Kamal Ghorui
On a malign force that has the world worrying
Early warning signals are flashing. A big bad bully is rolling up its sleeves, and is all set to go into action, making people in many parts of the world fear what the bully will do, and when, and where, he’ll do it.
The only predictable thing about the bully, say experts, whose job it is to predict the bully’s behavioural patterns, is that the only thing it can be predicted to do is the unpredictable, being whimsical, capricious, and contrary to all rules of rationality and logic.
The bully in question is not a person, but a climatic phenomenon, called El Nino, which means Little Boy in Spanish, a name that was given to it by Peruvian fisherfolk, who first noted it in the 19th century.
El Nino has a sidekick, called the Southern Oscillation, SO for short, and they are tagged together as ENSO.
The disastrous duo work in tandem to hijack that huge weather machine, called the monsoon, on which hundreds of millions of farmers in India, and other parts of South Asia, are crucially dependent.
El Nino raises the temperature of the water in the south-central Pacific, while the SO increases the atmospheric temperature in the same region.
This double whammy plays merry havoc with the wind currents that propel the rain-bearing monsoon clouds to the mainland. The result is that the monsoon, which is vital not just for farmers, but for entire national economies, gets inordinately delayed, or diverted, like those AI flights, the passengers of which are left clueless as to when or where they’ll eventually end up.
Meteorologists in US and in India simultaneously have sounded alarm bells that El Nino, and its SO buddy, are preparing to launch their combined assault in early summer this year, spelling prolonged heat waves, drought, and crop failure, and are urging govts to batten down their hatches the best they can.
To begin with, a name change might be in order. El Nino is too cuddly cute for something that evokes fears of such epic fury. El Donaldo? And its SO comrade-in-arms, Bibi?
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