Wars and terrorism, high fuel prices, violence and crime, drink and drugs, child poverty, sub-standard hospitals, governments behaving badly, local councils focusing on the wrong things — there’s no end of grimness .
As well as various aspects of humanity going wrong, there are the big physical phenomena which make us apprehensive too, including earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions, not forgetting climate change and sea-level rise.
This El Nino has been well flagged by many scientists and commentators for months. But it is already attracting a high level of excitement among some because it is looking like a strong event with severe repercussions right around the Earth.
El Nino is a climatological behemoth. Its signature signal is a ribbon of warmer ocean water than normal in the equatorial Pacific. The heat this releases disrupts atmospheric systems around the entire globe, re-routing the high-level jetstreams which determine where storms move and redirecting them, and weakening crucial monsoons.
The extra heat in the tropical Pacific Ocean warms the planet. A strong El Nino can lead to an increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature of up to 0.2°C, an alarming factor in an already warming world.
An El Nino most affects people through its impacts on crops and livestock and on the ability to produce secure food supplies. It causes extreme drought and heat in South and Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia and Australia, in Central America and the Amazon Basin, and brings famine to southern and parts of eastern Africa. Forest and bush fires also become more frequent.
However, it also brings disastrous flooding to usually drier areas, with torrential rain and landslips often afflicting the west coast of South America, particularly Peru and Ecuador, as well as the southern United States and Mexico. Unseasonal heavy storms and flash flooding also affect parts of Central Asia.
In New Zealand, an El Nino can have many flavours. While its basic anatomy is much the same each time, other broad-scale weather patterns and our mountainous terrain play havoc with any notion of the next one being a carbon copy of the last.
El Nino conditions here normally mean much drier weather in the east of both islands, with a high risk of drought, and very wet conditions for the South Island’s West Coast and in Southland and coastal Otago.
The prevailing westerly quarter winds mean temperatures are often warmer than average in the east and colder in the south. But this is where matters are not as simple as often reported.
We remember the strong 1997-98 summer El Nino for being brutally dry and often hot. Severe drought plagued North Otago and Canterbury for almost a year, with huge repercussions on agriculture and farmers.
Yet the strong El Nino of 1982-83 was completely different. There was little summer for much of the South Island east coast, with a seemingly relentless parade of cold, squally sou’westers with hail and thunder, even a tornado in Christchurch. The vast contrast between these two events was due to only about 40 compass degrees’ difference in average wind direction.
It’s marvellous we have the early warning of a major El Nino and can begin to prepare, farmers particularly, for a dry spring and summer ahead. Decades ago, this much notice would not have been possible.
Unfortunately, this comes at a time when people are already reporting feeling traumatised by ongoing bursts of severe weather and the climate-change crisis. In pursuit of a good headline, some are now insisting on calling it a ‘‘Super El Nino’’, which ups the ante and seems a little premature, considering it has yet to fully develop and start influencing weather patterns.
Reports are already spreading that this will undoubtedly be a dry and often very hot event for New Zealand. Which it may indeed be, but then it might not be either.
Can we pull back on the hyperbole until we know for sure which way it might go?
