The Name is Nino. El Nino.

El Nino Havoc
A severe drought kills 200,000 Ethiopians and brings down the government of Emperor Haile Selassie. Selassie becomes the deity of Rastafarianism, a Caribbean sect that promotes the use of the illegal narcotic marijuana. Nebraska spring planting hampered by unusual cold, wet conditions. Extraordinarily hot summer imperils the fall harvest. Southern California sport fishermen enjoy their best season in memory, as bizarre El Nino currents bring tropical fish north. In their bliss, L.A. fishermen ignore Nebraskan and Ethiopian suffering.

1977
James Bond Movie: The Spy Who Loved Me
Sea-loving megalomaniac Carl Stromberg develops a system for tracking nuclear submarines. He captures two with his supertanker Liparus, then plots nuclear Armageddon. With terrestrial Earth gone, Stromberg will create a new underwater civilization.

El Nino Havoc
After a devastatingly cold winter, the United States suffers a drought considered the century's worst. Factories and households ration electricity as hydroelectric turbines grind to a halt. Farmers watch their crops wither in the sizzling heat. Southern California's Mono Lake and other reservoirs turn into puddles. Leaders predict chaos, and regional utilities, water districts, economic planners, and government officials plan accordingly. Farmers switch to high-yield, chemical-fertilizer-intensive crops to compensate for lack of water, leading environmentalists to predict long-term poisoning of soil and ground water. Dry weather in the southeast spawns a plague of insects.

Life within the world's oceans, meanwhile, continues unperturbed.

James Bond Movie: Octopussy
Renegade Soviet Gen. Orlov, angered by NATO disarmament talks, launches a scheme to explode a nuclear bomb in a West German U.S. air base. This will embolden the Western nuclear disarmament movement, he hopes, and thus make the NATO alliance vulnerable to attack by Soviet conventional forces. The resulting war would kill millions of people, ruin economies, and devastate the environment.

El Nino Havoc
Water temperature in the central Pacific rises, killing most of the coral on centuries-old Pacific Ocean reefs off Panama, Indonesia, Japan, and the Galapagos Islands. In Peru and Ecuador, repeated unseasonal deluges damage transport systems, devastate farms, and ruin coastal fisheries. In drought-stricken Ghana and Liberia, bush fires turn countryside to cinders. Droughts in India ruin three-fourths of that nation's crops. Droughts force once self-sufficient Indonesia to import 2 million tons of rice. Similar droughts blight Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines, where six major hydroelectric dams face closure. Deaths are estimated in the thousands. Economies are ruined. The environment suffers.

1987
James Bond Movie: The Living Daylights
Failed U.S. military man Brad Whitaker joins forces with a double-dealing Soviet general. Together, they pilfer funds from the Soviet budget to finance an arms- and opium-smuggling operation run through Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Political chaos could ensue.

El Nino Havoc
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, struggling to hold together a splintering Congress Party, faces India's worst drought in 80 years. Rice harvest drops by 30 percent, bolstering demands that he step down. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping falls under attack as drought-created grain shortages bolster hard-liners, who preferred grain-first economic policies to Deng's industrialization.

1993
James Bond Movie: No James Bond Movie Released!

El Nino Havoc
Excessively heavy rainfall in U.S. attributed to El Nino phenomenon by many scientists.

The fools! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! North American deluges are not really caused by El Nino. They are actually the result of thermal influences of the Sargasso Sea and the dynamic effect of the interhemispheric macrosynoptic system, explains Li Xiazhi, a geophysicist at Peking University, Beijing, in his 1995 paper "On the Causes of the 1993 Excessively Heavy Rainfall in USA." Later, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder reveal that the years from 1990 to 1995 were all part of the same El Nino event -- the longest in 130 years of records. Tellingly, the James Bond movie Goldeneye is released in 1995.

1995
James Bond Movie: Goldeneye
A secret Russian mafialike group called Janus gains control of two Russian military satellites, which use nuclear pulse detonation technology to destroy electronic circuits. Commerce, communication, and transport would halt.

El Nino Havoc
Record storms ravage California, knocking out power to 29,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers in the southern San Francisco Bay Area. A mudslide closes the coast highway at L.A. rush hour. A spring deluge kills five in New Orleans. A storm strands 1,000 travelers at New Orleans International Airport.

1997
James Bond Movie: Tomorrow Never Dies
Mad media mogul Elliot Carver uses a top-secret navigational instrument to make a British naval frigate disappear in Chinese territorial waters. As the threat of nuclear war between China and Great Britain grows, Carver's media network will bring staged scoops to an otherwise bored world.

El Nino Havoc
Oddly spurred by growing scientific understanding of a weather pattern known as the Southern Oscillation, journalists turn weather stories -- once considered newswriting's worst chicken-salad-from-chicken-shit drudgery -- into breathless headlines. Mundane stories that normally wouldn't see the inside of a rural shopper are pushed to the front sections of metro dailies: "Corona del Mar Christmas Walk, Originally Set for Sunday, Postponed Due to Expected El Nino-Related Rains!" the L.A. Times declares. In the San Francisco Bay Area, heretofore unheard-of news headlines -- "Roofers Roof!", "Clear Day!", and "Nobody Cares!" -- become "EL NINO PROMPTS CALLS TO BAY AREA ROOFERS," "EL NINO EVEN CUTS THE SMOG," and "EL NINO WARNINGS FALL ON DEAF EARS." Readers turn anguished eyes to local cineplex marquees and plead: "James, stop these madmen!