I have been hearing about El Niño for most of my life. I don’t know what it is. I know it’s a weather phenomenon, but beyond that, I have little idea. El Niño, to my understanding, is some far-off, isolated thing which holds great invisible power over my life. I feel like an unnamed Ayn Rand character hearing about John Galt.
El Niño is on the mind because this morning, I saw a headline about a Super El Niño, and I said, “That’s bullshit,” just like I say “That’s bullshit” when I hear about Super Moons. Super Moons are good full moons backed by a PR firm. Quit devaluing the word Super. I’m sick of this Morgan Spurlock-ification of America.
I was going to write a blogpost about this (the Morgan Spurlock-ification of America), but when I went looking for information on the Super El Niño, not a lot came up, which makes me think the rest of the populace agrees with me about nomenclature and I don’t need to belabor the point. It did leave me wondering, though: What is El Niño?
I tried to find out. I really tried. I ended up on the NOAA’s website at one point. (It had a very helpful blogpost, but should we really believe the federal government when it comes to what happens in the middle of the Pacific?????????) What I think I read is that El Niño just means the waters are warmer than usual in the Central Pacific Ocean, and that they’re staying that way, and that this creates a cycle of the water there staying warm for even longer, which eventually leads to more winter precipitation in parts of the southern U.S. and warmer winter temperatures in parts of the northern U.S. thanks to an effect that water temperature has on a global pattern of air currents called the Hadley circulation. Weaker trade winds, extended North Pacific jet stream, etc. etc., yada yada, Texas might get more winter rain. I don’t know if this is like Lake Effect Snow on a global scale or what, but evidently the temperature of water in the Central Pacific has a significant impact on our weather, and evidently it’s helpful for weather folks to have names for different categories of that temperature (La Niña, as you might imagine, is when the water in the Central Pacific is cold). Here’s the thing, though:
It took me eight readings of that blog post to finally keep myself focused long enough to take in what I read.
Even having done that, I am going to remember none of this in five days.
And so I come to realize that there’s a reason I’ve never internalized what El Niño is. It’s not that it’s mysterious—hidden and shadowy and laden with grand powers. It’s that it’s underwhelmingly simple. Simple enough that you could probably say, “Warmer water temperatures in the Central Pacific are leading scientists to believe we could see a wetter winter in Texas this year” and get the point across.
