Desiring the Weather: El Nino, the Media, and California Identity

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Weather is not what it used to be. It is no longer something one goes outside to register, that one experiences on the ground and in the flesh. It has become, rather, a technological experience, seen from satellites and endlessly monitored on television and the Internet. What was once the site of interest for farmers and fishermen has become the source of pleasure and obsessive viewing for urbanites and suburbanites. What was considered to be a boring, uneventful news item has become a primary, if not quintessential, aspect of contemporary cable television. What was understood as a natural phenomenon is now the source of technological fantasy.

Yet, weather fascinates precisely because it appears to be a stable phenomenon of history. The turn of the millennium is defined by technological change, political upheaval throughout the world, economic volatility, and the increased globalization of culture. This postmodern and postindustrial experience is accompanied by an anxiety coupled with optimism not unlike the modern experience at the last turn of the century. In this context, the weather is a source of fascination precisely because of the comfort it can appear to provide--comfort at the unchanging routine of rain, clouds, and sunshine interrupted by an occasional weather event. The weather's capacity to be both tremendously mundane and spectacularly dramatic is key to its emergence as a source of viewership pleasure. Within the gaze of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century technology, the weather has been transformed from a simple indicator of natural forces into a phenomenon of entertainment. Today's weather is not to be experienced so much as watched and consumed.

The primary events that have signaled the new weather as entertainment have been the particularly severe hurricane seasons of the 1990s, which produced significant damage on the East Coast; the El Niño of 1997-98, followed by La Niña, which began in 1998 and dissipated in 2000; the rise of the Weather Channel as a staple of cable television; and the spate of weather books in the late 1990s for armchair disaster watching, such as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (which became a film in the summer of 2000) and Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm--both of them about catastrophic storms--and Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, an analysis of Southern California as the site of weather, natural, and social disaster. ¹

Of these events, the El Niño of 1997-98 was perhaps the most anticipated, thanks to new technologies of measuring water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, and it was the event most centered on California. In this essay, I focus on this particular El Niño event in the broader context of the new construction of the weather. Termed "the climate event of the century," the 1997-98 El Niño produced a rash of predictions, anxieties, commercial ventures, and dire warnings about the potential demise of the California coastline. As such, it revealed not only the construction of weather as entertainment but also the role played by the weather in a liberal discourse of political denial. The media coverage of this El Niño event made visible the weather's function as a site for desire, both displaced desire in its many forms and the desire of the spectator's gaze. The embrace of El Niño as an event of meaning demonstrates the ways that contemporary discourses of weather serve to alleviate contemporary postmodern anxieties about fragmentation, rapid...