El Nino, and the global economy

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

The temperatures are reaching 45 Celsius in New Delhi, and the record heat is claiming thousands of lives in India and Pakistan. The drought in Phnom Penh is destroying the crops of the world's poorest farmers, and in Thailand and California there is water rationing. What these events have in common, according to the climatologists, is that they are now being caused by the cyclical occurrence of the El Nino.

The effects of climate change on human life and the economy has occupied the minds of both scientists and economists, but little research has been done on this particular cyclical phenomenon. El Nino is an overal lchange of the temperature o the surface waters in the equatorial and tropical areas of the Central and Eastern Pacific Ocean well over the usual levels. This happens for a few months roughly once in five years, in the general case the average temperature rising by more than a few tenths of a degree.

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