El Niño Came, So Why Didn’t It Bring More Rain?
Loren Eiseley, the great humanist and naturalist, wrote, “If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in water. … Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air.”
Eiseley’s beautiful essay is correct on many levels. Water vapor in our atmosphere condenses into precipitation and releases latent heat that can have profound implications for severe weather in California. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor it can hold.
