El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker [Hardcover]

J. Madeleine Nash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 2002

Mark Twain said that everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. In El Nino, award-winning Time 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. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

El Niño, the Pacific Ocean-born weather system that has been much in the news over the last decade, "turns dry places wet, wet places dry, cold places warm, and warm places cold." Scientists have only begun to puzzle out its mysterious and erratic workings, a quest that Time magazine science correspondent Madeleine Nash chronicles in this engaging book.

What those scientists have learned, Nash tells us, underscores the interconnectedness--and, in her words, the "teleconnectiveness"--of the world's ecological systems. El Niño may be born in the subtropical waters of the western Pacific (where, among other things, it has helped spark great firestorms in Australia and drought in Indonesia), but its influence extends around the globe. Moreover, Nash writes, El Niño touches billions of human lives, taking a role in the spread of diseases such as hantavirus and threatening food and water supplies. With the ever-growing human population and the enduring presence of the weather system and its cyclical counterpart, things are only likely to get worse, she tells us: "the torrential rains and searing droughts connected with future El Niños and La Niñas will mean still more loss of lives and property."

Nash's inquiry into world weather and the science surrounding it makes for lively, and sometimes unsettling, reading. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

This is the story of the perfect storm system, El Nino, which in its 1997-1998 incarnation created aberrant weather conditions across the world, often with devastating results. Nash, a former science correspondent for Time magazine, does not have an easy narrative structure (the progress of a storm) and obvious characters (those caught in that storm), as other books on bad weather do. She compensates by crisscrossing the stories of the scientists who have studied the incredibly complex system with those who have been affected. The book begins with a California couple waiting for torrential rains brought on by El Nino to wash away a nearby hill and carry the debris into their own house. Readers get a fascinating glimpse of the Peruvian fisherman who first noticed the sign that heralds El Nino: the periodic disappearance of a normally bounteous catch. Nash observes Africa's Rift Valley and the American Southwest, where El Nino encouraged terrible outbreaks of fever. Few places escape unscathed by the system. In between tragedies, the author interviews several key researchers: Gilbert Thomas Walker, a British mathematician, who in India began connecting the various effects of El Nino into one spectacular system; glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, who studies ice caps in the Peruvian mountains; and Ants Leetmaa, who first blew the whistle on El Nino, correctly predicting the most recent event despite much public doubt (he was even teased by NBC weatherman Al Roker on Larry King Live). Nash does a good job holding such disparate material together and bringing alive such an abstract, albeit dynamic, system.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books (March 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446524816
• ISBN-13: 978-0446524810
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,324,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a storm, March 7, 2002

By 

magmolian (IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker (Hardcover)

Nash brings a complex subject to life through stories of the maverick, and occasionally ridiculed, scientists who hunted El Nino over the centuries. She has a delicate touch and paints vivid images of El Nino's glory and its fury, effortlessly explaining seemingly impenetrable science to make it relevant and, more importantly, interesting to the lay reader. Nash has a journalist's way of getting to the point, so there's nothing extraneous is this tightly written narrative. If you liked "Longitude", "Cod", or "Guns, Germs & Steel", or you're simply a fan of the Weather Channel, "El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker" is one you don't want to miss.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An historical storm, July 20, 2002

By 

J. J. Kwashnak "voracious reader" (Monroe, LA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker (Hardcover)

Warm wet winters, hot dry summers - calling cards of the weather pattern El Nino. How something so huge, impacting so many lives across the globe was not recognized truly until the past couple of decades is one of the points that Nash tries to make. After the first few chapters, looking at historical meteorological records and the understanding of El Nino, she continues on and places this weather maker in a larger historical, social and political context. How El Nino and La Nina patterns can affect disease spread, the life cycles of other animals and coral, and the growth and destruction of civilizations are topics for exploration. For El Nino truly defies the traditional way of thinking about climatology and pulls back the view to the global scale.

Despite being so focused on a weather maker, the book is fairly jargon free. You don't need to know you isobars from your relative humidity. Some basic science knowledge makes it easier to follow many of her points, but you are not lost in geek speak. I did find that often she would talk about glacial formations using words that she never defines, which makes it harder to make a mental picture, but these problems are few and far between. I walked away with a better understanding of what is going on, and understand the how far we have to go in truly understanding this climate controller. A must for anyone who watches the Weather Channel.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars El Nino Deconvoluted, March 31, 2002

By 

Trish (Colorado) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker (Hardcover)

Ms. Nash has done an admirable job of reconstructing the research background on this topic. Her book will certainly increase the public understanding of El Nino and meteorology in general. A downside for me was writing the book as if it were an article in a waiting room magazine e.g. p113 "Painted a gay red and white, these doughnut-shaped buoys sported whirligig instruments known as anemometers for measuring wind speeds and jaunty antennas....)" This is annoying to someone who is seriously intersted in this fascinating phenomenon.