Photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post.
Until Jagadish Shukla, meteorologists generally believed that predicting the weather beyond 10 days was a hopeless pursuit. He wanted to help farmers anticipate monsoons.
Did you ever read Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm, a book about a devastating hurricane in Texas before there was good weather prediction? That was the first time I heard about the “butterfly effect,” tiny changes in weather conditions with powerful results.
A researcher interested in chaos theory asked himself what could happen with more butterflies than one.
Anusha Mathur writes at the Washington Post, “Standing in his home office in Rockville, Maryland, meteorologist Jagadish Shukla gestured at the high-resolution satellite map of India hung on the wall. It shows every groove of his home country’s geological landscape in vivid detail. …
“ ‘The trick is how to find predictable components in a chaotic system,’ Shukla told me. …
“He’s come a long way from his childhood village in northern India, where he spent his summers playing outside and praying for rain.
“The most anticipated season of each year was the annual monsoon, he writes in his memoir, A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory. Monsoons follow India’s hottest period and last for months, providing both relief from the sun and fertility for the land.
“But the monsoon also can be a source of suffering. Some years the rain brings intense flooding, while in others there’s too little for a good harvest — or worst of all, drought and famine. …
In 1970, 26-year-old Shukla arrived in Boston to pursue a doctorate at MIT. “His goal: find a way to predict the Indian monsoon’s seasonal impact.
“At the time, weather forecasters relied heavily on ‘initial conditions’ — how volatile factors such as temperature, pressure, wind or jet stream today might affect the weather tomorrow. As a result, meteorologists generally believed that predicting the weather beyond 10 days was a hopeless pursuit.
“Soon after arriving at MIT, Shukla learned about the ‘butterfly effect,’ coined by renowned meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz observed that even the tiniest changes in initial weather conditions — something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings — could make an entire system chaotic over time.
” ‘The idea is that if you change just one decimal point in your initial condition, you will get a different forecast after 10 days,’ Shukla said.
“Lorenz’s work made many scientists skeptical about whether seasonal predictability was worth focusing time [on]. But Shukla’s felt sure that — at least for the monsoon — there was knowledge to be gleaned from the chaos. …
“Then came the breakthrough. While daily weather is driven by volatile initial conditions, seasonal averages are shaped by something else, ‘boundary conditions’ such as ocean temperature, soil moisture, snow cover and vegetation. And these boundary conditions are a source of predictability. …
“Said David Straus, a climate dynamics professor at George Mason University who worked with Shukla, ‘Shukla had a really outsize role in saying, ‘Look, all these little pieces of evidence in the past are there, we can use them together.” ‘ …
“Shukla’s team ran simulations in which they dramatically changed the initial conditions — the metaphoric flutter of billions of Lorenz’s butterflies — while keeping the boundary conditions fixed. Despite the day-to-day instability, the seasonal outcomes remained consistent. It was the origin of the phrase ‘predictability in the midst of chaos,’ which became the title of Shukla’s bellwether paper, published in the journal Science in 1998. …
“As Shukla deepened his work on dynamic seasonal prediction, a new scientific field was emerging: climate change. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Shukla’s colleagues repeatedly asked if he would turn his attention to global warming. …
“He ‘wasn’t convinced yet’ about global warming. He worried the claim of human-induced climate change was too bold, too early.
“Finally, in 2004, he accepted an invitation to serve on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to work on its fourth comprehensive assessment of the climate. …
“In the bombshell IPCC report, published in 2007, Shukla and his fellow scientists declared that the ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and identified ‘discernible human influences.’ That year, the panel received the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, along with former vice president Al Gore, with Shukla sharing in the honor.
“ ‘I cannot accept something simply on faith and belief,’ Shukla said. ‘The reason 2007 got the Peace Prize was because it was the first time our model said, “Oh, it’s now beyond the uncertainty.” ‘ “
Read at the Washington Post, here, how climate-denying members of the US House put Shukla under an intense and vicious investigation in 2015. Despite the misery of that period, he says, “It’s a small price to pay to defend the integrity of climate science. … If we don’t defend it, who will?”
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