Our Affair with El Nino: How We Transformed an Enchanting Peruvian Current Into a Global Climate Hazard [Hardcover]

This beautifully conceived and rendered account of global weather systems is the best currently available. Philander is able to mix scientific and artistic elements with fluid elegance. He observes that recent intense El Nino events have led to a new awareness on this phenomenon. The focus, however, is both too limited and has been distorted by media. People have been led to believe that the sudden warming of waters off the Peruvian coast is an abnormal phenomenon. He points out that the El Nino and its obverse, La Nina are manifestations of a long-term oscillatory pattern. Neither are "deviations" from some perceived norm.

In explaining the Southern Oscillation of shifting warm and cool waters in the Eastern Pacific, Philander turns to various art expressions. Weather predicting is often the butt of jocularity - we remember incorrect forecasts readily, blithely ignoring the recent advances in accuracy. He recognises this tendency, but reminds us that our growing population, illogical placement of urban centres and vested economic need to have good science applied to anticipating weather trends and events. Weather prediction, rarely, if ever, considered a "hard science" has made tremendous strides. The tricks nature can play on us means that we must extend our thinking beyond solid mathematics. We must utilise the techniques of the painter, the poet and even the musician in considering weather and climate.

Forecasting the weather had flimsy beginnings. A thoughtful observer in one location might make accurate records. If nobody in neighbouring regions matched the work, it proved of little worth. The telegraph immeasurably added to the creation of communication links, as did the reports of ship captains bringing observations from long voyages. It was the integration of these bits of information through the intuitive methods of music or art that began to force new, expanded views of weather conditions. The local scene was too limited to provide a complete picture. Philander uses a musical metaphor to compare the weather in the British Isles with the California coast - a high-pitched violin or flute as contrasted with the notes of a cello or bassoon. Conditions in other areas, he says, push aside single instruments, stating "only a huge symphony orchestra can do justice to the music of this planet".

Predictability, common in most "hard" sciences, must give way to the many forces that contribute to our weather. From the deep, cold currents moving at the sea bottom to the cycles of heat exchange in the atmosphere, subtle change can evoke monstrous events. Such occurrences are more common along our inhabited coastal areas, but may reach far inland. A long-standing sequence of disastrous famines in India led to one of the first investigations of just how the monsoon was generated. Although the first attempts to understand it failed, it led to better assessments of the roots of weather patterns. Many of these, including the monsoon, still defy full description. Philander urges more investigation, although he recognises that those providing funding are still looking for quick, decisive answers. These won't be easily forthcoming, he notes, but increased effort must be made.

Philander has been a major voice in helping us to understand the vagaries weather investigators must endure. He wants us to recognise that cyclical events like El Nino and its counterpart will continue. We must be aware that hard and fast predictions are unlikely, and that we must prepare long-term plans to cope with changes. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Either Philander tried to dumb down his book to please the masses so much that he lost touch of the science or he never understood the science in the first place. If you want to learn something about the arts, consider reading chapters 7-9. If you want to learn something about El Nino, keep searching.

El Nino may never have been known as a "charming Peruvian current" on Maui, especially Upcountry, where he is blamed for unwelcome dry spells.

It could be worse. According to Princeton meteorologist George Philander, predictions that an El Nino in 1997 would lead to drought in Zimbabwe actually caused more hunger in that already hungry land.

Worried about the predictions, banks were reluctant to lend money to Zimbabwean farmers to put in their next crop. An El Nino did develop, but unlike most others, it did not result in drought in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe's harvest, though, was down 20 percent. Not as bad as the racist dictator Robert Mugabe has managed to do since, but bad enough.

Readers expecting to learn much about El Nino himself will be surprised. In "Our Affair with El Nino," "the Child" serves mainly as a starting point for a long essay about how science works, particularly -- but not only -- the sciences of meteorology and climatology.

Reaching out to non- (or even anti-) scientists, Philander tells the same story successively from "The Perspective of a Painter," "<\q>.<\q>.<\q>.of a Poet," and "<\q>.<\q>.<\q>.of a Musician."

In another chapter, he personalizes a cloud to make another point.

How successfully this works perhaps depends on how skittish you are about dry science. I happen to like my science like a martini, but for those whose tastes differ, "Our Affair with El Nino" could offer a palatable summary of current controversies in climatology.

There is, of course, not a great deal of controversy about El Nino, although perhaps there should be more.

The tendency to blame everything that goes wrong on El Nino has led to a backlash. For example, in the big El Nino year of 1997-8 Clark Davis of History News Service began one report sarcastically by noting that, "Corporate downsizing has proved one aspect of American life apparently unchanged by El Nino."

The big controversy in climate is, of course, global warming, and Philander, who wrote an earlier book called "Is the Temperature Rising?: The Uncertain Science of Global Warming," is in the camp that says the globe is warming and, furthermore, we're warming it.

"It will be a while before the forecasts of future climate changes <\q>.<\q>.<\q>. are as reliable as weather predictions are today," he says in his newest book. "We are therefore obliged to make policy decisions on the basis of uncertain and incomplete scientific information. How much scientific information do we need to start implementing effective policies?"

Perhaps surprisingly, considering his Zimbabwe example, Philander thinks that for global warming, we have enough now.

But he has another example -- India. El Nino conditions often, but not always, decrease rainfall in both India and Zimbabwe. (It almost always decreases rainfall in East Maui, too. Paradise is not exempt.)

The failure of the Indian monsoon no longer leads to famines "not because of advances in the prediction of the monsoons, but mainly because of critical political changes that facilitated the implementation of effective policies."

And so with climate change, he thinks.

One threat is clear enough. If the thermocline in the eastern tropical Pacific were to deepen (because of complicated events linked to human emissions of carbon dioxide), Philander believes there is a good chance the Earth could enter "permanent El Nino" conditions.

On the other hand, if without extra carbon dioxide emissions we are about to enter another Ice Age -- which history suggests might be so -- the prospect that the most productive parts of the globe might be sealed under a mile of ice does appear to be the kind of change that even "effective" governmental policies would be unlikely to mitigate.

Philander acknowledges the prospect of a coming Ice Age but for unstated reasons considers it to be thousands of years, rather than tens or hundreds, away.

Ice Ages are an unusual phenomenon in the long stretch of global history. Philander asks, "Is there a risk that the current rise in carbon dioxide levels could return us to the warm world of more than 3 million years ago?"

Or is the greater risk that it would not?

Tough choice.

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