El Ni帽o in History: Storming through the ages by C茅sar
Caviedes, University Press of Florida, $24.95, ISBN 0813020999
THE rogue ocean current El Ni帽o has a hidden hand in human affairs,
says C茅sar Caviedes. Its history unfolds like a Greek tragedy. However
hard the protagonists fight it, destiny rules.
According to Caviedes, empires from Asia to the Andes have risen and fallen
at its whim. General El Ni帽o defeated Hitler at Stalingrad. Nearly a
thousand kilometres north and 130 years earlier, the wiles of his sister La
Ni帽a, the flipside of this climatic phenomenon, defeated Napoleon on the
road to Moscow. An El Ni帽o drought bumped off Haile Selassie in Ethiopia
in 1974, only to depose his Marxist successors a decade later.
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El Ni帽o conjures up locust swarms and epidemics of malaria. It even
sank the Titanic. It also creates: South American deserts bloom under its benign
gaze, and centuries ago its periodic reversal of the winds across the equatorial
Pacific took Polynesian boats east to colonise the far-flung islands of the
South Pacific.
El Ni帽o in History is not the definitive guide to El
Ni帽o鈥檚 history. Caviedes, a geographer from the University of Florida, is
too inclined to adopt a blind climatic determinism, but this is a good start for
anyone keen to guess who the next victims might be. Climatologists predict a new
El Ni帽o this spring鈥�