Word: nino
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Short-term effects include volcanic eruptions and the El Nino phenomenon, characterized by a warming in the tropical Pacific. Long-term effects include the release of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere and natural climatic cycles...
...NINO. To meteorologists, the weather phenomenon named after the Christ child is not a theory but a recognizable and recurrent climatological event. Every few years around Christmastime, a huge pool of warm seawater in the western Pacific begins to expand eastward toward Ecuador, nudging the jet streams off course and disrupting weather patterns across half the earth's surface. The El Nino that began last year and is now breaking up has been linked to record flooding in Latin America, the unseasonably warm winter in North America and the droughts in Africa...
...problem with sorting out these influences is that they interact in complex ways and may, to some extent, cancel each other out. Pinatubo's cooling effects could counteract the warming caused by greenhouse gases, at least over the short term. At the same time, El Nino's warming influence seems to have suppressed the early cooling effects of Pinatubo's global haze...
...course, there have always been volcanic eruptions, and the tales of El Nino date back at least to the Spanish conquistadors. Old-timers can point to freak weather occurrences that put the Los Angeles floods to shame, like the 1928 storm that bombarded southwestern Nebraska with hailstones the size of grapefruit. Or the blizzard of 1888 that buried the Eastern Seaboard in snowdrifts the size of four-story buildings. "There is a record set somewhere every day," says Steve Zebiak, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory...
...production opens with the sound of a blues piano as the three Witches, fortune-telling bar-flies in Williams' production, croon a short trio. The piano music (played adeptly by Peter Sultan), which includes everything from Gershwin to Pachelbel to Nino Rota's theme from The Godfather, continues throughout the play, weaving the scenes together in what is perhaps William's greatest transformative device...