El Niño has a very strong connection to my website The Weather Doctor. In the waning days of
the last major El Niño event, I began to decry the negative media attention paid the atmosphere,
blaming every human and global woe from floods to infected toe nails on El Niño. As a counter
action, I began The Weather Doctor in early 1998. And in those three-plus years, I have never
written about El Niño and have steered away from the plethora of books written on the subject.
One reason I had refrained was the perceived tone of the books (or at least their publicity
blurbs). But recently, three books on the El Niño phenomena (which I here use to include La
Niña and other related aspects) have changed my mind. Two (Brian Fagan's Floods, Famines,
and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations and Ross Couper-Johnston's El Niño: The
Weather Phenomenon that Changed the World) look mostly into the historical impacts of El
Niño on human society and civilization. The third is Michael H. Glantz's Currents of Change:
Impacts of El Niño and La Niña on Climate and Society.
Currents of Change is written for the lay audience and covers the scientific, environmental and
social aspects of the global El Niño phenomenon. It is an updated second edition that covers the
increases in information and knowledge gained from the major El Niño event of 1997-98.
Currents of Change is the perfect fit between highly scientific tomes such as S.G. Philander's El
Niño, La Niña and the Southern Oscillation and Couper-Johnston's popular account El Niño. Its
scientific material is clear and smoothly written and the linkages to social concerns on the mark
without being unduly alarmist. The book is divided into three sections:
Opening Section I with a look at the many definitions of what El Niño is and how we perceive it,
Glantz then proceeds to relate the history of what was known about El Niño and the Southern
Oscillation (a significant component in the El Niño atmospheric linkages) prior to Jacob
Bjerknes' seminal 1966 paper that linked the atmospheric and oceanic aspects of El Niño.
Section II takes up with the state of the scientific understanding of the El Niño phenomena from
the latter third of the previous century to the time of writing. Included here are chapters on the
structure of El Niño, La Niña and their components; the state of El Niño forecasting; the
identification of some of the El Niño impacts on global weather patterns (teleconnections); and
impacts on ecology. In doing so, Glantz does not shy away from telling us that what we know
about El Niño is still a work in progress, ever changing as scientists gain new insights with
further analysis of past events and will continue to do so as new events occur.
Unfortunately at this point, I do have to toss one large fly into my honey of praise for Currents of
Change. Glantz has included a series of monthly surface water temperature charts for the central
Pacific Ocean to illustrate the shifting of warm and cold waters during the El Niño cycle of
1997-1999. The charts are arranged so that it is possible to animate the cycle by flipping the
pages. However, the easiest, and I think the most natural, way to flip the pages --placing the
book on a flat surface and flipping from back pages to front -- runs the time sequence in reverse!
A poor job of technical editing on the part of the publisher in my opinion that detracts from the
overall package.
Good as Section II is at describing the science and what we still need to learn about El Niño, I
reserve my highest marks for Section III. Here, Glantz asks the burning social question: "Why
Care About El Niño and La Niña?" While he adds some additional concerns over human health
impacts to topics (e.g., fisheries, agriculture, damage to infrastructure) covered in previous
chapters, the majority of the section looks into why El Niño had become such a media event and
why we are continued to be so surprised by an irregularly recurrent natural event such as El
Niño. He concludes with chapters on what people need to know about El Niño -- the most
established truths and those "knowledge" traps about El Niño the public needs to know about.
If I had the powers, I would make this third section required reading for anyone practising or
studying science/environmental journalism as well as current and future scientists themselves.
And considering its wider application as an analogy for other science topics on the role of the
media in general science education, perhaps it should be read by all wishing to be scientifically
informed citizens.
Overall, Currents of Change by Michael H. Glantz is a book I most highly recommend. It is well
written and illustrated and provides a needed light of reason amidst all the wobbly-spun media
hype over the past El Niño. Buy a copy now so that you will be properly informed in the next
warm phase of the El Niño cycle. I hear the "Little Lad" is coming up the walk!
Keith C. Heidorn, PhD, ACM
THE WEATHER DOCTOR
August 10, 2001
Order Currents of Change: Impacts of El Niño and LA Niña on Climate and Society Today!