The Rearview | Part 2 : El Niño: From Titanic to Monsoons—The Climate Story That Changed Everything

[00:00:00]This is an extraordinary story [music] that links El Nino to perhaps the most famous shipwreck in the history, the Titanic.

[00:00:08]>> So, one of its effects may have been to strengthen the winds that drove unusually large number of Greenland icebergs. [music] >> And the first people aboard to realize something was badly wrong was not the scientist, they were the cooks.

[00:00:23]>> So, how does the whole scientific establishment miss something of that magnitude? But how do you actually watch the Pacific? It is the biggest thing on the planet.

[00:00:33]>> This machine has been running for thousands of years. How has it actually impacted sociological conditions across the globe?

[00:00:44]>> Hello and welcome to the rare view. I am Shanaki Nay >> and I am Jacob Koshi. [music] So last time we left two men staring at the same animal from opposite ends. [music] So there's a Peruvian fisherman watching his catch vanish. El Nino at Christmas.

[00:00:58][music] >> I thought it was El Nino.

[00:01:02]>> Got me there. Okay. El Nino, the Christ child. And there's Gilbert Walker, the boomerang throwing Cambridge [music] mathematician who' found a great seesaw of air pressure rocking the Pacific and naming it the Southern Oscillation.

[00:01:17][music] He had the pattern, remember, but not the theory that caused it. And it sat just like that for 50 years.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> And 50 years is a long time for a cliffhanger. So let me introduce the man who resolves it because he arrives with the best pedigree [music] in the business. Jacob Bjunes, your namesake except for this very complicated surname.

[00:01:42]>> So I have a simple surname. [laughter] He was the son of Wilhe Bures, one of the founding fathers of the modern weather forecasting, [music] head of what what's called the Bergen school of school in Norway. If you have heard a forecaster talk about [music] cold front and warm front, that front, that word front comes out of the Bergen school. They borrowed it from the battle lines of the first world war. So Bjcnes grew up in a sense inside mythology.

[00:02:16]>> His moment arrives in 1957, the international geoysical year, a great global scientific effort where among much else money finally got spent dropping instruments into the middle of the oceans. And by pure luck in 1957 turned out to be one of the strongest El Nino of the century. For the first time, scientists had eyes far out in the Pacific while it was happening.

[00:02:49]>> And Bjnes did with the what he did with the data was what Blandford kind of had done with all the telegraph wires. He looks at the warm waters spreading across the Pacific, >> the fisherman's El Nino, and he looks at Walker's atmospheric seesaw flipping at the same moment. And he realizes that this isn't just a coincidence. They are the same thing. It's like the ocean and the atmosphere are locked together. Each is influencing the other. In the normal state of the Pacific, the trade winds, the famous trade winds, they blow steadily east west along the equator and they drag warm surface water westward and pile it over the other side. Imagine like this whole sheet of water piling up in Indonesia on far side and the sea literally sits half a meter higher over there than of South America. And this water is several degrees warmer. It's actually called the warm pool.

[00:03:53]>> Ah, so half a meter of sea held uphill by nothing but wind.

[00:03:59]>> I mean just it's like the >> like like how and this the in the Bible movies how Moses splits the Red Sea and the sun just rises up like that.

[00:04:08]>> I mean as long as it is just a story it's fine. Imagine imagination image is you know alarming.

[00:04:15]>> That's literally the thing but that's the point. It's a balance. And because all that warm water has been dragged west, the eastern side of Peru is cold.

[00:04:25]And because and then cold water wells up from below to replace that or you know that warm water that's been blown away.

[00:04:33]And that upwelling of cold water, it's very nutrient-rich and all that. It feeds the great fisheries. So warm and west in the cold in the west, cold and dry in the east. trade winds holding the seessaw in place. I mean it's a mindboggling spectacle. Yeah.

[00:04:49]>> And that's actually a normal year and it's a strong monsoon setup for India.

[00:04:55]>> What kind of tips it over >> and so every few years and even after all so many decades of you know wrangling with this we still aren't fully fully clear. the trade winds just weaken and naturally it's like that rubber band is holding up and if the rubber band slackens >> the wind's grip loosens and the warm water comes sloshing back in east in a great slow pulses and when it arrives it shuts off that whole cold water mechanism that is coming up from the bottom of the seas naturally cold water gone means the fishery the the nutrients are gone fishes stop feeding And that's the and that's exactly what the fisherman's El Nino is. And because warm water is what feeds the rainstorm, the rain that normally sits over the western Pacific that backs up and follows the warm water east out over the open ocean.

[00:05:53]>> So that's when the seessaw kind of flips over. So that means the rains that should have been falling over India and Indonesia during the monsoons they are just hovering over in this giant cloud over the middle of the Pacific.

[00:06:06]>> So the monsoon doesn't fail because of anything happening in India. It fails because a patch of warm water on the far side of the world went for a wander and took the rain with it. It's like if the India was in on Freud's psychotherapy couch said no thank god it wasn't me I'm not responsible somebody else far off so that's it so bes he ties up this whole theory in a neat packaged you know bow he gives a couple system one name so southern oscillation was walker and el nino is this so he calls it the el nino southern oscillation and now it's nice cute term is enso as all the you of weather watchers call it. The ocean part is El Nino. The atmosphere part is the southern oscillation. So Walker had died a decade before and he never knew that they named the wind after him.

[00:07:02]>> That's rather lovely but equally sad. I mean 50 years too late and he missed it by 10 years. But uh for completeness there is a cold phase too, isn't there?

[00:07:15]when it lurches the other way >> and this is a part you would be very happy about there is and they give it a matching name so just imagine everything I described wound the other way instead of the trade wind slackening they blow harder than usual they drag even more warm water in the western pile the cold upwelling of Peru turns colder and Walker's seesaw instead of flipping just digs in deeper that's La Nia little girl El Nino's sister No relation to Jesus Christ. Good person.

[00:07:47]>> Yes. As all most women are.

[00:07:50]>> Had to come over there. I'll grant it to you this time. [laughter] Okay.

[00:07:54]>> And for India, of course, she is the kinder system >> very much as a rule. Yes. So, Alan Ninia in general tends to strengthen the monsoon. So, it's a machinery carrying rain into India running at full tilt sometimes too full or extra rainfalls and >> you know all those things. So the two phases pull India opposite bases Elino starving monsoon lania force feeding it almost and there are several years this is like a 2 to sevenear cycle so there are neutral there are neutral conditions also when these factors don't really influence monsoon rain but it's the elino that keeps India's forecasters up at night >> so now here's the question I always get stuck on it's all very well explaining the machine after the fact [music] but how do you actually watch the Pacific.

[00:08:42]It is the biggest thing on the planet.

[00:08:45]>> And for a long time, the honest answer was badly. So there's this very funny almost facial episode that shamed everyone into fixing it.

[00:08:54]>> In September 1982, a research vessel called Conrad sails out of Hawaii to study the normal equatorial Pacific.

[00:09:04]normal because as far as the science of the day could tell 1982 was definitely not El Nino year and the first people aboard to realize something was badly wrong was not the scientist they were the cooks.

[00:09:20]>> Cooks.

[00:09:20]>> Yeah. The Fijian cooks aboard used to catching the evening meal by dropping a line off the stern. Suddenly they couldn't catch a thing because they sailed into warm dead water without knowing it. And then an engine failed.

[00:09:36]And when the crew checked their position, they found that the ocean was carrying them the wrong way eastward towards Peru. They were sitting inside one of the biggest El Nino of the century and nobody had told them because nobody knew. So how does the whole scientific establishment miss something of that magnitude? The first was a volcano. The Mexican volcano El Chikong had erupted months earlier and thrown a haze of particles high to the atmosphere. And that haze was fooling the satellites that measured the sea surface temperature. They read the ocean as cooler than it was because that all that plume of particles had blocked the heat signatures that usually come. And the second reason is a deep lesson of the whole field. Everyone was watching the wrong gauge.

[00:10:31]>> The accepted way to spot an Elnino was to wait for warm water against the Peruvian coast. But this one had started the west and behaved completely differently. So, and this was the eternal big lesson. No two El Nino are ever exactly the same.

[00:10:48]>> And there's a scientist who got it wrong in the grandest way. the one who got it right in the most domestic way together.

[00:10:56]They are the moral of this episode. As late as October 1982, one of the most respected experts in the field, Cross Whitki stood up at a conference and declared flat out there was no Elnino happening and wouldn't be one the next year either. He was watching the Peruvian gauge and the Peruvian gauge was quiet. and he was comprehensively wrong.

[00:11:24]>> And the man who got it right, >> an Australian meteorologist named Neville Nicholls. And Nicholls wasn't watching the ocean gauge at all. He was watching Walker's atmospheric seesaw, the southern oscillation, and he'd seen it flip hard mid year. He was so sure a drought was coming that, and this is the detail I love, he and his wife had just bought a new house. She wanted to put in a garden and Nicholas flatly refused to let her plant it because he knew rains weren't coming. A >> clever man. He didn't bet his house on the on Walker, but he bet his garden >> garden >> a garden pod for watering of >> and he was right. the drought came and that's the quiet vindication of the whole first episode.

[00:12:16]>> Some weird way this reminds me of exit pose and predictions. Somebody's saying that you know oh [laughter] this party will win it and somebody's flattening off you know >> and somebody wins it and says right and there's a bet.

[00:12:29]>> No no no this is the right place to plug the Hindu because all the exit polls got the 2024 elections wrong but the Hindu got it right.

[00:12:38]>> Absolutely. And we didn't even have to bet our garden on it.

[00:12:41]>> Okay. So, in fact, they've carved the equatorial Pacific into several sections. You know, there is Nino 1 and two, which is pressed against the South American coast. There's Nino 3 in the east, Nino 4 in the west, and sanding in the middle. It's the bit that matters the most. It's called the Nino 3.4.

[00:13:00]That's the exact section they always track. And when its temperature rises half or 1°ree above what's normal, that's when uh scientists say that an El Nino is coming.

[00:13:10]>> Here I have my favorite story in this entire series. This is an extraordinary story that links El Nino to perhaps the most famous shipwreck in the history, the Titanic. Ross Cooper Johnston in his book El Nino, the weather phenomena that changed the world argues that while the ship of course sang because of the human failings, El Nino may have quitly stacked the odds against it. Captain Edward Smith famously declared, >> "I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel." Like almost everyone else in 1912, he had never even heard of El Nino.

[00:13:57]>> So Johnston argues in his book that the El Nino had been reshaping weather across the globe for months. So one of its effects may have been to strengthen the winds that drove unusually large number of Greenland icebergs far south in the North Atlantic shipping zones, shipping lanes. So by 1912 April more than a thousand icebergs had crossed into waters where ships rarely encountered so many. So Titanic had received several iceberg warnings but Captain Smith you know bearded with his nice uh pipe had pressed on at full speed >> and hidden among a pack was at one iceberg that opened six compartments and sealed the ship's fate. So Johnston is careful not to blame El Nino for sinking the Titanic. Uh but obviously it adds another layer to the Titanic mystery.

[00:14:56]And while we may have solved the that mystery, the Enino mystery continues. We know what it is. We know how it works.

[00:15:06]But most importantly now we broadly know how to watch for it.

[00:15:12]>> Which leaves us with that big question.

[00:15:14]This machine has been running for thousands of years. How has it actually impacted sociological conditions across the globe? I mean Titanic and you know those are like small human factors, human lives in you know in confined spaces that have been probably altered.

[00:15:33]But the El Nino has had far bigger effects on entire civilizations.

[00:15:38]>> Yeah. So next time we will follow its fingerprints through history from India's great famines to ancient [music] Peru perhaps even to revolutionary France before returning to the India of today.

[00:15:53]>> And that's [music] for next time. That's all from me, Jacob Koshi, >> and me, Shna. [music]