Conveyer Belt
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Conveyer Belt The storm is moving slowly. We expected Ophelia to lash us with her gray claws yesterday, but all we saw were some puffy clouds and felt her oppressive humidity. The building was oppressive, too. The garage, down on the third level where you can feel the heat from the earth’s core, was particularly still. Maybe it is the barometric pressure that makes me feel trapped like a rat. I simulated work for several hours up on the sixth floor, absently listening to C-SPAN radio, hearing Judge Roberts refuse to answer simple questions, like what movies he liked. Actually he did. He liked Dr. Zhivago and North by Northwest . Those are good enough credentials for me, but I wound up disliking the distinguished senators and the distinguished judge. Someone said that, if confirmed, the Judge could be the Chief Justice for as many as four decades. I kept a little tally of the dead in Baghdad on my notepad by the phone. The bombers released a statement that the slaughter was in response to the attacks on Tal Afar in the north, where coalition forces claim to have killed 150 insurgents. The city is the gateway to Syria , and the entry-point for Jihadists from around the region. The dead and wounded in Baghdad were mostly day-laborers, not much different than the people in New Orleans . People just trying to get by. Fighters traded for non-combatants. Awful. I kept scratching off numbers and adding new ones. When I am agitated or confused I like to keep a tally sheet. I do years of personal finances in business meetings, changing assumptions, running the numbers out to retirement. The war had not been on my mind since the storms took center stage. There were others in mortal peril, closer to home and I can only balance so many crises at a time. I need to generate some sales as we surge toward the end of the fiscal year, and all I have to sell is ideas. They come by on the conveyer belt of intellectual property and I pick the ones that seem likeliest to attract interest. I have two that I keep in my briefcase, ready for discussion, just in case. I made a notation on the location of Ophelia, that is moving slowly up the Outer Banks, scouring the coast of North Carolina and dumping up to fifteen inches of rain in some places. Experts agree that this storm season is no fluke. I Googled up a scientific article on the subject after reading an impassioned memo on the company e-mail system. The memo articulated the opportunity for an additional revenue stream which we could generate by providing disaster communications. The article explained the mechanism for why the storms seem to be increasing in severity. It was a relief to discover the cause of the storms is not hubris, or some other form of divine retribution. It appears that the mighty Atlantic is actually a wet conveyor belt, part of the global circulation of the oceans. I know about the Gulf Stream, and how the warm current caresses North America’s shapely flank . But that is just part of it. Thermohaline circulation is the actual mechanism that rules the cycle. I had to look that up. �Thermo� is the easy part; �haline� refers to the salinity of the water. There is a continuous flow of upper-level water drawn from tropical waters north toward the Pole. Arriving up north, the water cools and sinks, cycling back to the Southern oceans in deep water currents. The circulation has a flow equal to about 100 Amazon Rivers, and contributes to the comparatively warm sea-surface temperature along the coast of Western Europe and to the relatively mild European winters. Once the water cools and goes deep, it remains out of contact with the atmosphere for as much as a millennium. So the at the southern end of the Gulf Stream there is water that has not been exposed to the stars since the Vikings were living in Maine, and Islam was ascendant in Spain. Which it might be again. Bill Broeker explains it all in his article Chaotic Climate in Scientific American, published in the middle of the Clinton Administration. You can look it up. I have a short attention span, if you hadn’t noticed. I am about as interested in global climate modeling as I am in how many games out of contention the Washington Nationals can get by the end of the month. The hurricanes mean something personal, though. Years of colder wind out of Canada blowing on the North Atlantic has sped up the conveyor belt, drawing tropical surface water more quickly than has been the norm over the last seventy years. Water temperatures in the North Atlantic are as much as 2 degrees warmer than they have been. That’s good for hurricanes, which is essentially a wind engine that runs on heat. The warmer the sea-surface temperature (and the more warm-moist air that’s available the stronger a hurricane can become. Climate records compiled by NOAA and other folks suggest a correlation between a pattern of increased cold winds and the 1995 up-swing in hurricane formation, which prompted Broeker’s article. It takes time to alter the flow of a hundred Amazons, and once change is set in motion it takes time to settle out. This means that we could be in for decades of increased storm activity. In 2004 we had four major hurricanes; Charley and Frances in August, and Ivan and Jeanne in September. I am already scheduling travel for the rest of the year, and I clicked on MictroSoft Outlook’s calendar. A guy named William Gray of Colorado State compiled the statistics. He is calling for five storms big enough to earn a name this month, and two more in October. Three of them, calculating the odds, will be severe. That should do it for this season. I clicked on the function that brings the calendar on the computer screen up in three-month chunks. If we have already had two big storms this month, I calculated, I should schedule five more storms over the next six weeks. The radio announced that the figures from Baghdad had been revised again, and I dutifully copied down the updated numbers on the tally sheet by the phone. The murdered amounted to 150 by the time I could no longer stand to be in the office, and the wounded were hundreds more. I descended to the basement via the express elevator to the lobby and the service elevator into the garage areas. I looked at the sky as I headed out of the city to an improvised meeting on the right side of the Potomac . Still no moisture, but definitely the prospect of rain. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
