WHY WORRY ABOUT THE WEATHER?

An Editorial Review Essay

Glantz, Michael H.: 1996, Currents of Change: El Niño’s Impact on Climate and
Society, Cambridge University Press, 194 pp., ISBN 0-521-57659-8.
Burroughs, William James: 1997, Does the Weather Really Matter? The Social
Implications of Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 230 pp., ISBN
0-521-56126-4.

In swinging a golf club, buying a stock option, courting a loved one, or writing a
book, timing means much. Estimable anytime on their merits alone, the books on
the reviewer’s desk this month could hardly appear at a more propitious moment.
In this winter of 1997, every medium from tabloid to tellie is awash with El Niño’s
torrid and turbulent currents, and a long-gathering tidal wave of concern about
human-induced global warming is cresting as analysis threatens to turn into action
at Kyoto. Weather and climate are on the front page and in prime time as never
before, and lurid images of storms, droughts, and rising seas enliven the evening
news and the morning rag, sharing the headlines with Balkan wars and stock market
crashes. But is the weather as important?
Underlying weather’s sudden celebrity status is an implicit assumption that
both its day-to-day vagaries and the longer-term regularities that we term climate
are indeed important to human society and economy and thus merit public con-
cern, journalistic interest, and political action. Glantz and Burroughs illuminate
this assumption from very different perspectives, and both contribute mightily to
clarifying what John Maunder in his pioneering analysis termed ‘The Value of the
Weather’.
Drawing on his own multiple decades of research on the connections between
climate and society, Glantz provides us with an encyclopedic and scholarly mono-
graph on the El Niño phenomenon. The connection between the arrival of warm
waters off the coasts of the Andean republics and the annual celebration of the
Christ Child seems to date from the 1890s and is attributed to Peruvian fishermen.
Often defined simply in terms of ocean temperatures, the term is increasingly seen
as but one manifestation of a Pacific-scale Southern Oscillation with worldwide
implications. Glantz skillfully and clearly delineates the definitions and taxonomy
of these phenomena, providing a wonderfully concise primer for the lay reader.
That done, he moves rapidly into their impacts, beginning with a fascinating
history of their effects on human activities. In the last century, it was noted that El
Niño’s warmer, nutrient-poor waters decimated bird populations and production of
guano-based fertilizer, then Peru’s major export. As fishing replaced guano-digging

Climatic Change 38: 255–259, 1998.

256 EDITORIAL REVIEW ESSAY

in this century, however, fish replaced birds as the focus of attention. Eventually,
a sequence of El Niño events combined with unsound fishery management in the
early 1970s to destroy the anchoveta fishery that once provided a third of Peru’s
foreign exchange earnings – and to launch a rising world-wide tide of interest in
climate.
Beginning with a notably clear and concise outline of the dynamics of a ‘canon-
ical’ El Niño, Glantz then presents richly detailed accounts of several notable
events, highlighting that of 1982–1983. He includes a remarkable collection of
phenomenological information on its impacts throughout the world. This leads
smoothly into discussion of teleconnections between El Niño and climate anom-
alies in other parts of the world, and the rapidly emerging capabilities for predic-
tion. Understanding and prediction will demand copious data on the ocean and
atmosphere, coupled with correspondingly massive research and modeling efforts.
These physical and intellectual terrains belong to no nation, so international efforts
are required, and Glantz presents a comprehensive history of relevant international
efforts.
The ‘bottom line’ question, however, is whether we should care about El Niño.
Numerous anecdotes suggest that we should. However, Glantz holds that the full
magnitude of its impacts will only be perceived when we understand the linkages
among the myriad compartments of the natural and human worlds. Somewhat
surprisingly, he provides few hints as to how improvements in that understanding
could be attained by social scientists. He concludes this excellent book with a fas-
cinating collection of statements from leading researchers that provide a refreshing
dessert to a most nourishing book.
If Glantz’s monograph is a tightly focused spotlight on a single beast in the
menagerie of climate, then Burroughs’ volume is a floodlight seeking to illuminate
its entire jungle of complexities. An atmospheric physicist, sometime diplomat and
policymaker, and science journalist, Burroughs brings a unique kit of tools to his
task and wields them with great skill and impressive effect. Consonant with Glantz,
Burroughs answers his book’s question by concluding that weather does matter –
but it’s just one of many things that matter.
Burroughs again builds his arguments from a historical foundation, presenting
a scholarly and entertaining parade of historical connections between weather and
human society. For example, readers who share the reviewer’s passions for trivia
and antique furniture will delight in learning that mahogany replaced walnut in
18th century parlors because of the intense frosts of the Little Ice Age that killed
European walnut trees. More significant linkages with agriculture, health, immi-
gration, and politics from early Mesopotamian civilizations to the present day are
illuminated with telling and well-documented anecdotes.
Moving into the present, Burroughs discusses the impacts of storms, floods, and
droughts. Throughout, he emphasizes the complexity of the linkages between the
physical effects of extreme events, policy responses, and ultimate impacts. Thus,
hurricane damage depends not only on wind and water, but on what is susceptible
 EDITORIAL REVIEW ESSAY 257

to damage – and this depends on settlement patterns, building codes, insurance

rates, etc., that are in turn influenced by perceptions of the likelihood of hurricane
damage.
Such mind-numbing cycles of cause and effect assume even greater weight as
Burroughs turns to the problems of natural and human-induced climate change.
Again, he begins with a précis of climatic history, and then turns to evidence of
contemporary climate variations and the possibilities for predicting them.
But, all this said, does the weather really matter? Burroughs believes that this
question can be meaningfully addressed in the long term only through quantitative
models of both the physical and human systems. At the least, these will enhance our
understanding; ultimately, they may to a useful extent illuminate the future. With a
notably even hand, he assesses the present degree of competence in modeling and
prediction in both domains, finding some beauty and many warts in each. Demon-
strating his experience in decision-making circles, Burroughs holds strongly that
‘forecasts . . . not only have to be frank about what they can and cannot predict
but also must be viewed in the context of the other challenges facing societies’.
Further, if modeling and prediction cannot address the needs of policy makers and
produce measurable successes, then they will become ‘a fascinating but esoteric
scientific pursuit. . . ’.
Burroughs’ thoughtful conclusion is that weather alone does not alter ‘the main-
springs of history’. However, its vagaries have provided the catalyst for major
upheavals in times of stress. While on a global scale our interconnected human
society has become less vulnerable to weather fluctuations, the society and econ-
omy that support us places ever more people, property, and possessions at risk, and
depends increasingly on weather-sensitive activities. At the same time, we have
come to expect a degree of freedom from risk and confidence in the future that
nature may not in the end permit.
Burroughs sees ‘choppier waters ahead’. Dealing with long-term, slowly evolv-
ing, annoyingly uncertain problems of possibly increasing vulnerability to possibly
changing climate will demand greater degrees of both scientific confidence and po-
litical will than are currently in evidence. Reductions in uncertainty about current
human influences, future climate shifts, and their impacts on society are urgent.
While uncertainty is hopefully being whittled away, a policy of ‘gradualism’ is
recommended involving a broad program of research, sensible land management,
timely technology development, sober and responsible information transfer from
science to policy, and the fostering of a political climate that will permit prudent
control of human influences on and vulnerability to weather.
In this winter of El Niño and Kyoto, these two excellent and timely books should
be required reading for anybody concerned or confused about the turbulent weather
and human systems of our little planet. They offer no magic bullets. Instead, they
unmercifully illuminate the limits of our understanding, our ability to predict, and
our capacity to manage ourselves and our world. They recognize that in many
important respects, the future is not only unknown, but in a fundamental sense
258 EDITORIAL REVIEW ESSAY

largely unknowable. We must learn to live with El Niños, floods and droughts, and
changing climate – all shrouded in mists of uncertainty. At the very least, readers
will be left with a profound sense of skepticism about easy answers or quick fixes
emanating from either end of the political spectrum or from the current tortuous
international negotiations.
But where does all this leave simple citizens like your faithful reviewer, who
worry more than a little about their grandchildren’s world? Somehow we must
make decisions here and now – to burn coal or uranium, to cut or preserve forests,
to treat our atmosphere as an irreplaceable resource or a convenient sewer. Must we
puzzle through a maze of data, models, scenarios, and assessments to make prudent
and responsible decisions? Even if we get the physics and the sociology and the
politics and the arithmetic exactly right, the joint trajectory of climate and society
that we will actually follow will be a random drawing from a universe of possible
trajectories, not the impeccable prediction of our unimpeachable models. We may
make the probabilistically ‘right’ decisions only to experience the existentially
‘wrong’ results.
Moreover, the consequences of our decisions will be borne by our successors
decades and centuries from now, living in a world we cannot begin to imagine,
and voteless in decision-making in the impregnable fortress of the future. As this
journal’s editor has so often emphasized, decisions as to what kind of world we
want are fundamentally based on values. But whose values? Teddy Roosevelt’s?
The Sierra Club’s in the winter of 1997? Those of the Chamber of Commerce of
New Delhi in the year 2055? Better models and sharper predictions will be nice to
have, but they won’t bail us out of this existential dilemma. Building a future world
for our grandchildren is akin to buying them Christmas presents – What we pick
may not be what they’d like best.
Should we then just give up? Are the watchwords to be ‘business as usual’ and
‘muddle through?’ Or is there perhaps some overriding principle that will tell us
what to do regardless of the unknown and unknowable details, and unknown and
unknowable values of the beneficiaries of our decisions – just as the Second Law
of Thermodynamics tells us how physical systems will behave regardless of their
details or our wishes? One suspects that such a principle might exist. After all, we
humans love our children without resorting to cost-benefit analyses. We expend sig-
nificant resources on restoring condors to the wild, buying Mozart recordings, and
feeding needy strangers without much thought about economic consequences. We
are somehow irrationally special among Earth’s creatures. Something in addition
to arithmetic governs our behavior.
Sir John Houghton holds that we humans, as very special creatures, indeed have
a special role that transcends self-interest and analysis: In Houghton’s words, ‘We
are on the Earth as its stewards . . . on behalf of God’. Such a principle holds that
we don’t have to calculate benefits or rationalize reasons – we just have to follow
orders to take good care of the place we were given to live in. Perhaps as a hang-
over from his military days, your cynically agnostic reviewer finds this principle
 EDITORIAL REVIEW ESSAY 259

compelling for its simplicity, directness, and efficiency. Arithmetic and argument
aside, we must take good care of the world we were undeservedly given, and pass
on to a perhaps undeserving future a world as rich as that which we received from
the past.
The atmosphere, the untidy crowd of weather events, and the comfortable cli-
mate we’re used to are, as these books amply demonstrate, economically vital
elements of our world we have inherited. The weather does matter, and we have
an inescapable responsibility to see that our successors enjoy the balmy summers
and verdant landscapes that pleasure us. Scholarly and perceptive analyses such
as these fine books on our nightstands can help us to manage our affairs and the
planet’s to preserve and profit from the weather as the conscientious stewards that
our humanity demands we be.

Climate Research Board, JOHN S. PERRY∗

National Academy of Sciences,
2101 Constitution Avenue, NW,
Washington D.C. 20418,
U.S.A.

∗ John S. Perry is Senior Advisor to the Board on Sustainable Development of the National Re-
search Council. The views expressed herein are those of the author, and do not represent assessments,
findings, conclusions, or recommendations of the National Research Council.