EL NINO AND US: HELL, HIGH WATER AND HYPE

When the rains failed and the crops died and the locusts came and all hell broke loose, the primitives of old knew why: they had offended the gods. They would offer a sacrifice--a virgin, perhaps--to put things right.

We moderns are too sophisticated to believe such nonsense. (And anyway, where would we find a virgin?) Instead, we blame all our earthly woes on...El Nino.

The El Nino panic is in full bloom. It's been blamed for an invasion of Argentine ants in Southern California, for starving seabirds off Oregon, for albatrosses abandoning their nests in the Galapagos Islands. An Israeli scientist thinks El Nino irregularities occasioned the biblical famine that led to the Jews' entry into Egypt--thus offering the nice ecumenical touch of El Nino, Spanish for the Christ Child, accounting for Passover.

Most, if not all, of these attributions are bunk. But if you are selling umbrellas in Los Angeles, where a 500% increase in rainfall was predicted--well, that was weeks ago; it's down to 150%--you don't care. Business is good.

Now, there is nothing unusual about an El Nino. It is a perfectly normal cycle of Pacific waters' warming every two to seven years, altering jet-stream flows and cloud formation. This changes the weather over most of the globe in fairly predictable, entirely natural ways. It alternates with the La Nina cycle, which cools the waters and creates mostly contrary effects. It's been going on, as far as we can tell, for millennia.

Why then the hysteria? This El Nino appeared from early data to be particularly strong. Hence the emergency preparations everywhere from California to South Africa. The major anticipated event for California is heavy rain. Some meteorologists, however, remain skeptical and distinctly unimpressed by the grim Noachian predictions. For example, Jan Null of the National Weather Service in Monterey, Calif., points out that in the eight heaviest El Nino years, California experienced on average only about a one-third increase in rainfall. In fact, two of these years, 1965 and 1991, brought drought.

The fact is that no one knows how severe this El Nino will be. There is nothing wrong with making preparations for the possibility of an extreme event. But other than being good for the umbrella business in L.A., the El Nino hype is simply stirring fear.

That does not, however, deter Vice President Al Gore, who lives in a state of perpetual environmental anxiety and will seize whatever weather event is at hand to justify it. Addressing the El Nino Community Preparedness Summit in Santa Monica, Calif., last month, Gore was quite unwilling to let El Nino speak for itself. After describing in lurid detail its predicted effects, he went into the presumed effects of global warming. Then, having set the trap, he sprang it: "While there is no definite link between El Ninos and overall climate change," he said (referring to global warming), "it is worth looking at recent patterns"--which he then presented so as to suggest precisely such a linkage.

In fact, however, there is no evidence that El Ninos are caused or intensified or made more frequent by global warming. Indeed, the only thing global warming and El Nino have in common is that they are both about a warming. So is making toast.