S. George H. Philander

on El Niño & the
uncertain science
of global warming

Most people ½rst heard of El Niño in
1997 when newspapers and television
gave extensive coverage to various di-
sasters associated with that phenome-
non: devastating floods in California,
severe droughts in Indonesia, and
strange weather everywhere. Everybody
became familiar with El Niño, but few
realized that the phenomenon has been
with us for millennia and that, at ½rst, it
was welcomed as a blessing. Originally
the name was given to a modest, warm
current that appears along the shores
of Ecuador and northern Peru around

S. George H. Philander is professor of meteorol-
ogy in the geosciences department at Princeton
University. A Fellow of the American Academy
since 2003, he is the author of numerous articles
and books, including “Is the Temperature Rising?
The Uncertain Science of Global Warming”
(1998). This essay is based on his book “Our
Affair with El Niño: How We Transformed an
Enchanting Peruvian Current into a Global
Climate Hazard,” forthcoming from Princeton
University Press.

Christmastime when the accompanying
rains transform the barren coastal desert
of that region into a garden. (The term is
Spanish for ‘the boy’ and refers to Child
Jesus.)

Over the past few decades, even

though the phenomenon has remained
essentially constant, our perceptions of
it have undergone a remarkable trans-
formation. We now regard El Niño as
a global hazard that we anticipate with
trepidation. It is as if we, temperamen-
tal and capricious, have been having a
stormy affair with aloof, indifferent El
Niño.

Our affair is approaching a critical
juncture. By rapidly increasing the at-
mospheric concentration of greenhouse
gases, we are changing the climate of
this planet, and hence El Niño. What
have we learnt from our affair that can
help us avoid a calamity?

An important lesson learnt thus far
amounts to a paradox: as we grow in
wealth and in population, so does our
vulnerability to natural hazards. Insur-
ance companies ½nd that claims related
to damages inflicted by severe storms,
hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, etc. are
rising steeply even though there is no
evidence of an increase in the number
and intensity of those hazards. The rains
associated with El Niño still turn the
desert of Ecuador into a garden, but
today few people have time to behold
that miracle; they are preoccupied with
the roads, bridges, and houses that are
washed away by the rains.

In our efforts to cope with natural haz-

ards, we routinely ask scientists to pre-
dict those phenomena. Meteorologists
have responded by transforming daily
weather prediction from an augury into
a reliable source of important informa-
tion–a splendid achievement that near-
ly everyone takes for granted. Scientists
are also making progress with the pre-

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Note by
S. George H.
Philander

diction of longer-term climate fluctua-
tions that are strongly influenced by
oceanic conditions. For a long time, the
lack of measurements was a serious
handicap. Until recently, oceanogra-
phers gathered much of their data from
solitary vessels that they navigated by
means of stars and sextants. (Asking for
a “tall ship, and a star to steer her by”
was not simply a romantic wish but a
practical necessity.) The measurements
thus obtained tell us much about the
‘steady’ aspects of the oceanic circula-
tion, but not about its variability.

To explore the ‘weather’ of the ocean

requires simultaneous measurements
over large areas for extended periods.
Such measurements ½rst became avail-
able through an international ½eld pro-
gram in 1957, as, fortuitously, El Niño
occurred. It then became clear that the
interannual warming of the waters off
Ecuador and Peru–the signature of El
Niño–extends far westward across the
entire ocean basin and affects atmos-
pheric conditions globally. Resources
for exploring such climate fluctuations,
especially their oceanic aspects, in-
creased signi½cantly in the decades after
the launching of Sputnik (also in 1957).
This led to rapid scienti½c advances
that brought oceanographers to the real-
ization that the warming of the eastern
equatorial Paci½c during El Niño is a
consequence of changes in the winds
over the ocean. To meteorologists, how-
ever, that warming causes the changes
in the winds. This circular argument
implies that El Niño is neither a strictly
atmospheric nor a strictly oceanic phe-
nomenon, but is attributable to interac-
tions between the ocean and atmosphere
that give rise to spontaneous oscillations
between complementary warm (El Ni-
ño) and cold (La Niña) conditions. To
ask why El Niño and La Niña occur is
equivalent to asking why a pendulum
swings back and forth.

Scienti½c progress was so rapid that,

although the exceptionally intense El
Niño of 1982 caught everyone by com-
plete surprise, by 1997 oceanographers
could anticipate the arrival of the phe-
nomenon several months in advance.
This was an impressive achievement, but
it had an unfortunate blemish that illus-
trates how dif½cult it is to bridge the
worlds of science and human affairs.

During the summer of 1997, scientists
alerted Californians that a very intense
El Niño would probably deliver excep-
tionally heavy rains to their state during
the upcoming winter. Scientists also
advised the people of Zimbabwe that
rainfall there would probably be below
normal. Californians did indeed experi-
ence floods, and were prepared, but
Zimbabweans had normal rainfall and
were unprepared. Because of the expec-
tation that crops would be poor, and
thus unpro½table, banks in Zimbabwe
declined loans to farmers. The conse-
quences were dire: crop production fell
20 percent below normal in the impover-
ished country.

The tragedy in Zimbabwe raises many
questions. Did the policymakers of that
country fail to appreciate the signi½-
cance of probabilistic forecasts? Or did
they cynically welcome the forecast of a
mysterious phenomenon that threatens
from the remote Paci½c as an effective
means for diverting attention from seri-
ous local political problems? Did the
scientists, in their eagerness to demon-
strate that their results can be useful,
emphasize the large uncertainties insuf-
½ciently?

History tells us that accurate scienti½c
information concerning environmental
hazards is of enormous value, and also
that much can be accomplished even
when that information has large uncer-
tainties. Consider, for example, the occa-
sional failure of the Indian monsoons
that results in poor harvests. The conse-

106

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El Niño
& the
uncertain
science
of global
warming

quences used to include horrendous
famines and the deaths of millions. At
½rst it was assumed that a solution to
this problem required accurate forecasts
of the monsoons; but for several decades
now, there have been no disasters com-
parable to the famines of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, even
though the monsoons still fail occasion-
ally, and even though the predictions of
such failures still have huge uncertain-
ties. India learnt to cope with poor mon-
soons after it became a democracy and
started developing and implementing
effective policies that do not require pre-
cise scienti½c information. (Famines are
attributable not to a lack of food, but to
problems with the distribution of food.)
Hurricanes are further examples of haz-
ards whose impact can be minimized,
even in the absence of accurate predic-
tions, by implementing appropriate poli-
cies–by discouraging the construction
of buildings too close to hurricane-prone
shorelines.

From our affair with El Niño it is evi-
dent that we tend to see ourselves as the
innocent victims of natural hazards, and
are reluctant to acknowledge that the
way we live and conduct our affairs con-
tributes to our vulnerability. In the case
of future global warming, our role in cre-
ating potential problems is more explic-
it. But this issue is very complex because
the current rapid increase in the atmos-
pheric concentration of greenhouse
gases is an unfortunate byproduct of in-
dustrial and agricultural activities that
bring us considerable bene½ts–increas-
ing standards of living for the rich and
poor alike. In weighing the costs and
bene½ts, we should keep in mind that
the technological advances that have
brought the bene½ts have also brought
grave responsibilities. We have become
the custodians of Earth because our re-
cently acquired technological prowess is
such that we now are geologic agents

capable of interfering with the processes
that make this a habitable planet. We
are capable of inducing global climate
changes so that the decisions we make
today will affect not only our offspring
for many generations to come, but also
all of the other forms of life on this
planet.

The future of our planet is too serious

a matter to be left strictly to scientists
and economists. Everyone has to partici-
pate in the discussion of environmental
policies, which means that everyone
should have at least a rudimentary un-
derstanding of how our planet maintains
the conditions that allow us to prosper.
This is a daunting challenge, given the
immense complexity of our planet. It is
therefore heartening that we have had
enormous success in coping with a sys-
tem even more complex than our plan-
et, namely the human body. We have
increased life expectancy by several de-
cades by strongly supporting activities
that contribute to the prevention of dis-
eases. Each of us needs to become as in-
formed about Earth, and the effects of
our daily activities on the environment,
as we are about our own bodies. To live
in harmony with nature, a passionate ex-
pression of concern about the environ-
ment is no substitute for a rudimentary
understanding of the way Earth func-
tions and of our impact on the environ-
ment.

In the debate about global warming,
many people appear to be unaware that,
because the growth in the atmospheric
concentration of greenhouse gases over
the past century has been exponential,
merely reducing the rate at which we
burn fossil fuels can amount to a signi½-
cant mitigation of the potential prob-
lems we face. Greater ef½ciency will
make the limited supply of fuels last
longer, will make us less dependent on
imports from other countries, will re-
duce the rate at which we emit green-

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house gases into the atmosphere, and
hence will delay the onset of the kind of
global climate changes that are liable to
turn El Niño into a serious hazard.

Our affair with El Niño is approaching

a critical juncture. Constant El Niño
could soon become ½ckle. Will he grow
more intense? Will his brief visits be-
come prolonged? As yet we have no
de½nite answers. But we have learnt that
much can be done to avoid calamities
by implementing appropriate policies,
even when the available scienti½c infor-
mation has large uncertainties. Above
all, we need to guard against the tempta-
tion to defer dif½cult political decisions
because of a perceived need for more ac-
curate information. Much more can be
learnt from our affair with El Niño. We
need to do so in a hurry, before we suc-
ceed in changing him.

Linda Hutcheon

on the art of
adaptation

Despite the argument implicit in Spike
Jonze’s latest ½lm, Adaptation, every age
can justly claim to be an age of adapta-
tion. The desire to transfer a story from
one medium or one genre to another is
neither new nor rare in Western culture.
It is in fact so common that we might
suspect that it is somehow the inclina-
tion of the human imagination–and,
despite the dismissive tone of some crit-
ics, not necessarily a secondary or deriv-
ative act. After all, most of Shakespeare’s
plays were adapted from other literary or
historical works, and that does not seem
to have damaged the Bard’s reputation

Linda Hutcheon, a Fellow of the American Acad-
emy since 2003, is professor of English and com-
parative literature at the University of Toronto.
Her theoretical works include “Narcissistic Nar-
rative: The Meta½ctional Paradox” (1980),
“The Politics of Postmodernism” (1989), and
“A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction” (1998). Most recently she edited, with
Mario J. Valdés, “Rethinking Literary History:
A Dialogue on Theory” (2002).

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