El Niño Is Back. And Worse Than Ever.

The Daily

A powerful Super El Nino event is brewing in the Pacific Ocean, with a 69% chance of being the strongest since 1950. This phenomenon could s

Key takeaways

• El Nino is a natural phenomenon in the tropical Pacific that disrupts global weather patterns.
• This year's El Nino could be the strongest on record, with a potential 3-degree temperature increase.

Main topics

• El Nino's formation and mechanisms
• Historical impacts of El Nino

Notable quotes

"The ocean and the atmosphere are kind of always interacting together in this like tug of war."

Conclusion

This episode highlights the unprecedented strength of the current El N

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:01) From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Speaker 2 (0:06) A powerful Super El Nino event is right now brewing deep within the Pacific Ocean. Speaker 1 (0:13) The Speaker 2 (0:14) meteorological Speaker 4 (0:18) wrecking ball that is El Nino is back. Speaker 2 (0:22) The Climate Prediction Center gives a 69 % chance this year's El Nino may be the strongest since 1950. The heat released by the Pacific Ocean during that event could spike temperatures into unseen territory. Making 2027 one of the hottest years, perhaps even the hottest year on record. Speaker 4 (0:40) And this year, it's already shaping up to be by far the strongest and most severe on record, and to wreak havoc across the world. Today, I speak to my colleague, global climate reporter Chico Harlan, about El Nino's history, its inner workings, and its destructive powers. It's Wednesday, August 19th. Speaker 4 (1:12) Chico, welcome back to The Daily. Thank you, Michael. So I feel like this episode requires a little bit of a confession that despite a lot of us hearing about El Nino our entire lives, and despite pretending we know what it means and invoking it in casual conversation, most of us don't really understand what El Nino does, how it works. And I think if we're going to do justice to a historic El Nino like the one we're experiencing right now, we should probably start by actually explaining what it is. Speaker 3 (1:43) So El Nino is a planetary phenomenon that is both totally natural and also a huge chaos agent. And at the core, it is something that happens in the tropical Pacific. It is changes that occur there. And to understand those changes, it helps to think about this rectangle that stretches across the equator in the Pacific Ocean. It would basically run from the coast of Peru, Ecuador. all the way towards the international date line. You're almost in the darkest, most uninhabited territory you could find in the Pacific, south of Hawaii and to the north of the small islands like Fiji and Samoa. Gotcha. And normally, these waters follow a pretty predictable pattern year by year. They don't change so much in temperature. If I can use Celsius, you know... Speaker 4 (2:32) You can, you can. Can I? For Speaker 3 (2:33) the Speaker 4 (2:33) purposes of this conversation, you can. Speaker 3 (2:34) Okay. Normally, they top out in around May at about 28 Celsius, so they're pretty warm. And they don't cool off that much, but as you enter the summer, the Northern Hemisphere summer, they start to cool by maybe a degree down to about 27 this time of year. So that's most years. And of course, this rectangle is completely imaginary. It's been concocted by scientists. And only for this reason. They've realized that when things change or go haywire in this part of the ocean, it affects the entire world to the point where you could almost say that when this part of the Pacific catches a cold, the whole world has a fever. And Speaker 4 (3:12) you're saying in most years, this part of the Pacific doesn't catch a cold and the rest of us don't catch a fever. Speaker 3 (3:19) That's correct. But in an El Nino year, the sea surface temperatures, the ocean temperatures in that part of the Pacific, rather than gliding down, stays high and sometimes even keeps increasing. Speaker 3 (3:32) If the gap between the temperatures in a given year and the usual temperatures is 0.5 Celsius, a pretty small threshold, that is an El Nino. If the gap between the water temperatures is 2 Celsius greater than usual, then you have a super El Nino. Got Speaker 4 (3:49) it. Speaker 3 (3:49) And Michael, this year, we could be heading even for a three degree gap, which is beyond what we've ever seen before. Speaker 4 (3:55) Right. Like maybe a super duper El Nino. Speaker 3 (3:59) Yeah, the terminology doesn't exist for it. Speaker 4 (4:02) Well, I want to get back to this year and what all that means. But before we do that, explain why in an El Nino year, these ocean temperatures keep going up rather than gliding back down like they normally would. Speaker 3 (4:17) Okay, so let's go back to this rectangle. Speaker 3 (4:21) Imagine in a normal year that the winds above these waters are blowing the warmth away from South America towards Asia. Okay? So these waters are staying relatively cool. They're cooler than the waters in Asia. And there's cold water that's coming up to replace the water that was getting blown away. And so you have a nice cold ecosystem. This is, of course, important to fish and all this other stuff. In an El Nino year, that pattern... changes quite a bit. And the winds that normally take that warm water away either slow down or reverse. Speaker 4 (4:57) And Speaker 3 (4:57) that is one key element in this feedback loop in which the warm water is no longer displaced. Instead, it starts to build and generate on, you could say, quote unquote, the wrong side of the Pacific. Speaker 4 (5:09) Fascinating. Speaker 3 (5:10) And that hot water that's normally stored on the Asian side can come all the way over towards the South American side. And just explain why that is so meaningful. Well, let's just remember that the Pacific is huge. So imagine how much extra warmth it takes to warm that body of water by a couple degrees. That's the extra energy