Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the historical and cultural processes that construct the El Niño, La Niña and Southern Oscillation. It reflects on the role of these constructs in development, disaster preparedness and broader climatic discourse, and postulates a number of research questions.

Paper long abstract:

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is often considered to be the most important mode of climatic variability, the 2015-16 El Niño being implicated in flooding in Chennai, Indonesian forest fires, a famine in Papua New Guinea, southern African drought and the record strength of Hurricane Patricia. Yet El Niño, La Niña and ENSO are social constructs, the outcome of generally under-appreciated historical and cultural processes. El Niño is an annual warm-water current off the coast of Peru that has morphed through historical accident into a new global 'weather god', La Niña is the gendered 1985 invention of an American climatologist, and the Southern Oscillation a statistical artefact given agency, the result of an overtly imperialistic project of early twentieth-century meteorological knowledge-generation through colonial networks. This paper will outline the processes that have constructed ENSO, and will particularly focus on how the practices of statistical climatology construct global climate-space. The paper will postulate a number of research questions regarding the ways that El Niño and La Niña are deployed globally, including the power of the terms 'El Niño' and 'La Niña' for decision-makers, reflections on the power relations within the geographies of ENSO knowledge, and the position of ENSO within wider geo-political climate discourse.