Mark Twain said that everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. In "El Nino", award-winning Time "RM" magazine science writer J. Madeleine Nash tells the story of scientists past and present, around the world, who did something about the incredible weather phenomenon of El Nino (and his contrary sister La Nina), which can create drought in some of the world's most tropical areas while creating havoc-wreaking storm systems on the opposite side of the globe. The story begins with a warming of the coastal waters that Peruvian fishermen have noted for centuries, and the observations of 19th Century British colonial observers who marked the correlation between famine-causing droughts and drastic changes in wind patterns and barometric pressure. For over a century and a half, scientists and explorers added links of knowledge to a chain of observations that at last created a picture of what they call ENSO: El Nino Southern Oscillation, a picture that contains within it the interplay of wind, water, and geothermal forces that violently affects the world's weather. "El Nino'"s story is filled with human drama, tragedy, and triumph.
