On September 1, 1513, on the verge of despair, Vasco Núñez de Balboa left Santa María de la Antigua in search of “a new sea rich in gold”. It took weeks and he lost dozens of men, but on the 29th of that same month he was the first known European to reach the shores of the South Sea. We still called him that.
Seven years later, Magellan (emerging from that enormous and labyrinthine hell of canals, hurricane winds and storms that we call Tierra del Fuego) He called it Pacific and the name stuck.
But there is nothing peaceful about it. That huge chunk of water concentrates most of the planet’s seismic and volcanic activity, generates the most violent typhoons, and is home to some of the most severe extratropical storms that exist.
And I haven’t talked about El Niño yet.
What about El Niño? We have been talking about the 2027 ENSO event for the past few days. We have always done it with quite a worrying tone and the truth is that, the more we know, the less exaggerated it seems to me: there are meteorologists who already describe the subsurface heat of the equatorial Pacific as “possibly the blob of warm anomalies ever recorded since we know how to measure these things“.
And, as I say, it is not an informative “outburst”: the heat that is moving eastward beneath the tropical Pacific is (in volume and intensity) comparable to or greater than that which preceded the great Children of 1997-98 and 2015-16.
What’s more, that heat is moving across a planet that is already 1.4 degrees above the pre-industrial level.
Why are we getting nervous? This, I think, is the central question. First of all because what is invisible matters more than what we can see. In fact, “what we can see” (what we can measure on the surface of the ocean) is simply a trailer for what we are going to see in the coming months.
It is true that the mechanisms that allow coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere are always mysterious and the uncertainty is great. However, as we move out of spring (the time that most “confuses” the models) the quality of our data increases.
The problem is that, these new data, They only corroborate (little by little) our first intuitions.
Of course, caution is necessary. Both ECMWF and NOAA they ask for caution and yes, it is important to be cautious. In one month, the scenario of having a Child before summer has suddenly become very likely and this growth in probabilities has left us all out of the loop. The public conversation, as a consequence, is getting out of control.
But in reality, we are in completely uncharted territory. The problem with being unprecedented is that we grope in the dark. If we move forward.
Today, there is only one clear idea: as in the 19th century, what happens will depend on the decisions we make.
Image | Alex Boreham
In Xataka | There are more and more extreme weather events. In return, they are leaving fewer victims than ever
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