The summer’s drought and heat lasted long enough for us to decommission the sprinkler system and stack the winter’s wood under the eaves of the garage and house. Then, a week ago, we woke up to four inches of snow, and a day when the temperature didn’t get above freezing. Julie shoveled the deck in case the snow wouldn’t melt before next April. Overnight, fire season had become winter.
Last Saturday brought enough warmth for us to pretend we might have a normal October—normal October temperatures, anyway—but we live in a world of weather anomalies. We try to take nothing for granted. Snow still marks the north sides of hills, and the snow that Julie pushed off the deck is there for the duration.
We have brought up winter hats and gloves and boots from the crawl space, and we’ll be ready with our skis when and if the next storm hits.
At Redfish Lake, the big wedding tent next to the Lodge became an engineering class problem when the snow got heavy enough to turn it into a heap of bent metal and twisted fabric. I wondered if there had been a wedding scheduled and if it was still on. Some people would take this sort of thing as an omen.
Other omens are out there. The Gulf Stream, slowing due to enormous amounts of fresh water pouring off Greenland, may be about to split or meander in circles or simply stop.
Any of these changes would not be happy news. The last time the Gulf Stream was seriously disrupted was when the North American Ice Sheet melted, and it caused, according to some theorists, a northern hemisphere thousand-year cold snap that killed off the Pleistocene megafauna and destroyed the Clovis civilization. (Other theorists blame a giant meteor. Others blame humans. Others blame Atlantean physicists messing about with subatomic particles from dimensions where Atlantis didn’t exist. Lots of theories and theorists out there when it comes to the disappearance of megafauna, especially Atlantean megafauna.)
In any event, if the Gulf Stream slows much further, the weather records that have been meticulously kept for the last 150 years of meteorology will lose all predictive value. Northern Europe will be most directly affected, but world weather is an interconnected system, and the odd rainstorm that causes a thousand-year flood in Germany has ties to the water levels in Lake Powell and the resultant height of the fabled fountains of Las Vegas.
Siberian forest fires, Antarctic ice-shelf fractures, Florida hurricanes, New Jersey shoreline erosion, drought in the Sierras, giant icefalls on Everest, dust storms in Beijing, cancelled weddings in Idaho: all part of the same system.
Sadly, humans have trouble comprehending the interconnectedness of planet-sized networks. We prize our identity as self-directed entities—when we plan a wedding, we want it to go off with a hitch, as it were—and we don’t take kindly to the idea that a sea turtle fart in Indonesia can cause, two weeks later, a collapsed wedding tent at Redfish Lake. The human mind rejects the idea that subtle causes can have catastrophic effects, especially if the mothers-in-law have been planning this wedding for months, a hundred guests have checked into their hotel rooms, the band’s bus has just arrived from Nashville, and the marriage-to-be has been showing hairline cracks that need to be vowed into nonexistence immediately.
By 1900, the study of the physical world had affirmed, again and again, the tenets of Newtonian Physics. Newton’s theories were being proven correct to six decimal places. Science had become a series of answered questions. Medicine, a series of unalloyed triumphs. Lord Kelvin, the grand old man of British science, defined physics as a task of tying up loose ends.
A couple of those loose ends ended up as special relativity and quantum mechanics.
Newtonian physics brought us internal combustion engines, public health measures, plastics, machine guns, airplanes, and windfarms. It allowed the construction of an unselfconscious and confident civilization that overwhelmed non-Newtonian cultures the world over. The British Empire, scientific materialism, cause-and-effect, and industrial complexes all created a new reality that looked as if it was the Way, the Right Way, and it would last forever.
Nowadays the British Empire and industrial civilization are struggling with entropy and self-doubt. Scientific materialism doesn’t look so attractive now that we’re running short of materials, most notably petroleum. Effects are having trouble recognizing their causes. Reality itself is looking like it’s been built on a quaking bog.
Here’s how things have gone for meteorologists: they assumed that if they had enough weather balloons, weather stations, and satellites—in effect, enough data points recording the atmosphere at a given instant—they could design a computer program that would precisely predict the weather for months and even years in advance.
Quantum physicists have taken this idea to the extreme, and they have created a thought experiment that presumes a world-wide network of hyper-miniaturized weather stations, one per every cubic foot of the atmosphere and oceans. But at that level of instrumentation, you discover that any cubic foot of air or water can give rise to a spontaneous anomaly—say from the decay of a bad piece of kelp in the intestinal tract of a turtle off Bali—and it will disturb a couple of atoms in the next cubic foot of air or water, and so on, these actions and reactions speedily circumnavigating the globe, until Presto! you get an unexpected snowstorm that collapses a wedding tent.
So, the short answer about cause-and-effect is that it exists, but human consciousness can never discern all the factors involved. Everything is determined, but at a level our minds cannot penetrate. We default to a belief in free will, simply because we can’t understand the infinitely intricate deterministic mechanisms of reality.
If only it were that simple. Let’s revisit our worldwide network of weather sensors, and assume that data flows from each of these sensors into a central computer. Let’s assume the computer compiles all that data into categories and trends. Finally, let’s assume a technician is reading that data on a screen, and is formulating a big picture.
It turns out that the technician’s act of observation will alter the data and confuse the big picture.
A number of classic experiments have demonstrated this effect. Light has been shown to be both a particle and a wave, depending on who’s looking. Imaginary (we hope) cats, put in a box with a lethal device triggered by random radioactive decay, have been shown to be simultaneously dead and alive until the box is opened. Or, if Dr. Seuss had written on quantum physics:
It works with light as particles.
It works with light as waves.
It works with cats in boxes.
Don’t tell the SPCA!
If observation changes outcome, it’s hard to know anything for sure. Your observation, whatever it is, will sometimes shoot back in time, changing the past from a point in the present, producing a cat that was dead before you even opened the box.
From personal experience, I can attest that a single observer will cause different phenomena, before and after morning coffee.
Also, if you dream of a cat in a box, and open the box in your dream, does your dream, which has the quality of intense observation, kill the cat? If you forget your dream after coffee, does the cat return to life? Half-life?
As you might expect, most people dismiss any practical application of quantum theory once they understand how much it undercuts our sense of what’s real.
The winter of 1977-78 was an anomaly in central Idaho. It didn’t snow. A high pressure system set up over the state. Big storms would start moving up from California, but by the time they reached Sawtooth Valley they disappeared. By March, the skiff of snow that had fallen in November had melted off the south sides of the peaks, and Sawtooth trails were bare. Extra-thick ice covered the lakes because they had no layer of insulation. Temperatures in January hit forty below.
I hiked to Hell Roaring Lake on March 15th, 1978 and walked on the ice from one end of the lake to the other. From the far end, I started toward the base of the Finger of Fate. Weeping springs on the hillside had formed domes of ice, and when I stood on top of them I could look down and see big rocks and bushes and trees below my feet. It was like standing on a giant snow globe.
Above me, frozen waterfalls curved over cliffs and formed static cascades. In areas where the winter sun had evaporated the snow, ground cover was winter killed. I climbed through a chilled desert landscape, crushing brittle grass with each upward step. I remember thinking I’d have to be careful with fire.
I built my campfire on bare rock. I had brought two sleeping bags, and by putting one inside the other, I survived a night at ten below. The next day I walked around on the glaciated granite plain between the Finger of Fate and the Arrowhead, avoiding the transparent ice that coated the rock. The next night only got down to zero, and I woke up to a warm wind, and rain, and the crash of icefall.
Local climate-change skeptics point to the snowless winter of ’77-’78 as evidence that the weather has always been unpredictable, and that climate change isn’t a precondition for weird weather. No doubt they’re right. But since 1978, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from 330 to 420 parts per million. We are approaching CO2 levels we haven’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago. It was a time when the earth didn’t have ice caps. No doubt the weather in Idaho was weird then as well. But it’s likely it was weirdly warmer.
I don’t know that it’s going to snow any more this year or next, but the National Weather Service is forecasting a La Niña, which suggests that our weather will be either cold and wet or cold and dry. Or maybe warm and wet if the pandemic reduces the number of airline contrails, or if economic depression reduces industrial air pollution’s sunlight screening effect. Or we could have a reappearance of “The Blob,” which is what meteorologists call a huge area of warm water that now and then appears several hundred miles off the west coast. Depending on where it shows up, north or south, we could have more snow, or less. If we get an atmospheric river stretching from Hawaii to Idaho, it could rain and rain. We’ve got until April to find out.
In the late 1950s, when I was learning to ski on Sun Valley’s Dollar Mountain, the man in the ticket booth got tired of answering questions about the weather and taped a cartoon to his window that showed a TV weatherman, obviously hungover, snarling, “If you want to know what the weather’s going to do, look out the goddam window.”
It’s still good advice. Weather forecasts have improved, now that forecasters have supercomputers, but after four days their accuracy for any locality, for any day, plummets. Quantum anomalies make it impossible to understand what the weather will do next week.
Last winter the bottom eight inches of early snow dried out and became ice crystals and air, a fragile layer under everything that fell later. Avalanches threatened all season.
This winter we hope to wake up—often—to great days of skiing. If that sort of thing is an artifact of observation, we’ll gladly observe. We’ll put up with the accompanying uncertainty as long as it allows for ten inches of powder on a bulletproof base, and maybe no wind, under a cloudless sky.