A man is bitten by a rattle snake in Montana. A hurricane rips through Mexico. A turtle lays an egg on a Pacific island. An epidemic of Rift Valley fever breaks out in Kenya. At last the conductor that has been orchestrating these, and thousands of other seemingly random incidents, has been unmasked. His name is El Nino. In the late 1990s catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and famines became synonymous with the term El Nino. But it was etching its imprint on the world in a myriad different ways, long before it started to hit the headlines. From the sinking of the Titanic to the Irish potato famine, from the outbreak of the War of Independence in Mexico to the collapse of Hitler's Russian campaign, El Nino has helped shape world history and will continue to do so...