The Oracle is no match for El Niño

Originally published 17 November 1997

SCENE: The tem­ple of Apol­lo at Del­phi. The Ora­cle stands at the porch. Boston weath­er­cast­ers Bruce Schwoe­gler, Har­vey Leonard, and Dick Albert approach.

Schwoe­gler: We have come far, oh Ora­cle, to ask what we can expect this winter.

Ora­cle: You will mur­der your father and mar­ry your mother.

Schwoe­gler: No, no, not that old chest­nut. I mean, what can we expect in New Eng­land this win­ter weatherwise?

Ora­cle: You’re ask­ing me? Not even Zeus can pre­dict the New Eng­land weather.

Leonard: It’s El Niño we’re wor­ried about, the peri­od­ic warm­ing of waters in the east­ern Pacif­ic. Every­one is talk­ing about El Niño, but no one seems to know what, if any­thing, it will do to our north­east­ern weath­er. We’re here for the inside sto­ry, straight from Olympus.

Ora­cle: Our spe­cial­i­ty here is trag­ic love, the out­comes of epic bat­tles, dynas­tic for­tunes. Have you tried the US Nation­al Weath­er Service?

Schwoe­gler: Yeah, we have reams and reams of info from the sci­en­tists. Graphs of aver­age air tem­per­a­ture. Wind veloc­i­ties. Sea lev­els. Pres­sure gradients…

Albert: Ocean buoy trans­mis­sions. Sea-sur­face tem­per­a­ture anom­alies. Vol­canic forcing…

Leonard: The Inter­net stag­gers with data…

Schwoe­gler: But what does it mean? We can’t seem to get an unequiv­o­cal answer from the experts.

Albert: That’s why we come to you.

Ora­cle: Did you bring a lit­tle some­thing for the tem­ple staff?

Albert: Of course.

Ora­cle: Then I pre­dict drought and for­est fires in South­east Asia, mud­slides in Chile, hur­ri­cane rains in Aca­pul­co, and ear­ly snow­storms in Colorado.

Leonard: But those things have hap­pened already!

Schwoe­gler: We want to know what the future holds for the north­east­ern Unit­ed States.

Ora­cle: Have you tried the Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion? They are charged by your gov­ern­ment with keep­ing track of Posei­don’s watery domain.

Schwoe­gler: Of course, we have tried them. And what do we get? Reports with titles like…

Albert: “Pre­dic­tion of Niño 3 SST Anom­aly in a Hybrid Cou­pled Mod­el with Pig­gy-back Data Assimilation.”

Leonard: “Fore­casts of Niño 3 SST Anom­alies and SOI Based on Sin­gu­lar Spec­trum Analy­sis Com­bined with the Max­i­mum Entropy Method.”

Albert: The fore­casts are as var­ied as the com­put­er mod­els used to gen­er­ate them.

Schwoe­gler: The Scripps/MPI mod­el. The UCLA mod­el. The Lam­ont-Doher­ty mod­el. The NCEP mod­el. The COLA mod­el. The Aus­tralian BMRC mod­el. The CSU/AOML ENSO CLIPER model…

Albert: We can’t even keep track of what the acronyms mean. Nobody can.

Schwoe­gler: They send us great com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed graph­ics, which we show on the night­ly news — warm water creep­ing across the Pacif­ic, slosh­ing up against South Amer­i­ca, spilling up the coast towards Cal­i­for­nia. But what will it mean for us?

Leonard: Warm and wet, maybe. Cold and dry, maybe. Warm and dry, maybe. Cold and wet, maybe.

Schwoe­gler: Maybe. Maybe. Our view­ers want def­i­nite pre­dic­tions. All they hear about is El Niño, El Niño…

Ora­cle: “To Vré­fos.” That’s what immor­tal Posei­don called it the last time I talked to him. He said to me, “These Amer­i­cans. Since the fall of the Sovi­et Union they are des­per­ate to find a glob­al vil­lain. They have replaced the Evil Empire with “To Vré­fos.” That’s Greek for El Niño.

Albert: El Niño, To Vré­fos — what does it mean?

Ora­cle: Posei­don says these tem­per­a­ture oscil­la­tions in the equa­to­r­i­al Pacif­ic have been going on for mil­len­nia, every two to sev­en years, since the days of the Titans and gloomy chaos. Posei­don says the weath­er will always be chaot­ic. Posei­don says that he who would pre­dict the long-range weath­er might as well try to emp­ty the ocean with a sponge.

Schwoe­gler: Is that real­ly the best you can do?

Ora­cle: Remem­ber what I say. Watch out for your father. Stay away from your mother.

Schwoe­gler: Come on, guys. We are wast­ing our time. This Ora­cle guy does­n’t know any more about New Eng­land’s weath­er than the com­put­er mod­el­ers do.

Leonard: I told you we should stick with the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

(Schwoe­gler, Leonard and Albert exit.)

Cho­rus: You who live in fair New Eng­land, behold these melan­choly men, mas­ters of their art, strug­gling to pre­dict the weath­er two months hence, their eye on Posei­don’s dis­tant Pacif­ic realm. What­ev­er long-range fore­cast they chance to make, the gods will glee­ful­ly con­found. Count no weath­er­cast­er hap­py till El Niño’s past.