sole possible solution was a uniquely British one. The queen had to become involved. No matter that she sat on a throne halfway around the planet. She now had a constitutional role to play, and given Whitlam’s intransigence, she was obliged to do so.