“Not now, El Niño,” pleads the astrophysicist-turned climate scientist, Kate Marvel. On top of the fossil fuel crisis and conflicts derailing the world, it appears that Mother Nature is about to provide the umpteenth lesson that we mess with the grand cycles of the Earth to our peril.

The telltale plume of hot water has been spreading in the Eastern Pacific and the world’s forecasters are converging on agreement that an El Niño is brewing. It is likely to be a strong one, perhaps a “super strong” one, maybe even a “Godzilla” of an El Niño, as some more colourful weather forecasters describe it.

The oceans have absorbed about 90 per cent of the excess heat trapped by climate pollution. That’s been an enormously helpful buffer between cause and consequence, in terms of human suffering, so far. But that great service also means we are mostly blind to the staggering amount of pent up energy. “When there is a transition from La Niña to El Niño, it's like the lid is popped off,” releasing the heat, says meteorologist Tom Di Liberto with Climate Central.

El Niño is a naturally occurring event. In fact, even the name itself seems to have been around since the 1600’s when Peruvian fishermen described the arrival of unusually warm water as El Niño de Navidad. It comes at irregular intervals as the planet shifts between neutral conditions, the cooler La Niña phase and temperature-spiking El Niños. But those natural oscillations are now taking place on top of unnaturally supercharged temperatures. 

Right now, we’re transitioning out of a cooler La Niña phase, which should give a sane species pause. Because the cooling phases are now hotter than peaks used to be: even in that cool phase, last year clocked in as the second-hottest year ever recorded on land. For the planet overall, it was the third-hottest year, only marginally behind 2023. Whether influenced by El Niño or La Niña, the last 11 years have been the hottest on record.

The baseline keeps heating up. So each El Niño drives new temperature records. 

As James Hansen and colleagues wrote last month, this current La Niña cool phase is expected to bottom out around 1.4 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures — which is hotter than the peak of “Super El Niños” from the past decade.

The oncoming El Niño is expected to form over the summer. And the global temperatures lag a bit. So the big impacts will probably kick in during the fall and next year and will likely set new temperature records.

“Even a moderately strong El Niño may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027,” write Hansen and colleagues. The team went out on a limb and predicted we will see temperatures way above 1.5 C hotter than preindustrial temperatures. They predict that the first half of 2027 will rise to about 1.7 C.

And they put that prediction out there to test a couple of disturbing hypotheses. First, Hansen and co. have been arguing that global warming is accelerating. That was a controversial claim when they first made it several years ago, but it seems fairly obvious from the chart above and is quickly becoming conventional wisdom. 

More disturbingly still, Hansen and colleagues argue that the planet is going to heat up a lot more than conventional estimates. They argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies too much on computer models instead of actual observational evidence. A doubling of CO2 would cause at least 4 C of warming, by their calculations. They claim the IPCC has been underplaying the threat in its reports to the world’s governments and “climate sensitivity is significantly higher than IPCC’s best estimate.” If they’re right, then we’ll break through 2 C in the 2030s. 

The next El Niño will be a test of those claims. But it’s worth remembering that Hansen has been early and correct for many decades. His testimony to the US Senate in 1988 marked the beginning of climate change as a public “issue.” His research to demonstrate that smokestack pollution was masking the true extent of global heating and that climate change has been accelerating were both controversial but are now widely accepted.

And while Hansen’s team was earlier than most in forecasting an upcoming El Niño, most other scientists have come around. “A strong El Niño is indeed likely to develop later in the year,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth who surveyed 11 models and 433 forecasts. “The median and mean across all the models … would put it notably stronger than the 2023/2024 El Niño and close to if not matching what we saw back in 2015/2016.”

“Either way, this means that 2027 looks increasingly likely to set a new record, perhaps by a sizable margin if we end up on the high end of the range of El Niño forecasts,” Hausfather says.

What this means for us laypeople is that we are headed for hotter temperatures than people have ever lived through, sooner than we think. Add an El Niño on top of all that fossil-fuel burning, and we are in for more extreme weather than we’ve ever endured. 

The last El Niño started in 2023. It was not even a “super” sized one, but you will remember what that year’s fire season was like. That single year torched over 15 million hectares — about 5 per cent of Canada’s enormous forest lands — in a few months. It was supposed to be “a fiery wake up call,” in the words of the Canadian government. It was also the year that the world briefly breached 2 degrees C for the first time, a foretaste of the limits our governments had solemnly pledged to stay “well below.”

And then came 2024, the hottest year to date, with “unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes.” Marine heatwaves spread from the Caribbean to the Pacific and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. More than 80 per cent of the world’s reefs were hit in the worst global bleaching event on record.

Today, as we edge past the equinox and emerge from winter, it is still cold in parts of Canada. But it is already scorching elsewhere in North America. You would never guess we are still under the influence of La Niña when the National Weather Service is issuing Extreme Heat Warnings in California — temperatures hit 43 C (109 F) even before winter’s official end. Trails are closed in Arizona while officials warn visitors about extreme heat at the Grand Canyon, because rescue crews don’t staff up so early in the year.

Temperature records are being shattered from the Pacific coast to the Great Plains. “March in Western North America is deadly hot, completely above temperatures that would have been possible without climate change from burning oil, coal and gas,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, whose team released a rapid attribution study concluding the heat wave was made 800 times more likely by climate change — or, in plain language, “virtually impossible.”

And the oceans? Even without an El Niño, global sea surface temperatures are already tracking at record highs.

“When El Niño develops, we’re likely to set a new global temperature record,” says the veteran sailor and scientist, Jennifer Francis, of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “‘Normal’ was left in the dust decades ago. And with this much heat in the system, everyone should buckle up for the extreme weather it will fuel.”

© National Observer