Our odd and deadly weather; What's going on? Global warming? Or los ninos?

By Mary McLachlin, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Copyright 1998 Palm Beach Post December 31, 1998

This was the year that turned skeptics into believers. It even made some of the bah-humbug crowd admit that something really weird, and probably bad, is happening to the weather on planet Earth.

We had it, or saw it, all: floods, tornadoes, fire and ice storms. Trains toppling off railroad tracks warped by weeks of 100-degree-plus heat in Texas. Four hurricanes spinning at once, 10 tropical storms born in little more than a month.

The warmest and wettest January and February on record in the United States, the hottest July on record for the entire world, the warmest year on the whole surface of the Earth since the beginning of temperature records in the 1400s.

More than 32,000 people killed, 300 million displaced, $ 89 billion in losses around the globe. All from disasters caused by weather.

Is this how global warming announces itself and claims retribution for burning fossil fuels and leveling forests? Or did we just get caught in a nasty family tug-of-war between a robust El Nino and La Nina?

''Of course, we have natural variability, but that doesn't account for what went on,'' says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ''We don't have definitive answers, but there is reason to believe this is part of the signals of global warming we may be seeing.''

Baloney, says Jerry Mahlman, director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at Princeton.

''There's no bad guy out there,'' Mahlman insists. ''Basically, we're getting jerked around by the same stuff that's been jerking us around for a long time.''

By ''stuff,'' Mahlman means El Nino and La Nina, those fickle phenomena that alternately heat and cool the Pacific Ocean waters near the equator and thus determine where winds will blow and rain will fall. Scientists agree that they are the direct causes of this year's bizarre heat in Texas, fires in Florida and hurricanes in the Caribbean, and that they probably have more unpleasantness in store for 1999.

But not all scientists are ready to blame global warming and greenhouse gases for the antics of El Nino and La Nina.

''A lot of the topsy-turviness is an impression born of the fact that weather in the news has gotten a lot sexier than it used to be,'' Mahlman says. ''Everybody's interested in it. You hear more about weather far from where you live than you used to. . . . Everybody has a heightened sense of weather as something that can get you.''

The debate began in the 1980s, when scientists began to wonder whether the droughts, freezes and heat waves of that decade were early signs of global warming. In 1990, the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a major part of its annual convention to such issues for the first time.

Satellites, computers and communications had gotten sophisticated enough to let scientists see and connect weather events in different parts of the world into a global pattern. What they saw was troubling - temperatures inching upward through the preceding hundred years, holes in the Earth's protective ozone layer, floods and droughts and storms that seemed to be strangely out of place and out of season.

Some said flat out it was the start of the greenhouse effect - gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons trapping heat in the atmosphere and not letting it radiate out into space. Not gradually and imperceptibly, but in harsh, topsy-turvy doses. Colder cold, hotter heat, heavier rains, longer dry spells, stronger storms, droughts where rains ought to be, floods where it ought to be dry, and no way to pinpoint any of it.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the Earth's surface temperature has gone up by 1 degree as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 25 percent to 30 percent. Because we'll keep on burning oil, coal and natural gas to keep our factories and power plants and cars running, we probably will pump that much more CO2 into the air during the next century.

That would trap twice as much heat and raise the Earth's temperature by about 4 degrees, according to climatology experts. And that would mean trouble on a scale to make the weirdness of 1998 pale - glaciers and sea ice fields melting, ocean levels rising 20 inches, weather going viciously haywire.

That's the vision/nightmare of most scientists, including Trenberth, who are bold enough to state an opinion publicly. Others think it's hysterical nonsense.

Not enough data to prove it, they say. Even if it were true, they say, higher temperatures would mean places such as Canada would turn into breadbaskets and forestry growing regions and what's wrong with that, even if agriculture gets wiped out somewhere else?

''We have this gigantic heat engine made up of land, water, air, ice that makes it so wonderful for us to live here,'' says Jim O'Brien, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. ''(Global warming) means you've just thrown another log on the fire.''

Weather researchers made a big breakthrough when they realized that conditions in the Pacific Ocean control the path of the jet stream, the bands of high-altitude winds that flow from west to east and move weather systems around the globe. When the eastern Pacific waters are warm - the phenomenon known as El Nino - the jet stream flows steadily across North America, suppressing hurricanes and tornadoes. When the eastern Pacific turns cold - La Nina - the warm water gets pushed out to the western Pacific, where it bumps the subtropical jet stream north.

That sets off a loopy pattern that streams in over the Northwest, curves down into the country's mid-section and back up toward the East Coast. And that means wicked winter storms, spring tornadoes, fiery summers and fall hurricanes.

''All hell breaks loose,'' in O'Brien's words.

We began the year in an El Nino that lasted from April 1997 until last May, but whose storm-suppressing effects lasted until late summer. As it faded into the cold of La Nina, floods swept over China and Bangladesh, and tropical storms seemed to leap out of the Atlantic.

The 14 hurricanes and tropical storms of 1998 killed more than 11,000 people, most of them victims of Hurricane Mitch in Central America. Wildfires charred more than 500,000 acres in Florida. Ice storms put out the lights for hundreds of thousands in the mid-Atlantic states.

And we've been warned that most of Florida - even the sunny southern tip - probably will freeze sometime in January or February, creating more dry vegetation to fuel new forest fires in the spring.

After that, we'll have to wait for the next El Nino to bring the forecast into focus again.

O'Brien, known to peers as ''Mr. El Nino'' for his research on that phenomenon, has found another ocean anomaly that may be connected to global warming but definitely promises trouble for large areas of the globe.

Measurements show that waves in both the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans are getting bigger and stronger, meaning winds that drive them are stronger. O'Brien suspects that northern ocean storms - like the one that hit Washington and Oregon with high winds last week - have gotten stronger because they're carrying extra heat from the tropics to the polar regions so it can radiate into space.

''That's how the engine works,'' he says, ''and the engine is running harder.''

The engine, some say, is showing signs of overheating because of global warming. Water is the planet's air conditioning coolant, and raising the Earth's surface temperature causes it to evaporate. That dries out soils, wilts plants, leads to fires and more heat. Then the droughts that normally come during the cycles of El Nino and La Nina get worse.

Here's the other half of the equation: All that evaporating moisture has to go somewhere, so it gets carried 1,000 to 2,000 miles away and caught up in a weather system - such as a hurricane.

This is the part of the global warming scenario we'd better watch, Mahlman says.

''What we expect with global warming is things that are kind of scary for Florida. We expect hurricanes to be more intense . . . we don't know if there will be more of them, but if they do form, and the water is 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, it might crank up more (Hurricane) Andrews.

''It almost certainly will rain a heck of a lot more, and almost certainly, the summertime heat index will be considerably higher than it is now. That's kind of creepy, I know.''

South Florida. Hotter and wetter. Creepy, indeed.

A year of weather extremes

SUMMER

Memorial Day weekend: Wildfires burn out of control in Florida

Injuries: 125.

Timber losses: $ 300 million.

Homes damaged or destroyed: 324.

Firefighting costs: More than $ 100 million.

June 25: Fireworks banned in Florida because of wildfires

June 27-28: Storms cause flash flooding in East and Midwest

Power cut to more than 58,000 people across West Virginia.

Deaths: At least 23.

RECORD

July: Hottest month for the planet on record

The Earth's average temperature for July: 61.7 degrees Fahrenheit,

1.26 degrees hotter than usual.

* This summer - June through August - was ninth driest for Florida and the warmest on record.

* July was the seventh month in a row that was hotter than the same

month the previous year, a trend attributed to global warming.

Early August: Texas drought, the worst since the 1950s, kills 99

Aug. 23-24: Tropical Storm Charley

Storm causes Texas floods, dumps a foot of rain on south Texas and

northern Mexico.

Deaths: 20.

Damage: $ 50 million.

Aug. 26: Hurricane Bonnie

The first major hurricane (Category 3) of the 1998 season comes ashore

near Wilmington, N.C.

Deaths: Three.

Damage: $ 720 million.

WINTER

RECORD

January and February: Hottest and wettest ever

The first two months of 1998 were the warmest and wettest

on record for the continental United States.

National average temperature: 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Normal: 32.1 degrees.

Previous record: 37 degrees (set in 1990).

How strange was our rain?

Our dry season was wet and our wet season was dry.

Palm Beach International Airport gets 9.1 inches,

more than four times what it gets in an average January.

In January, ice storms in northern U.S. kill 56.

Bird populations drop in Everglades

Birds in Everglades marshes dropped from 17,087 to

9,013. Biologists blame unusually high water levels.

In February, tornadoes kill 42 in Central Florida.

Damage: 800 homes destroyed, another 700 left uninhabitable and another 3,500 damaged.

Total: $ 60 million. Disaster areas declared in 54 counties.

In February and March, severe weather in Southeast

Deaths: At least 132 from tornadoes and flooding

related to El Nino.

Damage: More than $ 1 billion.

SPRING

Lake Okeechobee and Everglades fill to overflowing

* Leaks of foul-smelling water devastate fishing and tourism

on the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers.

* Scientists blame deluge for lesions and tumors found

in fish from north of Jupiter Inlet to New Smyrna Beach.

March 11: Storm hits St. Lucie County

Damage: More than $ 3 million, mostly at the fairgrounds.

In May, Florida issues air pollution advisory

Hot temperatures and low winds cause ozone levels to exceed national standard.

FALL

Sept. 3: Hurricane Earl

Hurricane makes landfall near Panama City.

Deaths: Three.

Damage: $ 79 million.

Sept. 21-30: Hurricane Georges

Hurricane hits Caribbean, Keys and U.S. Gulf Coast.

Deaths: One.

U.S. damage: $ 5.1 billion.

Sept. 11: Tropical Storm Frances

Storm sweeps across the Gulf Coast, creating a virtual moat

around downtown Houston and swamping New Orleans.

Deaths: One.

RECORD

Sept. 25: Four hurricanes at the same time

Hurricane Karl joins hurricanes Georges, Ivan and Jeanne, the first time since 1893 that the Atlantic Ocean has played host to four hurricanes at once.

In October, Typhoon Babs kills 132 in the Philippines

Oct. 17-18: Texas floods again

Deaths: 20.

Damages: More than $ 90 million.

October is one of the driest ever in Palm Beach County

October's 1.36 inches of rain barely tops reigning record holder, October 1972, with 1.20 inches.

Hurricane Mitch becomes strongest October hurricane ever

Deaths: At least 11,000, with thousands missing.

Locally, encephalitis alert issued after heavy rains from

Tropical Storm Mitch.

Crop damage in Palm Beach County: As much as $ 20 million.

El Nino vs. La Nina

When the eastern Pacific waters are warm, a phenomenon known

as El Nino, the jet stream flows steadily across North America, suppressing hurricanes and tornadoes. The most recent El Nino lasted from April 1997 until May 1998.

Sources: Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); National Climatic Data Center; National Hurricane Center; The Palm Beach Post; Storm98 (www.storm98.com)

Compiled by SAMMY ALZOFON and LYNNE PALOMBO/Staff Librarians

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