"...so we checked it again on Wednesday, and it was still there," my research assistant told me. He meant the Pacific Ocean. I asked him to sit down.
Our lab has spent the summer counting storms in the eastern Pacific. That part went fine. The storms are strong and there are a lot of them, and forecasters say the season has months left. This is normal. Water gets warm, air spins, we write it down. Nobody in my lab looks up when a hurricane forms any more.
The ocean is a different matter. We measured it three times. Each time it covered about a third of the planet. Our control group was a glass of water on the windowsill, and the glass did not grow. Our p-value was tiny. That is the chance we are wrong. We are not wrong. There is a very large amount of water out there and it shows no sign of stopping.
I have to be careful with words like "catastrophe". So I will only say that the Pacific is the largest thing on Earth, it is currently very warm, and it has a long way to go.
Storms are the least of it. The storms end in November.
