El Nino Just An Elaborate Plot Device
DATELINE:
Orange County, CA
'It never rains in California,' goes an old song, but even old songs get it wrong sometimes. For the past two weeks it has not only been raining in California, but the winds have been howling and the temperatures dropping to freezing at night, even in southern California. Canadians need feel little pity for the poor babies (as I write, it's windy, yes, but it's still 65 degrees), but for the Californians it's a shock.
The cause of the climactic commotion is that notorious tropical storm, El Nino. Once a decade or so, we are told, the currents in the Pacific Ocean shift direction and meteorological mayhem ensues.
Here in the U.S. -- on the East Coast as well as on the West -- El Nino has been a big media story. I hope this doesn't sound insensitive to the battered denizens of California, but one has to wonder why. It's not a hurricane or a flood: it's not visually dramatic; it's just a cold, windy spell. What's going on?
The answer, I think, is that El Nino is the journalistic equivalent of a Macguffin. 'Macguffin' is a movie term for the thing that gets the plot moving. It's a Maltese Falcon, a Lost Ark, or anything else that supplies a motive to have our characters chasing back and forth across the screen.
The journalistic equivalent of the Macguffin is the all-purpose explanation -- the ready, plausible-sounding answer to the perplexing question, 'why?' Suppose you're covering the stock market, and it's been dropping steadily for three days. On the fourth day, it reverses itself and pops up 100 points. Do you know what caused the recovery? Almost certainly not and neither, probably, do your sources. So you reach into your journalistic bag of tricks and write, 'The market rebounded because it was oversold.' 'Oversold' is a financial journalist's Macguffin.
Or let's say you're sent to a cover a civil war in a country you've barely heard of. You arrive and discover that -- after years of living more or less peaceably together -- the inhabitants have for no reason you can see suddenly grabbed machetes and hatchets and begun massacring each other. You videotape the corpses and say, 'they fell victim to ancestral ethnic hatreds' -- the foreign correspondent's Macguffin.
You'll find this sort of handy all-purpose phrase in political, legal and financial reporting too, and for the same reason: The world is a mysterious and confusing place, filled with inexplicable events, and journalists must try to make sense of them in a very short span of time and in very few words.
Consider the climate. The world is supposedly suffering from a bout of global warming. The evidence for this trend is highly technical -- in fact, virtually incomprehensible to almost everyone who writes on the subject. Whether you believe in global warming or not depends on which you think more reliable -- temperatures taken at the equator on the earth's surface (which suggest warming) or temperatures taken by satellites in upper orbit (which cast doubt on it); whether you accept computer models (which argue for warming) or historical records (which dispute it). And so on.
Now most of us -- me very much included -- cannot even begin to assess properly which of these sets of evidence is more trustworthy. So we rely on our senses. When there's a hot spell, as there was in the summers of the mid-1990s, we are ready to believe in global warming. When there's unusually cold weather, we're tougher to convince.
So here we are in December 1997, with the world's diplomats having gathered in Kyoto to sign a climate treaty that will dramatically raise the price of oil and gas throughout the industrial world. And at the same time, the voters in the most
important state of the world's most important country are being lashed by viciously cold and windy weather. You see the problem. People in and around Los Angeles are right now asking themselves: Do the journalists and scientists who are warning us about global warming really know what they are talking about?
So what is needed is a Macguffin: Something that reassures readers and listeners that we do indeed know what we're talking about (even if -- or especially if -- we don't); that global warming is indeed compatible with incredibly cold weather. That's El Nino. And that's why Americans are hearing so much about it.
Originally published in The Financial Post