Bello: That damned child

AS A rather younger man, Bello arrived in Lima in November 1982 just as an unprecedentedly severe El Niño current was getting under way. The sea temperature climbed to 2.2°C above average. Peru’s northern desert became a lake; bridges, roads and power lines were washed away. Emaciated pelicans flapped forlornly over the city. In drought-stricken villages in Bolivia’s barren Altiplano, families ate their seed potatoes; their children were visibly malnourished.Bello is now back in Lima. It is early winter in the southern hemisphere yet the days are unseasonably warm and sunny. Starved of the Pacific anchovies on which they normally feed, hundreds of dead sea birds have appeared on beaches in northern Peru. These are unmistakable signs of the warming of the cold waters of the south-eastern Pacific, and thus of the approach of another El Niño.Named for “the boy” (Jesus) by Peruvian fishermen more than a century ago, because it normally becomes fully apparent around Christmas, El Niño (together with its cooling sibling, La Niña) is a complex, naturally occurring weather phenomenon. Every two to seven years much of the warm water that collects in the western Pacific...



from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1pSkiZz