From Pacific, the Ocean of the Future (Simon Winchester, 2015) p264-5
And that, with its corollary of ever more extreme weather events in the western Pacific and over the North American continent (to say nothing of a total permanent collapse of the Peruvian fishmeal industry), could cause long-term changes to human behavior, to the siting of cities, to the planting of crops. But little is certain. Thanks to the new computers, and to the fascination with Pacific weather, global forecasting is less of a crap-shoot than once it was. But out in the Pacific it remains a mystery of daunting complexity.
Yet a consensus of a sort appears to be building. It is all to do with heat, with the radiation from the sun, and with the manner in which the planet deals with it. Not a few climatologists are coming now to believe that because of its immense appetite for absorbing the solar heat, the Pacific could in time actually be seen as the savior of the world’s living creatures. It will be so by taking in all that destructive heat from the sun and from the excesses of carbon emissions and, rather than allow it to scorch dead the inhabited earth, employ it to warm itself up, slowly and sedately, as befits the dominant entity on the planet, and thereby enable itself to carry the world’s heat burden on its own.
The effects of all that absorption of warmth will be locally dramatic, for sure. As the American admiral fretted, there will be bigger and more destructive typhoons; there will be more super Tracys, more stupendous Haiyans. There will perhaps be a more urgent need to evacuate islands that will be inundated more swiftly than was thought. Maybe there will be bigger snow-falls in the Cascades and the Sierra. Maybe no anchovies will ever be caught again off Peru. Maybe the forests of Sarawak will be consumed by fire.
Locally, there will be mayhem. But globally, less so. The planet, perhaps, will manage to heal itself. The world and its creatures will survive, and all will eventually allow itself to come back into balance, just as the geologic record shows that it survived and returned to balance after any number of previous cycles of excess and danger. And once that happens, the Pacific Ocean will be seen, uniquely, for what many climatologists are coming to believe it to be: a gigantic safety valve, essential to the future of the planet.
The ocean’s monstrous size puts it in a position to let the planet go thermally wild for a time, to wobble dangerously. But then, like a formidable gyroscope, the Pacific will dampen the excess, will help bring sanity back, and will restore calm, serenity, and normality.
The Pacific Ocean as the world’s pacifier – the thought is maybe born of all too little science. But it is a thought endowed with poetry, and is now held by many. And in the gloom-dimmed world of today, even such a thought is surely a most welcome one.
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