На задната корица:

"What was amazing was not that the storms that hit California and Florida were linked to one another, but that they were both linked to a distant climatological upheaval that, in May of 1997, radiated out from the dark blue waters of the tropical Pacific. Over an astonishingly short period of time this shuddering convulsion had managed to rearrange the flow of weather across a large portion of the globe.... Chileans basked on strangely balmy beaches in their winter and Mexicans shiv­ered under a chilly coverlet of fresh-fallen snow during theirs. Peruvians wondered at a great lake that appeared in the middle of the Sechura Desert, while Indonesians suffered through a scalding drought that shriveled crops and allowed wildfires to blaze out of control.

"Amazing as it all seemed, these global reversals of fortune all shared the same cause: El Nino..."

*

От вътрешната страна на обложката:

El Nino. It brings droughts, mud slides, killer storms, and even epidemics and hordes of frogs and rats. Now, for the first time, here is the com­plete—and fascinating—story of the powerful weather-maker known as El Nino.

In this saga of scientists and civilians, murderous storms and ecological shifts, award-winning TIME magazine science writer J. Madeleine Nash reveals the mysterious sources of El Nino and its far-reaching, almost unbelievable effects on the lives of people around the world. She shows us how this vast climatic upheaval unites diverse disasters ranging from the worst outbreak of Rift Valley fever on record in East Africa... to forest fires on Borneo so hot and out of control that their eruption was immediately detected by orbit­ing satellites... to the accelerated shrinking of an ice cap in the Andes 18,700 feet high.

From the Peruvian fishermen who noticed a warming of coastal waters and christened the phenomenon the Corriente del Nino (the Current of the Christ Child)... to the British colonialists looking for the causes of droughts in India...to contemporary meteorologists, glaciologists, biologists, archaeologists, and others, Nash introduces us to those whose observations and research have added to our knowledge of El Nino. And she shows how these seemingly unconnected pieces have grad­ually, over a century, revealed a picture of what scientists call ENSO: the El Nino Southern Oscillation—a planet-spanning force produced by the interplay of wind and water with the power to unhinge the world.

One of the most engaging, vivid books ever written about the earth's changing climate, EL NINO is part detective story, part scientific study, and a grand, ever-changing drama played out by characters living centuries and continents apart and asking: What's the weather going to do today, tomorrow, and in the years to come?

J. Madeleine Nash was for fifteen years the senior science correspondent for TIME maga­zine. She is a three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine writing award; in 1996 she was elected an honorary member of the scientific society Sigma Xi.

*

--------