Category: All Fragilecologies

Fragilecologies Archives
3 March 1999

Published on March 10, 1999 in The Wall Street Journal under the title:
A Great New Way to Earn Citizenship

I’ve been in quandary for the past few months. I have been asked to prove that my mother (who came to America in 1912 through Ellis Island) is a citizen of the USA. She has lived in New York State for the past two years, having moved back from Florida to live with her daughter. She has received her mail in New York, paid property taxes in New York, etc. Yet Medicaid in New York wants even more proof that she lives in the state. In addition, despite the fact that she has voted in every national election since the 1920s, has had a Social Security number since such numbers were first given out, has filed income taxes for decades, and has been married to two American-born husbands, Medicaid also wants proof that she is an American citizen. But this is only part of the story.

Now, I hear on the news that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is thinking about running for a Senate seat in New York. She doesn’t live there now, nor has she ever lived in that state. Yet, as long as she is a resident of New York on the day of the election, she can run for the Senate seat about to be vacated by Senator Moynihan. So, this means that, in order to get on the Medicaid rolls in New York, you must go through the bureaucratic equivalent of giving away your firstborn child, but you can show up on election day and become a Senator who represents millions of New Yorkers.

I guess the only easy solution in sight for me is to have my mother run for the Senate. In that way, at least her citizenship in the State of New York will have been granted.

Fragilecologies Archives
12 January 1999

By Dr. Anne Silverstein
Earth Times News Service

Fears about a rapidly melting Antarctic ice sheet can be put to rest for now, according to an international team of scientists whose study indicates a pretty stable situation.

The researchers analyzed five years of satellite radar measurements of the West Antarctic ice sheet and concluded that, for the time being, melting from the middle of the ice sheet does not seem to be raising sea levels more than one millimeter per year.

Some environmentalists have warned that global warming — which these scientists agree is occurring — could cause the world’s ice sheets to melt with alarming results — tidal waves and large rises in sea levels.

Most of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits on dry land. Any melting that takes place pours new water into the oceans, raising sea levels. (The East Antarctic ice sheet is below sea level, so any melted water from it would have little effect on sea levels since the ice already displaces sea water.)

“We assume that global warming is under way now and it may be enhanced by human activities, but until now its effect on ice loss in Greenland and the Antarctic has been mostly speculation,” said C. K. Shum, a professor at Ohio State University, who, along with scientists at University College in London and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, analyzed the data from two European Space Agency satellites collected between 1992 and 1996.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a new satellite mission in 2001 to take more measurements of the ice sheet. The long-term impact of ice sheets on sea levels “remains an uncertainty,” Shum said. During the last ice age, sea levels were at least 100 meters (328 feet) lower than they are today.

Fragilecologies Archives
December 18, 1998

Is global warming a problem? The answer to this question is a resounding …. maybe. The reason I say maybe is that the debate over global warming is a mix of solid scientific facts and subjective interpretations of those facts. Aside from the uncertainties in the scientific information on the physical aspects of global warming, there is considerable ‘wiggle room’ for a wide range of subjective interpretations of the science and the implications of its uncertainties. During conferences, in the hallowed halls of Congress, in the media, and, increasingly, around the dinner table, people are discussing whether global warming IS a problem and, if so, is it a problem societies can cope with either through prevention or adaptation? The outcome of much of this discussion becomes centered on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

The following paragraphs are responses to questions often raised by one group or another, either to clarify or to undermine the various opposing views on global warming of the atmosphere and the role, if any, of human activities in that warming trend.

Is global warming happening, as we speak?

It appears that all observers agree that the global climate has warmed up in the past few decades. However, some argue that the warming began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, in the early 1800s, and continues today. They agree that there have been ups and downs in the trends of global average temperature, but those fluctuations do not undermine the basic tenet that the global climate is warmer today than in past decades. Others (the “naysayers” or non-believers in climate change) agree that there is a warming trend over the past few decades but that the variability of recent global climate falls within the range that might be expected from the behavior of “normal” climatic conditions over longer periods of time, such as centuries. Thus, they downplay the view that human activities are affecting global climate.

Is the scientific information in hand today strong enough to prompt societies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

There is still considerable uncertainty in the science of climate change and its potential impacts on societies and ecosystems. Whether what is known is enough to prompt action by governments, different sectors of society, or individuals will likely depend on whether the decision-makers are either risk-takers or risk-averse. Some will argue that it would be more prudent to be safe than sorry and will thus try to prevent the continued buildup of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. The opposing view, held by those who are willing to take the risk for themselves (while making the risk for others), demands more certainty in the science. Deep down, they feel that in the event their view turns out to have been wrong, technologies can be developed to get rid of or at least control the problem (i.e., the technological fix).

Is human activity involved in the global warming trend of the past century and a half?

There is convincing and mounting evidence that human activities related to industrial processes and deforestation are altering the global climate. It has been shown that human activities can alter climate on a local and regional scale. Why not on the global scale as well? The naysayers cannot accept that there might be such a potent human influence on the atmosphere. They argue that the fingerprint of human activity is non-existent and that what we are seeing is a natural variation in global temperatures. They argue that the global climate, since the end of the 18th century, has been rebounding from the “Little Ice Age,” which lasted from the 1500s to the 1800s.

Is any country really committed to dealing with national GHG reductions, even in the absence of other countries doing so?

There is considerable discussion about the responsibilities of nations to reduce their output of GHGs. While some governments agree that there must be cuts in GHG emissions, others oppose such cuts as unwarranted for a variety of political, economic, or ideological reasons. Some governments have taken the lead on the reduction issue by calling on all governments to lower their GHG emissions. However, it seems that there is more discussion thus far than action. There are proposals to trade permits among countries, permits that allow those who can afford it to buy up the unused permits from other countries. But is this a fair solution? Or, is it a case of the rich countries buying away from the developing countries their legal right to pollute the global atmosphere with increasing amounts of GHGs?

Are climate extremes and other climate-related anomalies reliably connected to global warming?

Speculation abounds about the impacts on the frequency, intensity, duration and location of climate extremes and climate-related impacts of GHGs. However, the attribution of cause and effect with regard to global warming remains a difficult issue that merits much more attention than it has been getting from the climate research community. The media, the general public, policy-makers, and even scientists have been rather lax in what climate-related impacts they attribute to human-induced global warming of the atmosphere.

Is global warming the type of creeping environmental problem that can be met with graduated societal responses?

One could argue that global warming is a creeping environmental change. “Creeping” means it is an incremental change that is only marginally detectable from one year to the next. Today’s atmospheric content of GHGs is not much different from yesterday’s. Tomorrow’s is not much different than today’s. However, in a few years, those incremental changes will have added up to a major environmental change. Often by the time those changes have combined, the environmental change will have turned into an environmental crisis. In this regard, global warming is similar to other creeping environmental changes such as air pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, soil erosion, deforestation, and so forth.

Unfortunately, graduated societal responses to slowly compounding environmental changes may not resolve the problem. Dealing with such problems requires getting ahead of them, that is; leap-frogging over the near future to gain a glimpse of how the creeping changes will likely evolve in the future, given no attempts to arrest them. One might then be able to see that there is a need to respond more quickly and effectively in bringing an end to a seemingly unimportant creeping environmental change.

Who is responsible for our current predicament, if global warming is agreed to by all as happening as a result of GHG emissions due to human activities?

Global warming scientists contend that the industrialized countries are responsible for the large increases in GHGs in the atmosphere since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. They also contend that the developing countries will become the dominant emitters of GHGs in the future as a result of their development activities, including the increased burning of fossil fuels, increased tropical deforestation, and, in general, an increase in affluence.

Industrialized countries argue that all countries should seek to reduce GHG emissions, since all countries are likely to suffer the impacts of global warming. A change in the status quo of the global climate system is viewed as a bad thing, something we must all work to avoid. They call on all nations to join in the sacrifice for the betterment of future generations.

For their part, developing country representatives argue that it is the rich, industrialized nations that saturated the atmosphere with a critical amount of GHGs in the first place and, therefore, it is up to them to resolve the problem. They can choose either to drastically cut back their own emissions or provide clean energy technology to developing countries, most of which do not have the means to buy it.

The problem with the issue of who is causing the “human-induced” global warming of the atmosphere is that the answer also identifies who has the first, if not primary, responsibility to resolve the problem.

What a difference a word makes … “is”

“What a difference a word makes” is a sentiment that underscores the importance of the meaning of the word “is.” “Is” can be interpreted to imply various, sometimes conflicting, meanings, even though its use to many might seem quite clear, unambiguous, and straightforward. This is as true when debating environmental issues as it is when discussing politics.

Is global warming a problem? This is a seemingly straightforward question. Perhaps the question should be: Is global warming a problem … for whom? For present generations or future ones? Is it a problem today or in the near future? Is it a problem that can be dealt with? That will depend not only on the ways that are available to governments and people to act but also on their will to act in response to this environmental change.

Fragilecologies Archives
December 17, 1998

In the early 1960s, colonial rule in Africa was drawing to a close. As independent governments emerged across much of the continent, there was great hope that these newly independent countries would fare well. There was even hope that the remaining colonial regimes would eventually give way to freedom for Africans in South Africa, Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Portuguese Guinea

Around the same time that independence was gained by these countries, it seems there was a downturn in the continent’s climate. The wet 1950s and 1960s gave way to multiyear droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. So at a time when new leaders were learning how to govern their countries, drought plagued their ability to feed their peoples.

Recurrent, devastating drought coupled with social, economic and political problems (such as war, corruption and problems generated by colonial rule), undermined the ability of many African countries to produce enough food to alleviate chronic hunger and occasional famine outbreaks.

At the same time, misuse of the fragile environment led to widespread soil erosion and deforestation. In order for people to cook their meals, they needed sources of energy, and the only energy around was wood from trees and shrubs. Sometimes animal dung would be collected and used as fuel, thereby depriving degraded soils of sorely needed nutrients. As a result of Africa’s “other energy crisis” (the need for firewood), much of the land around settlements has been severely degraded and, in many cases, abandoned as totally unproductive.

All of this has discourage those of us who a generation ago sought in our own ways to help the new countries become self-sustaining and well-fed. Many an African specialist has thrown up his or her hand in despair, suggesting the continent was a lost one. Many of them have shifted their research attention to Asia and Latin America, where there is a feeling of hope about the opportunities for economic development.

Recently, however, a report of the National Academy of Sciences suggested there is a chance for Africa to feed itself in the next century. This report, “Lost Crops of Africa,” identified grains more tolerant of drought conditions and various changes in climate factors – sorghum, finger millet, pearl millet, tef, fonio and African rice, among others. With colonial rule came plans to produce crops that were of interest to Europeans (e.g., corn, wheat, rice), not the food crops on which Africans traditionally depended.

Imported crop varieties demanded much more from the environment. They were less tolerant of high temperatures and low amounts of rainfall. These and many other crops called “cash crops,” such as sugar cane or peanuts, displaced traditional ones. They were grown for export to the world market and were not intended for use within the country growing them.

When I was in Nigeria several years ago, there was a major effort to grow wheat on land that had historically been used to grow millet and sorghum. Wheat was being imported in increasing amounts, and, to minimize the cost of those imports, the government wanted to grow its own wheat. There were billboards around the cities calling on people to “EAT WHITE BREAD.”

What if Africans were to return to growing their traditional crops? What if the international agricultural research centers were to put major emphasis on improving the yields and use of these traditional crops? What if the good soils that had been confiscated for cash crop production were to be given to farmers to produce sorghum and millet? Might this go a long way toward reducing the chronic hunger and malnutrition that plagues the continent? Might it serve to reduce the number of weather-related famines that appear several times a decade?

A wholesale return to the “lost grains of Africa” suggests that many countries on the continent could achieve food security by increasing production of their traditional food crops.

Those who are eager to help African countries out of their current state of dependence on humanitarian food assistance should read the Academy’s report. It will rekindle a feeling that Africa has a future.

Fragilecologies Archives
30 November 1998

El Niño is a natural process that has been associated with various kinds of hazards. It has only recently been discovered to have such impacts around the globe. The hazards it spawns include, but are not limited to, droughts, floods, frosts, fires, and landslides. Perhaps if we link what spawns natural hazards (i.e., El Niño) more closely to its potentially spawned hazards, we can shift our short-term responses toward proaction (i.e., prevention and mitigation) and away from reaction (i.e., adaptation and cleanup). Doing so would tend to push the early warning of specific El Niño-related hazards further “upstream,” thereby providing more lead time for societal coping mechanisms to come into play.

El Niño’s characteristics fit well within the analytical definition of a natural hazard. However, it seems that hazards researchers prefer to argue why El Niño should not be viewed as a natural hazard. Perhaps it is time for them to broaden their perspectives of the phenomenon and its impacts on environment and society, so that El Niño can be viewed as a legitimate hazard (in this broader sense).

Those in the hazards research have opposed considering El Niño to be a hazard, because, they argue, like winter, it just is. For example, things may happen in wintertime, such as blizzards or ice storms, and, while these are viewed as hazards, the winter that spawns them, they argue, is not. The same reasoning that they apply to winter, they also apply to El Niño.

When one thinks about it, societies have coped with seasonal changes for as long as societies have existed. So, many things that will likely occur (e.g., cold temperatures, snow, ice, sleet), we have already learned to expect and to prepare for, even though any particular winter can be either long or short, warm or cold, early or late, mild or severe. Thus, winter potentially spawns lots of hazards (some real and recurrent, others potential and occassional, some even rare or unexpected). Therefore, in a general (and potential) sense, a good argument can be made for considering winter as a hazard.

Societies and individuals tend to put into action their coping mechanism strategies and tactics instinctively when winter approaches. They adjust on a seasonal basis their perceptions of how they expect their normal activities to be altered. The more lead time they have to respond to winter (i.e., to prepare in some way), the better prepared they might be for the weather extremes that wintertime climate may bring. While we don’t explicitly consider the seasons as hazards in and of themselves, it would help to do so, because knowing a season is coming serves as an early warning to society and individuals to prepare for a different set of seasonal, climate-related problems with which they might have to cope.

By analogy, using the notion of winter-as-hazard-spawner as an example, one could make similar arguments for El Niño. Knowing that an El Niño is coming provides an early warning about possible changes in regional climate conditions and, therefore, in human activities and ecological processes that are likely to result from their adverse impacts. And, if a goal of managing the impacts of natural hazards is to reduce adverse aspects of those impacts, then by viewing El Niño as a hazard (in the sense that it spawns hazards), we can get an earlier start in determining how we might best cope with those hazards when they occur.

Furthermore, El Niño is a phenomenon that extends across several seasons and can generate different changes within the different seasons. Thus, one can and perhaps will in future years speak of an “El Niño winter” — a winter which enhances “normal” wintertime hazards in certain ways in some parts of the globe, while reducing the likelihood of such occurrences in other parts.

P.S. El Niño as a Natural Hazard
(Taken from Currents of Change, Michael Glantz, 1996, pp. 19-22)

There is a long-standing community of researchers with a focus on natural hazards, for the most part rapid-onset events, such as river flooding, blizzards, avalanches, tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Although it meets many of the criteria used to describe them, El Niño has not as yet made this list of such hazards. Ian Burton and colleagues (1993, pp. 35-6) have listed characteristics that define a hazardous event: magnitude, frequency, duration, areal extent, speed of onset, spatial dispersion, and temporal spacing, each of which they define as follows:

• Magnitude: only those occurrences that exceed some common level of magnitude are extreme.
• Frequency: how often an event of a given magnitude may be expected to occur in the long-run average.
• Duration: the length of time over which a hazardous event persists, the onset to peak period.
• Areal extent: the space covered by the hazardous event.
• Speed of onset: the length of time between the first appearance of an event and its peak.
• Spatial dispersion: the pattern of distribution over the space in which its [impacts] can occur.
• Temporal spacing: the sequencing of events, ranging along a continuum from random to periodic.

These characteristics apply well to El Niño. the magnitude of an El Niño is defined by degree of departure from a long-term average of anomalously warm sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific. Frequency relates to its return period, which scientists have suggested is of the order of 2 to 10 years (more specifically, one could argue that a major El Niño occurs every 8 to 11 years, and a minor one every 2 or 3 years). The duration of El Niño events is 12 to 18 months, with a few notable exceptions. The areal extent could be interpreted to mean the spatial extent around the globe of the impacts of El Niño and its teleconnections. This would vary directly with the severity of the event, with major El Niño events being linked to major worldwide impacts and minor ones linked to localized or regional impacts. The Speed of onset of El Niño is of the order of months. Occasionally, however, events have begun, only to collapse after a few months. Spatial dispersion refers to the area in the central and eastern Pacific that is encompassed by the anomalously warm sea surface temperatures. Temporal spacing, with respect to El Niño, refers to the return period which, on average, is 4.5 years.

Because the characteristics of an El Niño clearly meet the criteria used to define a natural hazard, El Niño merits inclusion in the list of natural hazards. An explicit designation could help to improve the level of research on its societal aspects, as has been the case with other designated natural hazards.

Fragilecologies Archives
November 17, 1998

Honduras has been devastated by Hurricane Mitch, the costliest hurricane in Central America this century, in terms of loss of life. In this instance, the word “devastated” is not strong enough. There were an estimated 17,000 deaths (known dead plus missing), and about one-third of its total population has been negatively affected. Ninety percent of its roads suffered some degree of destruction. Banana plantations, the mainstay of the Honduran economy and source of its key export crop, have been destroyed (at first by the winds and floods and, later, by standing water in the fields). In the aftermath of the hurricane, adverse health effects are expected to increase, such as cholera, dysentery, and dengue fever. As one of the poorest nations in Latin America, Honduras could ill afford such devastation. However, Honduras was not alone: similar adverse impacts occurred in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with substantial but lower loss of life and property in those countries.

In fact, Honduras was brought down by a tropical storm that a few days earlier had been classified as a Category 5 hurricane. Honduras is in an emergency relief assistance phase and will then move into a reparation and reconstruction phase. If Honduras were an ailing man, he would have to be put under intensive care.

As usually happens in such situations, international humanitarian aid donors will provide emergency and reconstruction assistance. Emergency aid will enter the country for a relatively short period of time. This will be followed by assistance to rebuild the damaged infrastructure. In this instance, because of the high level of destruction, the debts owed by Honduras and Nicaragua to foreign countries and to such organizations as the World Bank may be forgiven. Clearly, there is no way these countries would be able to repay their debt using their own resources (many of which have been destroyed), let alone produce the funds that will be needed to rebuild their countries. However, the emergency aid will likely be stopgap in nature, that is, considerably less aid than would be necessary to restore the countries and their citizens to their previous level of development (standard of living).

Courtesy of www.accuweather.com

Reconstruction activities will take a long time to carry out. What is likely to take place is that the worst-hit country (in this case Honduras) will be restored (maybe) to the level of development it had reached before the impacts of Hurricane Mitch. In other words, Honduras will likely (eventually) return to its previous levels of economic development and public health … and also to the levels of poverty, dependence on the export of a few agricultural products, etc., that existed just before the blitz of Hurricane Mitch.

Can we avoid this dismal scenario — that of returning a poor country only to its previous level of poverty? I would argue that this could be a unique point in Honduran history and in the history of foreign humanitarian assistance. With the Honduran infrastructure and economy in shambles, some radical thinking is warranted. (And one such radical approach is for Honduras to design the society it would like to have and for the international community to combine forces to help Honduras to achieve it.)

The international community should seize the opportunity to build Honduras anew and not just return it to its previous status as a relatively poor, developing country with little chance for improvement. By taking a radical departure from traditional approaches to post-disaster reconstruction, the international community and the Honduran government can help to develop a society that is no longer dependent on the primary sector (agricultural production), but can seek to move its economy toward the secondary (manufacturing) or tertiary (services) sectors.

What I have in mind is to convert a situation of chronic despair into one of hope. The situation in Honduras has some parallels to the way that the Brazilian government decided in the 1950s to build a new capital city (Brasilia) in the interior of the country on virgin land, choosing not to remodel or raze an already existing but run-down city.

The industrialized countries should combine their humanitarian and foreign assistance efforts to help Honduras begin the next millennium on a self-sustaining development path. For the “rich” countries (the “haves”) to be willing and able to rebuild a “have-not” country (almost from scratch) would provide hope to many other developing countries, which have been unable to close the economic development gap with industrialized nations.

For decades, economists in the industrialized countries have sought to apply their different, often competing, economic development theories to little avail for the recipients of their financial assistance (trade and aid). Here’s a chance for the rich countries and their development specialists to work together to put their proverbial “assistance money where their mouth is.”

Fragilecologies Archives
29 August 1998

About 20 years ago I wrote an editorial for a journal called “Climatic Change”. The title of the editorial was “Render unto weather…”. The notion behind the paper was that societies (especially governments) prefer to blame nature for the adverse impacts, certain kinds of disasters, especially those that are considered to have been climate-related. They include, but are not limited to, droughts, floods, fires, famines.

The argument went like this: If we look closely at the impacts of climate (usually climate extremes) on society, we find that there is a part of the adverse consequences that can be blamed on climate (e.g., nature) and a part that can likely be blamed on society. The examples I cited 20 years ago were (a) the drought and famine in the West African Sahel in the early 1970s and (b) the economic development of the city of Boulder (Colorado) in a flood plain with a known flood frequency and potential.

The Sahelian drought (defined as a lack of rainfall) could not be stopped by human activities, but the impacts of that naturally occurring drought could be worsened by poor land-use practices undertaken in the wrong ecosetting. As for Boulder, political decisions were made to develop a town at the mouth of a flood-prone canyon. However, when that flood does occur, nature will surely take the blame.

Not surprisingly, governments around the globe have shown no reluctance to look for, identify and blame Mother Nature for certain severe climate-related disasters. Fish populations collapse, according to governments, because of natural fluctuations in the environment and not because of overfishing (for example, the California sardine fishery immortalized by John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row or the Peruvian anchovy fishery collapse in the 1970s). Fires occur in the tropical areas during drought because of lightning strikes and because companies pay people to torch them (rainforests) on purpose as a cheap land-clearing measure. Unfortunately, the examples of laying blame are the almost endless.

More recently, societies around the globe have found a new “thing” to blame their problems on: El Niño. El Niño has been blamed for just about everything in the past year that was not wanted, was unexpected, or was associated (rightly or wrongly) with disastrous consequences for the environment or society. Kenya, for example, blamed the destruction of its transportation infrastructure on the heavy rains that occurred during 1997-98 El Niño. However, many observers now charge that the destruction of that infrastructure was due for the most part to government neglect of needed repairs for more than a decade and a half. In other words, the El Niño-related torrential rains only served to destroy something that was already collapsing.

Recently, the devastating heavy rains and floods in central and northeast China have received considerable attention in the media. Their impacts have been devastating in both human and environmental terms. Floods have adversely affected 29 provinces and cities and financial losses are estimated in billions of dollars. They were devastating enough to cause the president of China, Jiang Zemin, to postpone a trip to Russia and Japan.

The Yangtze River in central China, the third-longest river in the world, and the Songhua and other rivers in the northeast have reached their highest levels in decades, some say in the century. Inhabitants in central China had to endure not one but seven different flood crests throughout a period of a couple of months. The rains in the upper reaches of the tributaries of these rivers seemed never to stop, creating a seemingly incessant problem for human settlements downstream. As only can be done in China, the government in one instance mobilized about 400,000 soldiers to build up the embankment along Harbin’s Sonhua River to protect that city and China’s largest oil field, at Daqing.

News reports have suggested that more than 250 million — yes, 250 million — people have been affected by these floods! Both cities and rural areas have been flooded, sending millions of refugees to their relatives in other parts of the country or to shelters of some sort. Nothing in the wake of the flooding has been spared: as of now the official estimate is that more than 3000 people have died, millions of houses destroyed and infrastructure including power lines, transportation routes and water supplies have been trashed. There is a considerable threat of widespread water-borne disease outbreaks (such as dysentery, hepatitis) and parasites such as snail fever in central and northeastern China, given the shortages of medicines in the flood regions. The health problems resulting from the Great China Flood of 1998 will likely last until the end of the year, if not beyond.

These worst floods in China in more than 40 years have been blamed on El Niño by the Chinese government. However, El Niño is dying, as very cold waters begin to appear in the sub-surface and at the surface of the central tropical Pacific Ocean near the equator. Nevertheless, Chinese officials singled out El Niño as the culprit.

In mid-August 1998, the Chinese government took a bold step forward. It changed its story of blaming El Niño. It now believes that the damaging floods were caused in large measure by deforestation in the Yangtze River’s watershed. This is a bold admission…a government taking blame (and responsibility) for human activities, activities most likely allowed, if not encouraged, by decades of government policy or foreign neglect.

Heavy summer rains eroded deforested slopes, absent of trees that would help to retain moisture in the soil. Over decades, rivers have collected the silt from the erosion. The government has even taken the important step of banning logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze (e.g., in western Sichuan).

China deserves high marks by the environmental community for taking such a bold and irreversible step…and admission of misuse of the environment. With such an admission is likely to come a policy to reserve the environmental damage that has been done.

At a recent meeting on tornadoes, Don Wermly (National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration-NOAA) made the following comment, “We’re never going to be able to change weather, but natural hazards do not have to become natural disasters.”

Fragilecologies Archives
10 July 1998

There are many good reasons to wipe the slate clean in order to help developing countries to once again get their houses in order. A leading reason to forgive the debt burden is that it robs these countries from having the means to maintain peace and order and to shore up deteriorating infrastructure.

Forgiving debt would enable governments to focus on improving food production and to attend to the basic needs of their citizens. Those needs include but are not limited to quality of life issues such as personal security, access to affordable food supplies, the ability to have as many (or as few) children as people would like, to have adequate shelter (e.g., more than just a makeshift roof over their heads), and to be educated well enough to have a meaningful job.

Securing some of these needs can be achieved directly as a result of debt forgiveness… at least in theory. Securing other needs can be done indirectly by, for example, increasing confidence of other countries and industries to invest in the future of a recipient country by investing in that country. That makes funds available through taxes, increases employment, puts money into the economy. But, in many of the developing countries there are obstacles to the enticement, among them the lack of personal security and the belief that corruption will make life difficult to carry out commerce.

Corruption at all levels of government, especially the highest levels, is a major reason that donor governments and their citizens are reluctant to forgive national debt. They feel that wiping the slate clean only lets corrupt officials off the hook. The real dilemma is that these officials are not the ones “on the hook”. It is their citizens who bear the brunt of foreign debt. It is the infrastructure that suffers. It is foreign investment that is turned away from assisting in a country’s economic growth. It is the lack not only of personal security of the person on the street but also the personal fear at the highest levels of government that they might lose power to internal or external foes. As a result, government leaders make sure that the military and the national police fare well even in time of budget crises.

For example, consider the rumors about Zaire’s president Mobutu stash of about 9 billion US dollars in Swiss and other banks while his country has an international debt of about the same amount. The people of Zaire (now the Congo) must bear the brunt of Mobutu’s theft of national wealth by wallowing in state-sponsored squalor.

This example is neither limited to one continent nor just to specific countries. It also applies to the governments and foreign lending institutions who have supported these corrupt regimes over the decades for a variety of reasons such as containment of some real or perceived enemy. Donor governments, international banking institutions, development agencies have all been aware of the fact that their development assistance was often ending up in a Swiss or other numbered bank account. In other words the costs of such containment was borne by the local citizens of the se countries with corrupt officials.

So the dilemma is the following: how to get donor assistance or the benefits of debt forgiveness down to the level of the person on the street. While it is temporarily comforting to hear the words of leaders of government agencies and lending institutions about sustainable development, improved social well-being and specific economic development strategies, it is quite clear that most people in most developing countries are far from receiving any benefit of external assistance.

Perhaps it is time for governments to convene an international meeting to discuss such issues as reconciling foreign assistance in whatever form, corruption, investor confidence, and the pathways to get foreign assistance down to the level of the people, since it is obvious that “Business as Usual” will not work in the next century. Donors and investors will become fatigued, governments in many third world countries will stay insecure, and an increasing number of third world people will find that they have been forced to join the ranks of the poorest of the poor… they will have become fourth worlders.

The recent El Niño event and the devastation it brought in certain countries support a need for change. Peru, for example, received a few hundred million US dollars in mid-1997 in loans to prepare for the onslaught of El Niño. However, at the end of last year (1996) the Peruvian government purchased an equivalent amount of airplanes from Belorus. In response to both El Niño and the military purchase, Ecuador also purchased planes and received World Bank funds to combat El Niño. The interesting point here is that the amounts received from the international lending agencies were equivalent in both cases to the amount paid to purchase aircraft. Was this in fact an indirect subsidy by those institutions to support the ongoing border conflict between these two countries?

And a similar situation has occurred most recently in Kenya. Kenya’s infrastructure was greatly impaired by the heavy rains associated with the 1997-98 El Niño. In mid-May 1998 Kenya received almost $100 million dollars from the World Bank in order to repair its roads and bridges that had been destroyed by El Niño. However, the local newspapers ran the story of a corrupt money deal involving members of the Kenyan government, to the tune of one hundred million US dollars.

Is it that the national governments in many parts of the world have come to ‘expect’ that, with regard to development needs and responses to natural disasters, the international community of donors and investors will come to bail them out. This has often been the case in the past. Should not be allowed to continue in the future.

Fragilecologies Archives
1 May 1998

The suggestion that the El Niño of 1997-98 could be like the El Niño of 1982-83, the biggest in a century, has raised the concern of policy makers around the globe. The devastation attributed to the 82-83 event is now seen as possibly recurring with the current event. As a result, El Niño forecasters and researchers in general have been suggesting that there will be severe drought in Australia, Central America, the Indian sub-continent, Ethiopia, northeast Brazil, the southern Philippines, and southern Africa, along with floods in northern Peru, the Galapagos Islands, central Chile, and southern Brazil.

In North America researchers suggested that there would be an increased likelihood of a hot, dry winter in the Pacific Northwest, a mild, wet winter in the Northeast, a wet, cool winter in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, and a sharp reduction in the number of hurricanes in year zero (the year in which an El Niño event begins — 1997). These have been considered the regions of strong (robust) teleconnections of climate anomalies linked to changes in Pacific sea surface temperatures. Other parts of North America may be influenced directly or indirectly by such oceanic changes, but those impacts have been difficult to identify.

Once this El Niño began to be viewed as a big event (although not necessarily an extraordinary one) in June 1997, considerable attention focused on southern California. This region was plagued in 1982-83 with severe rains, coastal storms, flooding and mudslides. TV images played up the destruction in this region, showing coastal buildings being battered and destroyed by wave action and cliffside houses sliding into the Pacific ocean.

It became clear, after several months of media interest in El Niño and its potential impacts, that horror stories of potential impacts increased, as did the researchers’ statements about the likelihood of severe impacts in various regions around the globe, accompanied by an increasing number of suggestions about potential impacts in specific seasons, months, locations, and timing. Even the kinds of storms that one might expect in a given region during an El Niño event received attention. For example, it was suggested that there would likely be a few major “blockbuster” snowstorms during the winter of 1997-98 in the Rocky Mountains. The February killer tornadoes in Central Florida were blamed on El Niño by several weather “experts.” So too was the devastating ice storm in the northeastern US and eastern Canada, especially Quebec.

How much of this reportage is hype? Is El Niño really something that the US public and policy makers should be worried about? Are researchers telling us how bad it can be (or was) in order to generate more funding for their research or for operational forecasting activities?

The Issue of HYPE

There are two ways to look at what we call hype. I believe “hype” can be viewed in a positive light or in a negative one. Negatively speaking, one could argue that the sharp increase in media coverage of El Niño, such as the nightly coverage called “El Niño Watch” on CBS’s Dan Rather newscast, has not really been warranted. Weather anomalies occur around the globe every year, whether or not an El Niño is in progress. Not all adverse weather or climate impacts occurring in an El Niño year should be blamed on El Niño, as has recently been done. Some skeptics have suggested that the end of 1997 was a slow news period, and so there was a focus on a naturally occurring process involving the interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean that has been going on for centuries, if not millennia. Some have even suggested that the media have created the hysteria over the possible impacts of the 1997-98 El Niño with their banner headlines and scare stories, starting as early as September 1997. In generating such headlines the media have had the researchers and some forecasters as willing if not unwitting partners in their scare stories.

The positive side of “hype” relates to the fact that the 1997-98 El Niño turned out to have been a big one. It is of the order of magnitude of the 1982-83 event. Its impacts will likely be big … and costly, even more costly than official damage numbers might suggest. Even if the science has not advanced enough in the past two decades to tell us with great confidence where those specific El Niño impacts will occur, its research findings can suggest for some (not all) locations likely adverse impacts with enough lead time for people, industries, and governments to take precautionary actions to mitigate if not avoid El Niño’s worst, most devastating and debilitating impacts. In other words, hype (the plethora of stories about a phenomenon previously obscure to the public) has generated a level of awareness of El Niño among the lay public, the media, and government leaders worldwide that ensures they will take notice of El Niño forecasts in future decades.

The Issue of HOPE

In the 1970s the research community took notice of the El Niño phenomenon as one that can affect marine resources and trade. The events in the 1980s generated awareness and concern about El Niño’s impacts on weather anomalies and ecosystems around the world. The 1990s is the decade in which potential users became interested in droves in the El Niño phenomenon and in the use of information about it in their decision making processes.

A few years ago I published an article called “Forecasting El Niño: Science’s Gift to the 21stCentury.” I still believe that there is great value as yet untapped in knowing more than we currently do about El Niño. There is considerable information available about it and its impacts that can be viewed as reliable. Fore example, the likelihood of drought in Indonesia appears high during El Niño (warm events) and of good rains during La Niña (or cold events). This is historical information, though not without uncertainty, that can be used to take proactive measures to alleviate the likely drought-related impacts on agriculture, electric power generation, and water resources in general. Forecasts of El Niño are value added to what we already know. The same can be said for other regions around the globe where “teleconnections” are considered to be rather strong.

To date, just about every El Niño has surprised the research community in some way. However, after each event yet another piece of the El Niño puzzle is put in place. Researchers gain the confidence to suggest that they now understand the phenomenon well enough to forecast it several months to a year in advance, only to be surprised by some aspect of the next El Niño. The reality is that we have only been studying El Niño as a basin-wide phenomenon since the mid-1970s and have not yet witnessed all the ways in which it can develop; nor have we seen all the combinations of impacts worldwide that could occur with the different types of El Niño events.

Unlike with climate change research, there is little in the way of divisive politics involved in forecasting El Niño. Everyone wants a better El Niño forecast. While the researchers are improving their own knowledge and understanding of El Niño, societies must learn how to better use the El Niño information that they already have in hand.

Fragilecologies Archives
29 April 1998

I had a professor many years ago who was a world-class specialist on the Indian sub-continent. He was amazing; he knew everything about the history, was on top of new theories of political and economic development, and so on. By the time I got to take his class, however, he had changed. Still smart as ever with the facts and theories he had accumulated over the years, he had fallen into the trap (as I see it) of monitoring current events relating to the sub-continent. Each day he would come to class, open up the New York Times, and read a brief news item about India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or US policy toward one of those countries. That news item became the center of discussion for the class session. For a while this was OK, but for the professor it became the easy way out … not having to prepare a lecture in search of new explanations of national behavior (the old explanations seemed no longer to work). New behavior was forced into old theories of explanation, none of which seemed to really fit the situation. He had chosen to draw on his expertise and apply it to day-to-day aspects of politics in the Indian sub-continent, rather than providing students with the larger context that history could provide.

After graduation I went on to teach various political science and political development courses and vowed never to fall into the trap of talking only about the latest thing to happen in my field. Thirty years later, I am considered an El Niño expert — at least on the issue of El Niño impacts around the globe. Recently, however, I often find myself in the midst of many El Niño researchers and fear that I am falling into the trap I said I would always avoid.

Today we as scientists, as well as the media and the public, are following El Niño’s growth and development day by day and week by week. Each wiggle and turn in the trend line of sea surface temperatures prompts us to make a projection; the line is upward and therefore El Niño is weakening; and then it is up again! This is confusing not only to the public but to the researchers as well. They have become so over-focused on the day-to-day changes in SSTs in NINO3 or NINO1+2 or in NINO3.4 that they are looking only at the proverbial trees and not getting a picture of the forest made up of those trees.

We scientists have become El Niño reporters, begged by the media to comment on each twist and turn in the trend line of SSTs or in sea surface pressure changes. We have, for this event (among the biggest in a century) settled into explaining each squiggle in a trend line, squiggles which we can only describe but can not explain. We, like my professor, have become describers (or reporters) of the daily routine of a natural process that is, in several of its characteristics, seemingly chaotic.

Each El Niño event seems to carry with it its own surprises. The 1982-83 event was missed completely by the research and forecast community. Whatever happened to SSTs in the early 1990s is still not explained to the satisfaction of most knowledgeable onlookers. And the fact is that the forecasters who might have seen signs of an emergent El Niño event in the last months of 1996 told no one about their hunches until March of 1997, when the observations showed SSTs on the rise in the equatorial Pacific region — a true fingerprint of the onset of an El Niño. And then there’s the issue of what exactly was forecast: a slight warming until the end of the year. What emerged was a humongous El Niño linked in size and potential societal impacts (by analogy) to the biggest El Niño in a century, the 1982-83 event. While forecasters can now effectively argue that they forecast a warming in 1997, they did not forecast THIS extreme warming of 1997. Is forecasting rain (e.g., drizzle) the same as forecasting torrential downpours that could lead to flooding? I think not. An El Niño was forecast BUT NOT THIS EL NIÑO.

Much of our scientific concern or need to interpret day-to-day changes in El Niño’s behavior has been prompted by the media. Flattered to be asked by the media for their interpretations (i.e., interpretations of the week) of each squiggle in an SST trend line, researchers spoke out; first about the importance of the phenomenon, and second about what the phenomenon does in general. When pressed by the media for time and space specifics “What does it mean to us in Podunk, Iowa?”, we resort to using some of the past El Niño events as a guide. Needless to say, these comments made it into the news. The adjectives got bigger as El Niño seemed to be growing in size and in strength. The consequences of an El Niño became more dire. The political aspects of talking about El Niño emerged: Vice President Al Gore, FEMA’s James Lee Witt, Governor Pete Wilson, Senator Barbara Boxer, and so on got into the El Niño act.

All of this has left the public feeling dazed and confused. The media themselves have recognized (i.e., either accepting or denying) their role in El Niño hype. Awareness of an important natural physical process by the general public is being converted into cynicism. Cartoons poking fun at El Niño are appearing in increasing numbers. Talk show hosts are joking about it. Even the media, which gave birth to the interest in El Niño, began to challenge the science of El Niño research, claiming that the event was not living up to the day-to-day forecasts about its expected behavior or impacts. Most media specialists did this either out of ignorance of the issue or out of the natural progression the media seems to follow with hot stories of the moment. The monsoonal rains did not fail in India. The winter wheat crop did not fail in Australia. Southern Africa got drenched in November and December of 1997, when the region was supposed to be in the early stages of drought. Japan had a hot summer rather than a cold one; and so on.

Forecasting an El Niño several months in advance of its onset is not an easy task. Despite the optimism recently expressed by scientists and some policy makers, lots of work remains to be done. Not only must we continue to improve our understanding of the phenomenon itself, but we must shift attention to improving our understanding of its impacts on various societies worldwide. Success in forecasting El Niño does not translate directly into an improved understanding of the impacts of El Niño’s teleconnections (i.e., linkages between Pacific sea surface temperatures and alterations in weather patterns around the globe).

For its part, the scientific community and the agencies that support it must provide the media with a more realistic picture of what is now known, what is not known, and what it is they would like to know about El Niño. The media, too, have a responsibility to become better informed on the facts surrounding El Niño – the forecasting of it as well as the process by which it develops and its potential societal impacts around the globe.

There are lessons that can be drawn from the way this El Niño has been discussed by scientists, policy makers, politicians, local weather forecasters, and the media. These are basic tenets, and one could argue that they would put the El Niño phenomenon into a proper perspective.

After the natural flow of the seasons, El Niño is the biggest climate-related disrupter of human activities. It recurs every 2-10 years (every 4 and a half years on average). It is part of a cycle of warm and cold changes in sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific region. It has occurred for at least 5000 years and will likely continue to occur well into the future. However, it is important to remember that the scientific community only “discovered” the global implications of El Niño in the mid-1970s. We have a lot to learn about the science and impacts of this natural phenomenon. Given its importance, it is imperative that we do a better job of educating the public and the media about El Niño so that when it does reappear, say, at the end of this century or in the first couple of years of the next century, societies will be a lot better prepared to cope with the forecasts and day-to-day observations (nowcasting) of its progress.