El Nino Is More Than Hype No Catastrophes Yet, But Warmer Oceans Producing Worldwide Mischief

Some people believe the ballyhooed El Nino is more hype than reality. Others think it’s already going away.

They are wrong.

Although El Nino has had few of its predicted catastrophic effects in Northern California, the ocean-warming phenomenon already has produced mischief elsewhere by disrupting normal weather patterns.

At Christmas Island, one of the world’s most dazzling atolls and the mid-Pacific haven for one of the globe’s biggest bird populations, the birds are gone and the coral reefs are dying.

In the Malay Archipelago, the late monsoons and the lingering effects of widespread forest fires are endangering food crops and threatening hunger. In Indonesia, El Nino-aided forest fires are under control, but acid rain, soil erosion and flooding now loom.

In Australia, bush fires and drought foreshadow crop and livestock losses, promising drastically higher food prices.

In Venezuela and other South American countries, medical experts fear malaria epidemics similar to or worse than those that followed previous, and smaller, El Nino episodes. Dengue and cholera outbreaks also are feared in other parts of the world.

In Papua New Guinea, several hundred people already have starved to death, and hundreds of thousands are short of food.

In Somalia, floods have worsened food and medical shortages; in northeast Brazil, drought threatens the precious, life-giving rain forest; and in many other places, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, El Nino is believed responsible for flooding and other severe weather.

Less serious effects already include upward pressure on coffee prices because of expected shortages in coffee-growing regions; Starbucks, which has 1,400 shops in the United States, is buying coffee ahead because of expected shortages and price increases. The lack of snow also may hamper the Winter Olympics in February in Japan.

In California, the first El Nino-spawned storm of the season produced flooding, mudslides, wind and heavy surf that did widespread damage in Southern California earlier this month. But even before then, its pernicious effects were being felt: Thousands of northern fur seals and other aquatic mammals are dead or dying from starvation and malnutrition; many thousands more are in peril.

“We’re on the edge of a catastrophe,” says Daniel Nepstad, a scientist for the Woods Hole Research Center in Cope Cod, Mass., referring to the Amazon rain forest, which even at its pristine core is dangerously dry and flammable. Fires already have ravaged parts of the rain forest.

El Nino, of course, is not the only cause - destructive logging and other practices have done their damage.

But the combination means the danger to the rain forest “has been taken to another level,” says Steve Schwartzman, director of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Suddenly, it’s gone from a slow, incremental process of cutting virgin rain forest to a potentially catastrophic situation.”

Adds Nepstad: “A lot of the Amazon has lost its capacity to protect itself from fire. When the forest is this dry, small fires can turn into giant ones and take off into primary forests.”

The warnings came during last week’s international conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan, and threw new focus on the connections between the periodic but increasingly frequent El Nino phenomenon and the dangers of global warming.

Tropical forests absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that traps solar heat and is thought to increase global warning. Moreover, scientists estimate that burning half of the Amazon would release 35 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere - the equivalent of six years’ worth of worldwide fossil fuel emissions.

El Nino-influenced fires in the Amazon basin and other rainfalls are at an all-time high; forest fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon into the air this year as all fossil fuel emissions in Europe.

“If you put Indonesian burning and Amazon burning together, you’d see that more of the world was on fire in 1997 than ever in recorded history,” said Thomas Lovejoy, an ecological consultant at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The fires, drought and concomitant shortages of grains and other food worldwide sharply increase the likelihood of mass starvation in the wake of the current El Nino episode, already the biggest ever recorded and, many scientists believe, the biggest ever.