By Mike Loewe, Eastern Cape News
Thursday 4 September 2008
The Eastern Cape has two weather experts, and they could not be more different. Garth Sampson is our doughty, cautious weather guy in Port Elizabeth who represents the weather office. He talks about how careful he has to be with his statements because some oaf in the pub is always waiting to take him on over this or that non-prediction.
He’s read up on climate change, but thinks there are two directly opposing sides, both of which have some value, neither of which are totally right.
Steve “Spike” Pike, is a Rhodes trained surfer who happened to study journalism. His passion, hard-earned climate and ocean knowledge and flowing local language has made his www.wavescape.co.za web site one of the most well-read among sea people in South Africa and abroad.
While Garth and his team in Port Elizabeth argued and discussed Monday's impending storm surge with their head office in Port Elizabeth, especially as to whether they should issue a warning or an advisory, Spike was going off his head with warnings of a monster “fireball” of a storm heading our way.
Both services seemed to get there in issuing strong warnings to the public, and both were accurate.
We coastal-lovers are spoiled. We can choose between the authoritative, traditional, scientific approach of the weather office, or Spike’s outrageous and gripping accounts. I, for one, go for emotional intelligence over stark, lean brevity and levity, but in a hurry, will opt for Garth’s. I use them both.
Garth says tidal surges have been with us forever, such as the ’68 high tide in PE which combined disasterously with huge rains.
In a world awash with uncertainty over climate change, he uses the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as his yardstick. His office is keen to educate the public on basic weather calamities, such as foolishly running for the nearest tree during a lightning storm, when we should be curling up in a ball in open veld.
This is more important to him than pondering the complexities and vagaries of climate change – some areas will cool, others won’t, etc. This won’t prevent all those deaths from lightning in Transkei.
Yet, he says adding one centimetre to the level of the ocean while continuing to build in flood-prone areas, such as the Baakens Valley in PE, is “a melting pot for disaster”.
While everyone is looking for blame, he says the Bible is right to say that for every seven good years, there will be seven lean ones.
Even better, there’s been a major flood in the Eastern Cape every 35 years during the last 100. With climate change, you can make that 32.
And, an ocean surge like this “is going to happen again”.
For Spike, this was a storm “monstrously bloated and hideously malformed”, the biggest he’s seen in a decade of almost daily surfcasting.
And in the last eight years, “these huge storms always occur between August 20th and September fifth – during a two-week period “straddling winter and spring.
“We’ve had five major storms in five years, but Monday’s storm was the biggest – stretching from Cape Aghullas to the ice shelf – a distance of 3 600km.
“Other storms have blitzed through, but this one was a “relentless conveyor belt of mayhem”.
He sees an increase in frequency and ferocity of our ocean storms, and urges people to take action now “before a 10-foot wall of white water starts coming through your lounge”.
“A lot of people need to see grey skies and trees bending over before they click, as to the severity of a weather event. They can’t grasp that on a beautiful day with blue skies, there is a 40-foot swell busting up the coast.”
He says: “People on the coast must catch a wake up.”
He believes that at some point “all our stuff starts merging -- global warming, deforestation, carbon emissions, bio-fuels, the decimation of fish stocks and depletion of bio mass and diversity, the way we kill sharks upsetting the balance of life, how we cause whales to die, and plankton to freak out (plankton has a huge role to play in ocean weather). It eventually all merges into one *-&%$ up.”
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