At first Tim Barnett did not believe his own data. "I thought it was an error in the computer code," says the climate researcher at California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For one thing, the little-known phenomenon his model was predicting had not been witnessed since the mid- 1970s. By last summer, however, Barnett's forecast was borne out by a "monstrous" 7 degreesF plunge in ocean surface temperatures off * equatorial South America. The drop heralded the arrival of a mysterious weather pattern called La Nina, which brings unusually cold temperatures to the eastern Pacific. La Nina has since swept to the...
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