The rage of El Nino

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 21

The rage of El Nino

® Over the past 12 months the world’s weather has gone haywire. Spectacular storms have left thousands dead or starving. There is growing evidence that much of this destruction and misery stems from a single, mysterious phenomenon. On the Pacific coast of South America it is known as the “Christ-child” — El Nino. ROSEMARY RIGHTER reports for the “Sunday Times,” London, with research by Peter Collins, and additional reporting from Eric Marsden (Johannesburg), John Barnes (Malibu), Mary Ann Weaver (New Delhi), Tan Lian Choo (Singapore).

In the South African black “homeland” of Lebowa, in western Transvaal, those that can have to walk four miles for a can of water. They are lucky to be on their feet.

Nearly half a million blacks in Lebowa are in desperate need of help, and the hospitals are described by relief workers as “like concentration camps” — filled beyond capacity by children with matchstick legs, pot bellies, and body sores. It is much the same story in other homelands — Kwazulu, Kangwane, and Gazankulu, for example — as South Africa’s whole economy and way of life is upended by the worst drought this century. In neighbouring Botswana, food supplies in the rural areas are exhausted. In Zimbabwe, normally a grain exporter, the daily meal of thousands of villagers in the north of the country is now baked grass; no rain is due until September.

Across the Indian Ocean in Madras, there is . what meteorologists describe as a “water famine.” The reservoirs have dried up and in a desperate attempt to make rain, the city authorities called in an American company, Atmospheric Incorporated, to begin emergency “cloud-seeding” operations.

While parts of Africa and India may be used to drought, Indonesia, plumb in the tropics, is not. Yet there, nearly a million people are now threatened by famine. That is one extraordinary face of the world’s weather in the past 12 months; there is another. Across the world, countries from Polynesia to the United States and Chile have been hit by floods and storms which have turned semideserts into swamps, and sent rivers of raw sewage through Latin America’s teeming cities. The weather has wreaked economic devastation on countries already struggling with mammoth foreign

debt, and caused hundreds of deaths as villages have been covered by giant mudslides.

Fisheries have been destroyed and the entire bird population of Christmas Island, estimated at 17 million, has disappeared. Even Europe has not totally escaped. In West Germany, the citizens of Cologne are still clearing up after floods that put the city under five feet of water at the end of May. In France, the precious vineyards of Macon, and parts of Burgundy and Beaujolais, disappeared under water when the River Saone burst its banks. Britain has been comparatively lucky, although last month Dorset was pelted with hailstones the size of tennis balls.

Of course, erratic weather and violent changes in the pattern are not unusual. However, meteorological experts in Washington, who have been monitoring the mayhem around the world, say that the extremes of the past year have been “the most varied and farreaching we can remember.” There is, at the very least, a firm suspicion that the cause of it all can be linked to one freak and extraordinary act of nature. The first warning was spotted in April last year. A vast area of the surface of the Pacific Ocean began to warm up. Then the southeasterly trade winds slackened, and gradually veered round to the west. By September, the Pacific had begun quite literally to slosh over to its eastern seaboard, and a great wave of warm water began to sweep towards the coast of Latin America. El Nino was on its way.

Scientists are only just beginning to get the measure of the Pacific, by far the world’s largest ocean. Mariners have charted its currents and winds for centuries, but systematic satellite monitoring has only been possible since the 19505. Nevertheless, it is now known that this huge mass of predominantly cold water acts as the main “mem-

ory” for the world’s climate, and that it engenders global forces so powerful as to dwarf the impact even of the largest volcanic eruption.

Nothing better demonstrates its power than El Nino. Every few years, the ocean’s surface mysteriously develops warm patches and begins to “slosh” towards Latin America. The forces that this shift of water creates then inter-connect with a vast vertical rotating system in the atmosphere known as the Walker Cell — after the British scientist, Sir Gilbert Walker, who first observed it 60 years ago. The great sweep of warm water, drawing with it the Walker Cell, fetches up on the shores of Peru soon after Christmas — hence El Nino, the Spanish for Christ-child. Its effects are never benevolent. In 1972, its warm waters, flowing over the cold Humboldt Current, killed the anchovies and destroyed one of Peru’s staple industries.

American scientists have come to believe that the backlash of the Walker Cell — see map — is associated with catastrophic droughts or abnormally low monsoon rains in India.

The present El Nino is particularly malevolent — and a freak. It began not as normal in the eastern Pacific, but in the western and central areas of the ocean, drawing the Walker Cell from its usual route. It has not yet begun to subside, as it should. It is, according to the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation, “the most severe El Nino since records began.”

French Polynesia was the first to feel its wrath — hit, from June last year onwards, by the worst cyclones in living memory. Then, when it reached Peru — not at Christmas but last November — El Nino raised the sea level by 15 to 20 centimetres. Water temperatures rose to 32 degrees centigrade in places — seven degrees above normal, and six de-

grees above those associated with other El Ninos. The warm waters heated the lower atmosphere, and the resulting vapour ascended nine miles before spreading, condensing and precipitating the storms which have raged ever since. The northern jet-stream — the high-speed westerly wind which circles the Earth — was drawn 10 degrees south, and intensified the turbulence.

The results have been disastrous for the region. In Peru crops have been devastated and the mudslides have buried whole villages, and swept away part of the PanAmerican highway. Severe storms have also hit Chile and northern Argentina. Guayaquil in Ecuador received 15 times its normal May rainfall — three times the previous record; since November almost 10 feet of rain has fallen.

Far north of Peru, in the United States, El Nino’s storms laid waste $6OO million worth of prime Californian seaside property, and tossed huge sections of the Pacific Coast highway into the sea. In March, it renewed its force, welcoming the Queen to California with high winds and torrential rain. Now, worse is in store as searing temperatures begin to melt the snow dumped last winter in the high Sierras, causing mudslides and threatening to turn California’s central valley — which produces a quarter of the nation’s food — into one gigantic lake. The $2OO million strawberry crop cannot be harvested. Further east, 500 tornadoes have ripped through Texas, and 45 inches of rain in Mississippi put 600,000 acres of farmland under water.

The other side of the coin is what has happened in those countries which feel the backlash of the Walker Cell. For as it follows El Nino, creating tempests before it,

it leaves drought in its wake. Since 1972, when an intensive study of El Nino began, scientists have discovered that the phenomenon does have some global impact. How far reaching the effects are, however, is a matter of some controversy. The Diagnostics Branch of the United States Climate Analysis Centre firmly links the combined effects of El Nino and the Walker Cell with events as far away as Southern Africa. The

World Meteorological Organisation suspects a connection, but says it has not yet been fully established. Even so, it seems likely that the havoc El Nino created in the United States has carried through, in milder form, to Western Europe. It is known that weather in the Pacific affects the smaller Atlantic, and the jet-streams provide a powerful westerly impetus. What has happened over Western Europe this spring has been an

atmospheric blockage: major low pressure areas and their accompanying depressions, which normally traverse slowly eastwards, got stuck — hence Britain’s miserable weather,and the radiant heat-wave in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. There is also little doubt that, as the Walker Cell moved east, it left drought in its wake from Australia to South-East Asia and affected atmospheric pressures over the Indian Ocean. After poor monsoons in 1981, India had none last year and drought now afflicts threequarters of the country.

Relief workers there describe bleak tales of tragedy affecting more than 200 million people. From Ragasthan to Tamil Nadu in the south, peasants are trekking to the towns, where at least they can queue for water rations. With 43 million acres of land parched and bare, India will have to import five to eight million tonnes of grain this year.

In normally lush Kerala, the coconut groves are scorched, half the harvest ruined, and the sea has invaded the river beds up to 25 miles from the coast. In Delhi last week bureaucratic tempers were getting shorter as they shuffled urgent pleas for federal aid; Kerala and Tamil Nadu alone have asked for $5OO million. Meanwhile, across Southern Africa, the rains failed last year and again early this year — and though the case may not yet be proven there is evidence that African rainfall is correlated with El Nino events. In South Africa itself, already suffering the worst drought this century, the failure of rain to come in September will spell national catastrophe. White farmers are going bankrupt by the hundred, and the country — which is normally Africa’s bread basket — expects to have to import $4.6 million worth of United States maize this year. Rich as South Africa is, 1.5 million of its black people are now seriously short of food and water. The situation is worst in the “homelands” — arid even in normal times. In Lebowa, hospitals and clinics report an increase of 30 per cent in the starvation-related disease, kwashiorkor. A hospital sister admitted: “We are discharging babies after two weeks because we need the beds for the newcomers — but we just don’t know how many of them will die.” Zimbabwe, which also normally exports grain, is caught in what British Government sources call “the worst drought since records began in 1890.” In strife-torn Matabeleland, church workers say 50,000 children under five are suffering from malnutrition. Cattle, too emaciated to be slaughtered for beef, fetch only $lO each — for their

hides and the glue from their hooves. The union of Zimbabwe’s farmers, most of them black, estimates that 300,000 cattle have died. In Mozambique, deaths from starvation have already begun.

Far to the north, in the subSaharan Sahel, the drought has never really lifted since the 1973 disaster. However, since last year, the effects of El Nino may have pulled southwards the converging point between the north and south airstreams, preventing rains from reaching the region. In Ethiopia, a little rain earlier last month has not altered the fact that between two and three million people are now seriously at risk from famine.

The big question is how soon will El Nino subside? Off Peru, the atmospheric temperatures have started to fall, and this may have contributed to the feeble beginnings in south India last week of the monsoon.

Although it is winter in Peru, and the cold Humboldt Current should be flowing in force, the sea temperatures have dropped by only one degree centigrade; and still no sign of the south-east trade winds picking up strength. The World Meteorological Organisation believes there is a chance of a good Indian monsoon — but only if the Pacific waters cool. This El Nino has been so out of the ordinary that nobody really knows what to expect. Even when the ocean does cool, and slosh back to the west, there could be a second “warming” and a repetition. Even without that it is likely to take over a year for the Pacific to return to normal. So far El Nino is estimated to have caused agricultural damage worth about $12,000 million; damage to property accounts for another billion dollars. Only 700 deaths have so far been recorded — but the death toll among children under five in Southern Africa is now running at one out of every two.

It is probably true that, even if this freak El Nino had been predicted, little could have been done to prevent the tragedies and destruction it has caused. As it was, the early development of the phenomenon was obscured from satellites by the eruption of the El Chichon volcano in Mexico, which shot dust up to 18 miles into the atmosphere. Ironically, that eruption will begin to effect the world’s climate in 1984-85 — just as El Nino subsides. Its impact will be less dramatic, but equally significant. As the dust spreads, it is expected to cool global temperatures by about one degree centigrade. Yet that small change will be enough to shorten the growing season in many countries by two vital weeks.