Looking past El Nino.

• Author: Dunn, Seth
• Position: Editorial

Children, one old aphorism had it, should be seen and not heard. Quaint as this view may seem today, it befits the mainstream media's treatment of one of the biggest babies to make headlines in recent years. To be sure, reporters witnessed - and recorded with religious fervor - the Christ Child, or El Nino, of 1997-98. But were they really listening to it?

Most press were not immediately converted to the cause of El Nino. When a succession of prominent scientists began - as early as the summer of 1997 - to warn that the phenomenon could become one of the century's largest, some cast them as preachers of the apocalypse. Others, impatient with its initial mildness, joked about "El No-Show."

But once the human comedy of hype was dampened by the Christ Child's worldwide temper tantrum - from Indonesian forest fires to African drought to the flooding of America's west coast, with countless cases of deaths, destruction, and disruption in between - the link between extreme weather events and El Nino crossed a journalistic threshold. As early 1998 progressed, it became difficult to find a weather-related story that did not mention El Nino's influence.

This eagerness to summon the spectre of El Nino in discussing recent weather events was oddly juxtaposed with virtual silence on its vital relation to human-driven climate change. Was the press "burned out" on climate coverage after Kyoto? Or does the rush to connect hurricanes, ice storms, and tornadoes to what is in the public eye a...