An Inconvenient Truth – Review
There once was a radio announcer in Honolulu who eventually gave the same forecast all the time. Even when it was finally pouring, she would predict, “It will be a nice, clear day.” Her predictions were not very useful but they were accurate eighty five per cents of the time, which is a lot better than the National Weather Service average. The researchers characterized in “Prevailing Trade Winds” exploit the same contradiction in island weather that the announcer did: Overall it is wonderful and changes comparatively little, while on a minor scale it varies approximately yard by yard. As a result, the Hawaiian islands are an excellent biological laboratory, “climatically . . . closely resembling continents in miniature.” In such a small volume, “Prevailing Trade Winds” does not pretend to be comprehensive. Rather, it presents representative cases of weather phenomena, such as the Maui Vortex. The vortex, first easily identified by the Pineapple Research Institute from photographs of the main valley, is a swirl newly created by the trades simply blowing between two mountains. Wind that starts in the east speeds up and ends by gently sweeping down on the west shore of the island from a more northerly angle. This is of functional interest because of the desiccation of the main valley. Few people, residents or tourists, realize that central Maui is the driest place in the state, as dry as Kawaihae on the Big Island, which looks like a desert. Only irrigation supports the waving green sugar cane and suppresses the dust storms that otherwise would make Kihei uninhabitable. Ignorance about regional weather can be costly elsewhere, too. “Potential wind damage . . . is seldom a design criterion for Hawaiian houses. Structural failure due to wind is generally considered too unlikely to justify mutually reinforcing houses for great wind,” says Thomas Schroeder in a chapter on “Climate Controls.” This might already have been constantly changing when this book was originally published in 1994, shortly after Hurricane Iniki wrecked Kauai. “Prevailing Trade Winds” is full of equally fascinating tidbits. For example, although Waialeale, Kauai, is generally described as the rainiest place in the world, the one-month official record for the United States, 107 inches, was recorded at Puu Kukui, West Maui. It also has some critical information. Several references to wind power installations are out of date, and the statement that “most scientists decide that greatly increased applications of the greenhouse gases will shift the Earth’s radiation balance toward global warming” was incorrect in 1994, when a great majority of American climatologists (the “Phoenix group”) went on record refusing this idea. It is still incorrect in 2008. Which is not to say nothing is really happening. “Dramatic climate changes have occurred in Hawaii in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years,” Paul Ekern reminds us in the chapter on “Climate and Human Activity.”

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