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Bloomberg News seems unaware that a principal underlying cause for both bumper crops and crop failures resides way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Climatologists and meteorologists point to a natural phenomenon known as “ENSO,” the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, while farmers around the Great Plains anxiously await tardy rains. What does ENSO mean in layman’s terms? Many have heard that El Niño (Spanish for “the boy”) weather events bring above-average moisture to the US grain belt. When that happens, certain other weather features naturally fall into place. Surface waters off the Pacific coast produce substantially more moisture from...

La Niña is the cool phase of a climate phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, often referred to as ENSO. Its warmer, better-known, sibling is known as El Niño, and there is third, neutral phase between those two on the continuum. Specific conditions for the ocean and atmosphere must be present for an El Niño or La Niña weather pattern. In the case of La Niña, below-average sea surface temperatures occur in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Easterly winds over the equator strengthen, and rainfall usually decreases over the the central and eastern tropical Pacific and increases over...

Enlarge Image Climate of violence. El Niño-Southern Oscillation events hold sway over nearly half the nations of the world, many of which have experienced surges in violence during El Niño years. Credit: Hsiang et al., Nature Tensions between the Peruvian government and the rebel group the Shining Path erupted into bloody clashes in 1982—the same year that an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event scoured potato fields across the hilly nation. Doomsayers might see cause and effect, but scientists have so far struggled to connect widespread violence with global climate phenomena. Now, a new study suggests that civil strife is...

A new peer-reviewed study calls into question the so-called ‘consensus’ on the causes of global warming by saying that “Nature, not man, responsible for recent global warming.” The new study authored by three Australian scientists and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research says that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) accounts for the vast majority of temperature variability. Authored by Chris de Freitas (University of Auckland in New Zealand), John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), the new study is sure to cause waves among those debating the causes of global warming. Completely contrary to the mainstream media’s...

ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) is the technical name given to the most prominent source of inter-annual variability in weather and climate around the world. Its ocean temperature signatures, the more widely-known La Niña and El Niño, corresponding to different phases of the oscillation, are officially defined as sustained sea surface temperature anomalies of magnitude greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. When ENSO is in the phase known as La Niña, the Pacific trade winds blow true and strong causing sun warmed surface water to pile up against Australia and Indonesia.  Cool subsurface water rises in the...

Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. The best way to garner headlines in the global warming game is to generate scary scenarios. While many people view climate change as some esoteric concern of environmentalists, they still raise their eyebrows when they hear a phrase like "global warming deaths." It's little surprise then that a recent article in Nature magazine has caught so much attention. Written by Jonathan Patz, an associate professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of...