The wind screams in the rigging. The boat shudders and groans. The noise makes it impossible to talk in the cabins without raising your voice to a shout. Outside, the rain blows horizontally, driving against ports and hatches and forcing itself into every crack. Brendan lies to two large fisherman anchors in the northern end of an uncharted cove, protected from the seas by a low spit of land but wide open to the force of the wind. Mountainous terrain on either side of the cove funnels the gusts in a venturi effect. An open stretch of water a few hundred meters to the west is whipped into a lather of steam and spindrift by winds that have been accelerating all afternoon to hurricane force and above.

I sit at the nav-station as darkness falls, listening to the sounds of the storm and thinking about our situation here. The wind shows no signs of relenting-in fact, it feels as if it may be blowing harder now than it had been earlier this afternoon. The barometer is still falling. Last time I looked, it had dropped to 28.7 inches of mercury (972 millibars) lower than many hurricanes ever get.

There are any number of reasons that I should probably be feeling anxious. The keel could ground on an uncharted rock. The anchors could fill with kelp and begin to drag. An anchor line could chafe through. A crew member could get sick or hurt. The wind could shift and blow us onto a ledge at the side of the cove-or it could veer a hundred eighty degrees and pin us against a lee shore.

For some reason, however, I don't feel particularly anxious about any of these things. I'm aware of our vulnerability here and of the possibility of all sorts of sudden emergencies. I realize that we need to remain vigilant and that we must be ready, if any of them should materialize, to act quickly. But meanwhile I feel a kind of tranquility in the face of this storm-not so much anxious as awed, not so much frightened as overwhelmed by the magnitude of the events around us. I feel much the same as I remember feeling in other weather emergencies at sea: a six-day gale south of Iceland, a late-summer hurricane in New England, a black squall in the Gulf Stream, a wall of waterspouts in the Sea of Alboran, a storm in the Cabot Strait.

Such events can be frightening as they actually take place, for they speak to us of our mortality. They remind us of how helpless we sometimes are in the face of an indifferent nature. But they are also acceptable somehow-because they are a part of our age-old situation in nature and because they are beyond our control.

What is to me much more frightening-what is, in fact, truly terrifYing-is the thought of an occurrence like this that is not merely an event of nature. A storm, let's say, that no longer behaves according to the patterns we have come to expect over the centuries-a storm that is a "surprise," a "nonlinear response" caused by human-induced changes in the patterns of climate.

Speculation about what the future might look like as the Earth begins to respond to CO2 doubling or other greenhouse perturbations includes all sorts of unexpected climate events: anomalous increases in the number and magnitude of hurricanes, larger and deeper extratropical storm systems, stronger winds, denser cloud cover, heavier precipitation, longer droughts, abnormally large changes in sea ice cover, sudden growing or melting of polar ice caps, catastrophic changes in global sea level.

The thought that nature may not be nature any longer the thought that the human species may now be sitting at the controls and that our collective actions may be causing events to occur in nature - this is a bone-chilling thought. There are those who talk about "managing the planet" - as if humankind were actually capable of taking over and somehow operating the climate system to its own advantage. The arrogance of such a notion is superseded only by its foolishness - for to imagine that any of us is prepared to predict how the system will react to our tampering is to misunderstand the nature of complex systems and the unpredictability of nonlinear responses.

No, I think to myself, give me raw nature any day: a hurricane, an earthquake, a North Atlantic storm. I'll take my chances with one of these a hundred times before I'll assent to intervention - willful or otherwise - by a species as careless and shortsighted as our own.