Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms
A Scientific Odyssey in Three Parts
Welcome to the three-part series, Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms, where we follow the over fifty year-long career of noted Mediterranean meteorologists Millan M. Millan, profoundly expanding our view of climate change along the way.
I’d like to introduce this series with a scenario. Suppose someone pointed out that you’d been looking at the climate through a pair of glasses with only one lens? Lifting them off your nose, they then provide you a new pair of glasses with two lenses. Suddenly, parts of the climate you couldn’t see before appear. In addition to the atmosphere, you now see the landscapes around you and the soil beneath your feet, not as helpless victims, but as active drivers of this thing we call climate. Not only that, but you see that at one point, not too long ago, science looked at the climate in just such a manner. It was only later, in the 1980’s, that the glasses with the single lens was put before our eyes and declared the official scientific view.
These are some of the insights gained when you follow the path of Millan’s career and scientific work, though Millan uses different metaphors, referring to a “two-legged” climate understanding versus the one-legged, CO2-only view, the current orthodoxy. He also shows us that water, which lies at the heart of Earth’s climate, “begets water,” that soil is like a “womb” for rain and climate, and vegetation acts as a “midwife.”
I realize I’m using a lot of metaphors here, but with today’s data-driven narrative, metaphors are needed to help us see through the numerical fog. In any case, read on and by the end of the series things will become clear.
Part I. Stepping into the Two-Legged Climate
When Mediterranean meteorologist Millan M. Millan was a boy, his father brought him along on his frequent partridge hunting forays through the dry scrubland of southern Spain known as the maqui, often stopping to show him how to read the surrounding weather, pointing out how a “cloud in a certain place in the morning would migrate somewhere else by afternoon, triggering a rainstorm.” They’d watch the storms form across the landscape and plan their routes home to avoid getting wet. Little could Millan know that 40 years hence he’d be asked by the European Commission to figure out why those afternoon storms, which he and his father so enjoyed tracking across the hillsides, were disappearing throughout the Western Mediterranean Basin, with rivers drying up in their wake.
The future Dr. Millan, Head of the Mediterranean Center for Environment Studies, degreed in Fluid Mechanics, Industrial Engineering, Aerospace Science, Atmospheric Physics and Spectroscopy, Synoptic Meteorology and Weather Forecasting, would indeed figure out why the summer storms were failing. “Land-use perturbations (mining, industrial and urban expansion, deforestation, paving) that accumulated over historical time and greatly accelerated in the last 30 years” had rendered the land incapable of supporting the region’s climate, he determined. The storms were vanishing because the life on the land was vanishing, with far reaching implications for our understanding of the human causes of climate change and what we should do about it.
Though hailed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen as the most significant finding for climate change in twenty years and published in the American Meteorological Association’s Journal of Climate and others,1,2 his work was effectively ignored by mainstream climate science, proving as Millan put it, “incommodious.” The CO2-oriented, global computer models that came to dominate climate science couldn’t see the local, land-level processes Millan uncovered. Politicians, with their pet building projects and “growth” mandate, didn’t want to.
Millan isn’t the only scientist speaking out about “land change” as a human cause of climate change,3,4 but at 82 he’s been around the longest, long enough to remember a time when science held what he terms a “two-legged” view of climate, with a leg for atmospheric carbon and the greenhouse effect, and a leg for land disturbance and hydrologic effects (water cycles.) By researching past climate reports, I was able to verify this.5,6 But then I confronted another mystery. What happened to the two-legged understanding of climate? As it turns out, Millan’s story answers this question as well, as we’ll see.
The boy, whose father pointed to his destiny and who went on to deftly meet it, now nonetheless feels defeated. “I failed, he wrote me once, for all of us.” And indeed, today’s climate narrative essentially leaves out Millan’s critical contributions. But I don’t think the story is over. The wheel of science is moving toward Millan’s understanding, not away, and the scientific case for a two-legged, land and atmosphere, bio-physical view of climate continues to build, with scientists openly pressing for a more holistic perspective.7 Now, in fact, is the perfect time to tell Millan M. Millan’s story.
*
Millan didn’t set out to solve the mystery of the disappearing summer storms of the Western Mediterranean Basin. Like much of his story, the key developments were happenstance. But they happened to lead him where he needed to go.
In 1966, universities in Spain were erupting in student protests and he wanted to focus on his studies, departing at the age of 24 for Canada to continue his graduate work at the University of Toronto. With months ahead awaiting academic approvals, he sought employment and quickly found it with a Canadian corporation called Barringer Research Limited. There he distinguished himself early on by designing the technology that would eventually equip the metal detectors found in the world’s airports, for which he now jokingly apologizes. But it was another device, called COSPEC, that would lead him, beside his eventual return to Spain, to a key scientific relationship.
His instrument, still in use, enabled scientists to map plumes of pollutants as they move through the atmosphere, which had become quite necessary as rapid industrialization began choking cities with pollution. Millan felt he could improve on his instrument’s application with a deeper understanding of meteorology, particularly the ground level, in-the-field insights concerning how land surfaces affect the flows of air, moisture and heat, for which Ted Munn, a professor at the university, was renowned. Munn was an important figure in the World Meteorological Organization and an expert in a field called biometeorology, which examines not only the effects of climate on living systems but the effects of living systems on climate. The focus is on the atmosphere’s lowest layer, what’s called the “boundary layer,” the layer in contact with and directly affected by Earth’s living (or non-living) surface. Munn founded and for twenty years edited the scientific journal, Boundary Layer Meteorology. His books Descriptive Micrometeorology (1964) and Biometeorological Methods (1970) are classics in the field.
Part of Munn’s fame was the remarkable skill he demonstrated during WWII, forecasting weather for allied forces from the island of Newfoundland, never losing a plane or ship. Millan speculates that “he had moved from the large-scale systems he worked with during WWII to find out how those large meteorological processes were driven from the surface upwards.” This is a key insight. Climate change is generally portrayed as having a downward-pointing arrow of causation, from the atmosphere down, with the land acting as a passive recipient of climate. But the arrow also points upward, from the land, with the land behaving not only as climate victim, but climate driver as well.
Munn quickly took notice of his new student who seemed to already possess an intuitive understanding of the lecture material. “He was giving me the scientific explanations for my father’s observations,” Millan writes. For his part, Millan, who also loves the outdoors, was thrilled to be able to take his talents out of the laboratory into the natural world where, as it had for Munn, meteorology came alive for him. They soon became colleagues and friends in a 45 year long “tutorial and cooperation.”
By 1969, Millan was fully engaged in his studies, plowing through a syllabus which Munn had custom designed for him, while at the same time taking Munn’s courses in biometeorology. One day Munn handed him the draft for a book called Inadvertent Climate Modification: Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, a joint production of MIT and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It was one of the first broad scientific assessments of anthropogenic climate change in the modern climate age, and Munn was the coordinating author for a chapter entitled Climatic Effects of Man-made Surface Change. He asked Millan to check the concurrences between text, references and figures, an assignment which crystallized the two-legged concept for Millan, for it was clearly laid out in the book. Its opening paragraph, for instance, lists both “Climatic effect of manmade surface change” and “Modification of the troposphere and stratosphere” as “major areas” for consideration. Under the heading “Man’s Activities Influencing Climate” there’s roughly equal treatment for subsections concerning both “Atmospheric Contamination,” and “Land-Surface Alteration.” Under “Major Conclusions and Recommendations” is Munn’s chapter “Climatic Effects of Man-Made Surface Change.”
“The idea was that both greenhouse gases and land-use contribute to climate change, but at different rates,” says Millan. “Land-use changes the hydrologic cycle immediately, at a small or larger scale, depending on the perturbation. Greenhouse gases are already there,” meaning they spread out globally and don’t change day to day. He speaks of “two rates of climate interaction and two basic mechanisms.”
For land change, the mechanism is hydrological, the water cycle; it occurs quickly and at local to regional scales, spreading outward to global effects. If you clearcut a forest you immediately destroy the evapotranspiration in that place, and with it the cooling mechanism of the forest. Water vapor (along with carbon) begins burning out of the soil, and within a few hours the temperature can rise upwards of 20oC or more.
For greenhouse gases, the mechanism is the global spread and increase of carbon gases that absorb outgoing long wave radiation, now streaming upward around you from the sunbaked soil. It is called the greenhouse effect and is steadily heating the planet. It’s a slow process; the person sweating in the clearcut won’t feel it, but it subjects the entire planet to geological scales of change.
The point is, it’s not one or the other, but both. “Two legs is just a concept that implies an atmospheric (greenhouse gases) component and a surface (land change) component.” A concept which, he writes in his book, “lingered in my mind for years, coming back to me twenty years later when I was asked to look into the matter of a perceived decline in summer storms around the Western Mediterranean Basin.”
Demand for Millan’s instrument continued to grow, and in 1974 he was asked by officials of the European Commission, operational body of the European Union, to bring his instrument and expertise to Spain to help track the spread of industrial pollutants in the rapidly industrializing southern coast. He accepted immediately and was soon back home, a few valleys over from where he and his father had trekked. It was while in the maqui setting up field instruments that he began to hear about the summer storms. Locals would come around and make comments like “what you are trying to do seems interesting, but the real problem in this place is that it does not rain as much as before.” Millan passed this information along to the appropriate agencies, but there was little he could do as his assignment at the time was to track air pollutants.
Eventually, in 1992, the issue caught the attention of the European Commission’s Unit Head for Environment, Dr. Heinrich Ott. By then Millan was director of CEAM, Mediterranean Center for Environmental Studies, a large applied-science organization. In a meeting over general matters, the summer storms came up, and Ott asked Millan if “we could use the field data collected…and our accumulated meteorological experience to find an answer to this seventeen-year-old issue,” adding, “something should be done about this.” By then, Millan had known Ott long enough to know he had just been given a new assignment.
It's hard to imagine anyone better prepared for the task. Through numerous field campaigns he and his team had accumulated eighteen years’ worth of physical data utilizing assorted air balloons, gauges, instrumental aircraft and over 50 meteorological towers. No one knew the meteorology of the Western Mediterranean Basin as well as Millan. But he had something else working for him— his mentorship under Ted Munn, who had taught him how to read landscapes for their effect on climate. Had Millan approached the issue from the prevailing one-legged, CO2-only perspective, he would have never found the source of the failing storms.
One thing Munn had stressed was to always treat the comments of locals as critical field data. It was, after all, locals who had discovered the storm problem in the first place. Whenever a local came forward with information he and his team would query the individual carefully and take detailed notes. Millan recalled an old-timer who told him of a local saying: “Cierzo a las siete, Solano a las diez, agua a las tres.” Roughly, sea breeze in the morning at ten means rain in the afternoon at three. He thought about the tracks of the clouds he had watched as a boy moving up higher and higher into the mountains, gaining mass, dropping rain by afternoon. The refrain was revealing. For the sea breezes still came in off the sea each morning around ten, yet come afternoon, around three, the storms failed to materialize. The collapse, he reasoned, occurred in between.
In the next installment we’ll follow Millan’s scientific work as he solves the mystery, looking deeper into the intimate connection between land and atmosphere. Though Millan is a hard-nosed scientist, we’ll discover he has a poetic side as we follow the meaning of his oft-quoted tercet: water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation is a midwife.
Sources and Links:
3. Pielke, Roger Sr., 2009, Climate Change: The Need to Consider Human Forcings Besides Greenhouse Gases, Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, pp. 413-414.
4. Schwarzer, Stefan, 2021, Working with Plants, Soils and Water to Cool the Climate and Rehydrate Earth’s Landscapes, UNEP Foresight Brief, pp. 1-7.
5. 1971, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, MIT.
6. 1979, Proceedings of the World Climate Conference: Conference of Experts on Climate and Mankind, World Meteorological Association.
7. https://www.wri.org/research/not-just-carbon-capturing-benefits-forests-climate
Because of excess CO2 the earth is current experiencing "global greening". This has been confirmed by various study groups including NASA.
As a lay person, I find this material very interesting, and thank you for making it accessible. Our human society urgently needs to gain the fitness to see climate in the way Millan sees it, and you see it.
Re fitness, and species survival, I've just started to read Donald D Hoffman's book, _The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes_ . I need to read more of the book before endorsing Hoffman's work (or not). For now, I am drawn to his metaphor of reality as a process that is co-created by all living and non-living beings, deciding and doing things in their virtual reality headsets.
And I'm overdoing the metaphors here, but I cannot resist returning to the bicycle as encountered in Rob Lewis's Ode to the Bicycle. For me, the bicycle can be a tandem: it has two wheels, driven by as many legs as we earth-beings can muster, as we go on heading -- we hope -- for survival.