An El Niño

Variability and our perceptions of a warming planet

On still September days in the Rockies you can almost hear winter approaching—a truck just out of sight down the highway, tinnitus in a sunbeam. The first snow on Blackmore fell on September 9th, leaving a web of white lines on cold ledges. On the night of September 22nd at least 8 inches fell in the Absarokas; more in the Beartooths, though I wasn’t there to see it. Then the weather became fine, and most of it melted, but like a dog that snaps at your hand over its dinner bowl it was hard to look at the sky the same way as before. Winter was surely around the corner.

The fourth week of October seemed to make good on this early promise, with more snow and single digit temps in town. It was a false alarm: November was unusually warm, with a dry (if gloomy) weather pattern. A brief spell of intense cold and daily snow in mid-January pendulumed into a relentless, unnerving thaw. As I write this it is 50 degrees Fahrenheit, a solid 19 degrees over our daily average, warm enough that I rode into the office without gloves and in only a denim shirt, flinching as my tires threw up mud that should have been frozen. You can ski at Bridger, barely, but no one is happy about it. Why should they be? Shorter days in the temperate zone are something we experience physiologically, as animals. The psychic toll of an aborted winter is as much a disruption of cues as it is a premonition of apocalypse.

The proximate cause of Montana’s current warmth is the El Niño / Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Warm water masses off the coast of Peru, trade winds taper off, and storms track south while the polar jet stream misses us. I spent the past three winters under La Niñas in New Mexico, which produce analogous conditions for the Southwest. Are ENSO events increasing in frequency? A tricky question, but the answer appears to be yes, a trend likely to strengthen in the decades to come. The usual clichés apply: It will be both wetter and drier, hotter and colder. We will pinball between extremes.

This variability complicates attempts to predict ecological responses to climate change. It also complicates attempts to make emotional sense of a crisis. In a bar the night of the first heavy snow my friend Ben said that he had moved from climate anxiety to acceptance. The long view, he offered, provided him some solace. I agree, and have often felt the same, embracing a sort of vulgar Buddhism: mountains will fall and rise, but life will persist. The therapeutic problem with this deep time perspective is that it depends on abstractions far greater in scale than is adaptive for us to comprehend. Our link to it is the annual cycle, both timeless and discrete.

As the seasons become more and more erratic, this foothold is poised to crumble beneath us. It’s warm and dry now, but last year it wasn’t. It will be cold again, and it will snow, and fires will spread and then recede under unexpected August rains. It will never be the same.

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