Genuine Lyin'
Socialist Weasel

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

A Little Touch of Flurry in the Night: February, and winter finally shows up
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 12 February 2009

When I got home this afternoon, I was cold, wet, and miserable.

And I couldn't have been happier about that.

It's not just my Scottish genes acting up. (We believe suffrin will imprrrove yuh murral character). It was the weather. It was snowing like a mad bastard.

OK, you might say, you live in the mountains of Northern California, and it's February. What were you expecting?

Well, yes, we expect snow in the winter. Copious amounts. You can tell when a Siskiyou grandmother is driving; she's the one who, when the snow on the road gets to a foot deep, slows to 70 miles an hour.

And that was the problem. It started snowing unusually late—two days before Xmas—and then, just 12 days later, it quit. Altogether. We went through a strange, warm January where highs were often in the 60s (the record for the month is 69 degrees), and each sunny warm day melted away more and more of the snow until, by the end of January, there was none left. The local ski park was open, but only barely, with a base of 6” (compared to 232” the year before on that date) and management doing what little work was needed.

Up high on the Mountain, the snow pack fell to ridiculous levels. Areas that normally had snow forty feet deep had less than three feet. Shasta Lake, one of the main reservoirs for California's Central Valley, was down 35 feet, a level you expect to see in early November before the rains begin.

Late in the month, the air filled with birds, sparrows and swallows, birds that usually showed up in late March. In my front yard, the Quince was beginning to bud, and in the wetlands, so was the pussy willow.

Coyotes and bobcat came into town, seeking water. Neighborhood cats disappeared, victims of the strange weather and the predators it brought.

Residents eyed one another uneasily. A forest that was bare of snow in March was liable to be ablaze in August. Even the local dittoheads, prepped to bray loud disdain at any mention of climate change, looked puzzled and became uncharacteristically quiet.

We read in the news and watched as blizzards and icestorms struck, not in places like North Dakota and Ontario, but in Kentucky and London, England. Some friends of mine in Kentucky went 15 days without power, and went out the second day of the storm to find icicles hanging from the belly of one of their horses, one that was apparently too dumb to shuffle into the relative warmth and dryness of the barn. Didn't Kentucky fight for the Confederacy? Doesn't that mean it's a Southern state? And London...well, I've lived in London, and they get snow there. But it's a polite and proper English snow, an inch or two. Just enough to throw the City into chaos and leave double-deckers pulling doughnuts in Trafalgar Square. But England got hit again, and again, and again, piling up amounts of snow in Devon and other places that even us jaded Siskiyou County types would find respectable. Most English country roads can barely accommodate automobiles, let alone automobiles on snow.

Of course, it was the harsh winter back east that caught the headlines in the American media. Along with the strained abeyance of winter here, there were huge, hot droughts in India, Argentina, China, and Australia. The Australian weather finally broke into American news when temperatures in the mild coastal city of Melbourne went to 118 F. (47 C.) and fire erupted all along the coast, killing hundreds and wiping out entire towns. Moscow didn't see snow until Xmas, even as the corporate media ignored that to babble happily about record cold in Siberia.

While all of this was extraordinary, none of it was particularly unusual. It was a fin de siècle, or rather, a fin de ENSO. The La Niña that has held sway over the world's weather patterns for the past two years is ending, and an El Niño is swelling up to replace it. The La Niña will probably last until about April, at which point, according to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, conditions will be what they call “ENSO neutral”, which means that the Pacific waters off the coast of South America will hover near the median. Back to normal, right?

Well, not quite. According to Scripps, the present La Niña depressed northern hemisphere by about 0.88 degrees C. (1.54 degrees F.). That it was colder than usual in the Northern Hemisphere might have been news to us and the Muscovites; for much of the upper half of the world, it confirmed what they already knew: baby, it's cold outside.

Old timers know that folks these days are spoiled rotten. The weather they've been having in the mid west and back east, and in Siberia, were what in the 1970s were called “normal winters.” In fact, compared to the twentieth century over all, it's shaping up as one of the 20 warmest winters on record.

Scripps is forecasting an El Niño beginning in December, which historically means warm and wet for us. And, usually, general chaos all along the western coast of North America. The last big El Niño saw us getting thirty inches of rain in one month.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been indicating a possibly strong El Niño beginning around April, but have backed off on that, to my relief. They now think we'll have a mild El Niño, enough to make temperatures much above normal throughout the west this summer, and much above normal everywhere else in North America next fall and winter.

Note that “colder than normal” means “slightly warmer than normal” by 20^th century standards, and “warmer than normal” means “look OUT!”. The forecasted swing in temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere is from the -0.88 C. to +0.23 C., which could make 2009-10 an extremely hot time for our little continent.

In Australia, they would be looking at this situation with more than a little dismay. You see, normally, in a La Niña, they experience wetter than normal weather. In El Niños, they experience severe drought. We've been in a La Niña, and they've experienced severe drought. Will the swing in the ENSO make things WORSE? Or will the anomaly carry through?

For the Arctic, which hasn't recovered from the huge melt-back in 2007 (the ice is spread over a wider area right now, but is much thinner than normal), it raises the possibility of an even bigger meltback in 2009. It may be approaching a tipping point, since the albedo (reflectivity) of ice is much higher than that of water, and thus absorbs less heat. The dark, comparatively warm Arctic surface waters might not reform much ice next winter, even if temperatures aren't warmer than normal by then.

But for right now, it's snowing like a mad bastard, and the intermediate forecast for the region through mid-March says colder and wetter. I hope, for the sake of our forests and all the folks to the south of us who need the water, that the forecast is correct.

But a lot of swallows and sparrows are going to die here tonight, victims of strange new climes.

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Zepp was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and spent his formative years living in various parts of Canada from Halifax to Victoria, and then the UK, South Africa, and Australia before moving to the United States, where he has lived for 40 years. Aside from writing, his interests include hiking, raising dogs and cats, and making computers jump through hoops. His wife of 25 years edits his copy, and bravely attempts to make him sound coherent. Zepp lives on Mount Shasta.