In the “old days”, the summer rainfall pattern had a form of steady regularity. In Pretoria where I grew up with its state bureaucracy we talked about “civil service rain”.
Days would dawn bright and temperatures rise to upper twenties, early thirties. In the early afternoon the “thunderheads” would appear on the horizon described by many a South African writer and depicted, often emblematically, by painters such as Pierneef.
Then about 4pm the brief storm would break, just when the civil servants left their offices dashing for the nearest shelter to avoid drenching in the usual short sharp shower followed by a bright evening.
The seasons too had this quiet familiar yearly cadence. The same was true in the rest of the world. Of course there were periodic droughts and floods, even when not reported in the print media.
The decades passed and mankind exploded in its numbers and technology and its rape of the world, while the bottom fell out of its morality.
Now there is no predictability left anywhere, as inevitable man-made climate change is overwhelming us.
The weather forecasters find that their sophisticated models no longer work. Why, when global terrestrial and satellite weather data floods in electronically in milliseconds?
Weather models and science can only be constructed on the basis of past experience, as with the science of meteorology that developed increasing insight to the functioning of the weather and applying this to practical need for predictive models.
Inadequate features plus local factors such as mountains and lakes need to be taken into account.
These are represented by so-called parameters, fixed numbers in the model that need to be chosen, again on the basis of experience over time.
When everything continues to change perennially through climate change, the parameters have constantly to be second-guessed and probably never reach their former reliability.
Even some basic changes to our understanding of the processes themselves may be occurring until, perhaps some time in the future, some steadiness sets in.
However, as long as our rape of the Earth continues, of its oceans, the rain forests, the atmosphere, all affecting the weather, we cannot expect any sort of handle on things such as regional predictions.
George Bernard Shaw said more than a century ago: there is nothing certain but uncertainty.
It is up to each one of us to contribute to reducing that uncertainty, thereby improving our sense of stability, meaning our very civilisation - quoting Kenneth Clarke, half a century ago.
Balt Verhagen
Bramley