By Peter Snowdon
In Indonesia last year, the air was filled with a dense pall of acrid smoke which as far afield as Japan. More than a million hectares of forest burned uncontrolled.
Meanwhile, the drought which had begun as far back as April last year continued to keep the rains at bay, while the poisonous smog that hung over everything made it difficult if not impossible to ferry emergency supplies to regions where the crops had long since failed. One disaster compounded another, while politicians did what they do best — remonstrated, passed the buck and finally washed their hands.
Throughout the archipelago, conditions were worsening as the hot, dry weather stretched on and on across West Papua and into Papua New Guinea, where in mid-December, subsistence farmers faced starvation as a result of the worst drought in living memory, aggravated by unseasonable frosts in the highlands.
The world is increasingly out of joint. While delegates at climate change conferences squabble over the difference between 6% and 7% in the regulations that will govern carbon dioxide emissions in the future, the real unregulated climate is undergoing violent changes all around them.
Forest fires stalk Indonesia and northern Australia while large swathes of Ecuador and Ethiopia are washed away in floods. Papua New Guinea and Africa suffer famine as the rainy season waits and waits.
China suffers the worst floods in living memory and hurricanes kill thousands in Central America. Everywhere, it is suddenly either too hot, too wet, too dry or too cold.
Welcome to the wonderful world of el niño. Or more precisely, of ENSO — the el niño southern oscillation — the biggest climatic instability in the world, whose long-range effects embrace all five continents.
Paleo-climatological research suggests that the underlying mechanism and associated events of el niño may date back 5000 years. But it is only in the last 20 years that it has been identified as ENSO and begun to come under close scientific scrutiny.
The basic mechanics are clear. An ocean current arriving from the west loops around Australia, joining with warm water blown across the Pacific by easterly trade winds. Together they soon collide with the Indonesian archipelago and various other obstructions which prevent them from finding a way out into the Indian Ocean.
As a result, a pool of warm water accumulates around PNG. Once this pool has grown sufficiently substantial, the heat has to be dispersed and the warmth eventually sets off east towards Peru by means of a "sympathetic oscillation", while cooler water rushes in to take its place.
It is this reversal of the usual ocean currents that is known as the "southern oscillation". The easterly trade winds typical of the South Pacific drop, and the wet weather of south-east Asia take a prolonged holiday on the coast of South America, leaving its homeland exposed to droughts of varying degrees of severity.
Over the last 20 years, el niño has re-emerged as a major player in the world climate system, but the ENSO events of the last few years show signs of evolving in some disturbing ways.
In 1982-83, the west Pacific had only its second "double dry" event in recorded history, and the first since 1877-78.
For much of the intervening period, the gap between west Pacific dries (when they occurred) usually lay somewhere between five and eight years. But over the last decades there has been a steady quickening of the pulse. Since 1982-83, we have seen severe ENSO-inspired droughts in 1987, 1991, 1994 and again in 1997. The gap has narrowed to two years. Moreover, 1997's event is by some measures the most severe since 1877-78.
What is happening to el niño? Robin Harger of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Paris told me: "In the early '90s, we said that if el niño picks up in frequency and intensity, then it will mean in all probability that global warming is upon us. Now that has happened, and in spades.
"Increased temperature in the surface sea water has pushed the thing into faster and harder reaction, in order to remix the heat into the depths of the ocean. It's simple: just watch a pot of water over a hot element and see what happens when the temperature rises."
Harger, who spent 14 years in Indonesia researching the history of el niño, took part in a meeting of the United Nations Environmental Program's (UNEP) working group on ENSO events and climate change in Bangkok in 1991, which warned of the possible impact of global warming on ENSO behaviour.
For Harger, what was hypothesis in 1991 is now a certainty. "In my opinion", he said, "we are already deep into global warming. The situation on the equator is alarming, as it points to over 1.5-2.0° Celsius increase in underlying temperatures over the last 100 years, according to data from Indonesia, the Philippines and El Salvador.
"The increased frequency and intensity of el niño, the melting of glaciers, and so forth, all point to the same thing."
Harger's research has convinced him that global warming is in itself catastrophic for el niño-affected areas, whether there is a systemic relationship between the two phenomena or not.
Data collected over the last 130 years show that the range between the coldest and the warmest months of the year in Jakarta has not simply moved up the scale by a couple of degrees, but has also widened by at least a degree, as el niño has churned up cooler water from the ocean below.
One degree may not sound like much, but if you are a farmer or a fisher, you would know that it can be vital. For scientists, it also provides a rough measure of climate variability. Even leaving frequency and intensity out of account, global warming is thus exposing the archipelago to a greater range of extreme el niño behaviour than was known 100 years ago.
Billy Kessler, a US government climate researcher, speculates on how global warming might interact with el niño to produce spectacular effects.
He took the example of tropical storms, which are one of the main devices used by the ocean-atmosphere system to disperse excess heat: "Tropical storms grow at sea surface temperatures (SSTs) above 27.5° Celsius. Changing the SST from, say, 24° to 26° has little effect on storm growth, but between 27° and 28°, the atmosphere changes dramatically. With the proper heating from below, storms boil up.
"At present, the area of the tropical Pacific with SST above 27° is more than 20% larger than the area above 27.5°, so even a small general warming could greatly increase the area of ocean above the threshold.
"If this happens, then there could be big changes to the regional or global atmosphere. Therefore one might wonder if global warming could interact with el niño through changing the area of warm SST. In that case, small changes in the background temperature (such as we see from year to year) might not have much effect, but a threshold could be crossed in which the background temperature of a large part of the tropical Pacific rose above 27.5°, and then a sudden change could occur."
If it did, the consequences could be catastrophic, not just for the region, but for the whole world.
Kessler was at pains to stress that this example was merely speculation, and that the "non-linear" nature of the climate system means there could be other, unforeseeable, compensating changes, which would work to damp the whole thing down.
But for other scientists, such reticence, induced by the sheer difficulty of adequately modelling the internal structure of an el niño event, is irrelevant.
Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Council for Atmospheric Research in the US, told me: "All the evidence points toward the fact that el niño happens because if it didn't, heat would build up in the tropical Pacific.
"During el niño, heat is pumped up into the atmosphere (producing a mini global warming) and, through changes in ocean currents, carried into higher latitudes of the ocean. Because it deals fundamentally with heat, global warming will interfere with and must change el niño. It will also make its manifestations, in terms of floods and drought around the world, more severe."
When this simple physical rationale is combined with the statistical record over the last 20 years, the evidence appears compelling that the collision of global warming with ENSO is not only an accident waiting to happen, but that it may well be happening now.
Perhaps Kessler's "speculation" is a fact right now, and what we are seeing in the west Pacific are the first fruits of global warming — a world of violent extremes and radical unpredictability, in which the natural cycles on which human lives depend are torn apart.
The west Pacific warm pool where el niño starts, and where all the surface water is above Kessler's magic figure of 27.5° Celsius, is larger today than it has been at any time in recorded history.
So when will scientists decide that the warm pool is large enough to start to do something about it?
The 1991 UNEP meeting concluded that an increase in ENSO's frequency and intensity would be prima facie evidence that el niño was riding the wave of global warming. Since then, much of the missing evidence has materialised.
Yet as facts have accumulated, and people have been exposed to fire, flood and famine, instead of gathering confidence, climatologists seem instead to have become increasingly reluctant to accept the confirmation.
Instead, they have largely taken refuge in the ever greater complexities of modelling the ENSO event, or of refining their predictions of the moment of its onset and the course it will take. These fine activities seem out of place, to say the least, when the storm is about to break over your head.
If you surf through the dozens of web sites devoted to el niño, you soon get an idea of the kind of disaster most people have in mind: trouble down at Malibu Beach tends to rank higher in the list of concerns than other people's fires and famines.
Most of these sites are funded and run by US government departments. Even the ones that are not rely on satellite imagery and forecasting technologies provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
These sites provide a more-or-less useful fire service, warning people, mainly in North America, of what may be coming their way in the near future.
But of all the sites I inspected last year, only one explicitly promised information on connections between global warming and el niño. Alas, clicking on the links led only to pages providing information on either global warming or el niño; nothing on the two together.
When asked by e-mail where the missing connections were, a representative of NOAA replied: "The reason you won't find much information connecting el niño and global warming is that we [meaning the mainstream scientific community] don't really have anything useful to say at this point".
Pressed, he did admit: "Another reason is that scientists tend to shy away from questions that are so politically loaded. It [global warming-el niño] seems to mean nothing but trouble."
He added: "The plain fact is that we don't know very well at all how el niño and global warming could interact ... At least most of us know enough to keep our mouths shut when we don't know something." Or when we know what's good for us?
You don't need a degree in rocket science to see how el niño and global warming could interact, and how such an interaction might become politically loaded.
The evidence suggests that el niño may already have been driven out of its former equilibrium state, and while this semi-cyclical phenomenon is undoubtedly searching for a new equilibrium, until it gets there "chaos" would be a generous description of what we should expect.
If the 1997-98 ENSO does turn out to have the double impact for south-east Asia that many experts are openly talking about, we may be facing a humanitarian catastrophe. Not merely the intensity of this event — possibly bigger than the "great dry" of the 1870s — but the rhythm of the build-up, which has meant that for almost a decade local ecosystems have had no time to recover properly before the next blow arrived, spells disaster for food security not only in the region, but further afield, wherever el niño reaches.
Why are so many people still in denial of the potential scale of the problem? Few international bureaucrats are likely to starve if famine strikes their part of the world, but they could lose their jobs by sticking their necks out and going against the institutional consensus. And they can always comfort themselves, faced with the consequences of their inaction, that whatever happened was, after all, only a "natural" disaster.
As for the science of el niño, which suggests that there may be nothing at all "natural" about what is going on, the climate change conferences in Kyoto and Buenos Aires did their best to skirt around the whole issue, despite forceful representations from certain of the countries that suffer most acutely from ENSO-related effects.
That's hardly surprising, given that ENSO research is dominated by the developed world, and more particularly by the military establishment, which has a near-monopoly on the hardware required to collect data and construct models. Almost all the science that wants to be taken "seriously" depends upon it.
Not that there's a conspiracy of silence: who needs one? As one veteran diplomat told me: "El niño is a very, very sensitive issue in the US. So much so, that to admit that its recent behaviour was the result of global warming, and that in turn was the result of large domestic CO2 emissions, would be a fundamental contradiction in the national consciousness."
Another commentator, also speaking on condition of anonymity, was even more blunt: "The question of global hegemony depends directly on 'cheap' oil and the avoidance of pollution penalties.
"If the number one power had to operate on ... an appropriate price for oil to compensate for global warming effects, it would immediately slip from first place. In that sense, the difference in the price of a gallon of gasoline in Italy, say, and the same gallon 'elsewhere', is the margin of advantage preserved by some people in maintaining global hegemony.
"It is that difference in realised social cost or outlay vis-a-vis the available energy per gallon of gas or oil that allows the ready projection of power."
As far as the US is concerned, the advantages of global hegemony outweigh the necessity of survival. El niño — and what it may become — is the price we have to pay for McDonald's and the nutrient-free junk democracy that goes with it.
George Aditjondro, former chairperson of Walhi, Indonesia's leading environmental watchdog, may have been more right than he knew when he called last year's el niño-fanned fires "the worst ecological disaster to have hit Asia since the Vietnam War".
The South Pacific may seem a long way from Beirut or Berlin, but it isn't really. Recent research shows that ENSO may be responsible for droughts in the Middle East, as well as last summer's disastrous floods in central Europe.
When finally that storm comes in your window, just remember who you have to thank for keeping the world safe for catastrophe.
[A longer version of this article first appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly, 356, December 1997.]