El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker

Floridians tend to associate El Nino with hurricanes, but the Pacific -born weather system also brings droughts and mudslides, even firestorms and epidemics.Nash, a former Time magazine correspondent, explores the "teleconnectiveness" of wind, water and the world's ecological systems as she tells the story of the 1997-98 El Nino. She profiles scientists who research the mysterious weather pattern even as she describes it's effects.

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.

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.

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.