Watch Out for El Niño
“You’re reading The Morning newsletter. Your daily guide to understanding what’s happening — and why it matters. Hosted by Sam Sifton, for readers in the U.S. and Canada.
Good morning. The United States and Iran missed their deadline to reach a deal under the terms of the June cease-fire. And Hawaii is struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Lala.
There’s been more storm activity in the Pacific than in the Atlantic so far this hurricane season, and that’s partly because of El Niño. Today we’re going to tell you more about the phenomenon.
Sam will be back tomorrow.
Pacific grim
El Niño, the Pacific climate shift that comes around once or twice a decade, is back this year — warming tropical oceans and triggering various consequences worldwide. We know to expect these, and they don’t usually reach full strength until December.
But this year’s El Niño is already huge — and affecting the planet well before it is done growing. Scientists say the world should brace itself for some major weather extremes.
El Niño is nudging up already-sweltering global temperatures. It’s causing dry spells and crop failures across the world. We’ll feel the ramifications into next year in droughts, floods and heat waves that had already been growing more intense because of climate change, scientists say.
Now scientists wonder whether human emissions are causing El Niño events to become stronger and more frequent. There’s no expert consensus yet, because El Niños are very complex — and good records don’t go back far enough to have certainty about how they are changing. But the question hangs over the current cycle because it’s on track to be the strongest in nearly 80 years of records.
Let’s look at what’s changing.
Ripple effects
The Pacific influences weather around the world. So when temperatures in its tropical zones jump, the consequences play out everywhere from Central America to the Horn of Africa. In those places, experts are now seeing El Niño’s telltale pattern.
Parts of Panama, normally one of the wettest countries on Earth, haven’t had a major storm since early May, raising concerns about operations in the Panama Canal. It raises and lowers ships through the locks using water from a rain-fed lake.
Ethiopia’s fertile highlands, its agricultural breadbasket, are enduring one of their driest summer stretches in four decades.
Kenya’s western grain-producing counties are experiencing a stunningly poor maize harvest.
India had its fifth-driest June since its modern rain records began in 1901.
Dry and hot seasons mean fewer crops, which will feed fewer mouths. The United Nations World Food Program says that El Niño could drive an additional 50 million to experience acute hunger by the end of next year.
Why now?
El Niño events are essentially ocean anomalies, and their magnitude is measured by looking at a specific rectangular zone of the Pacific to see how much surface temperatures there veer from normal.
The answer is: a lot. Temperatures have soared over the past three months, and forecasts say this could be the most freakishly warm year for that zone in modern history — hotter than the strongest El Niño cycles. (If you’re curious about what that means, the three-month average temperature in that area of the Pacific is likely to be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal this year. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but the ocean is vast and requires tremendous excess heat to warm even slightly.)
The extra heat affects air temperatures, too. This year isn’t quite as scorching as 2024, the planet’s hottest year on record. but experts widely believe that 2027 will be the hottest year on record, thanks in part to El Niño.
Until 2010, the world didn’t have a single year that was more than 1.0 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial times. But Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, forecasts that temperatures near will be 3.17 degrees Fahrenheit above that level in 2027.
The temperature spike from El Niño is transitory. But it offers a glimpse of where the world is heading.“
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