Record-breaking El Niño could be a preview of Earth’s future. It’s not pretty
El Niño keeps getting stronger—and the intense weather it is set to bring could be a preview of our future in an even warmer world.
This year’s El Niño could become the strongest on record, forecasters say, and that means potentially intense weather impacts, from prolonged droughts in some parts of the world to more storms and precipitation in others, leading to severe floods.
A temporary +2-degree world
How strong an El Niño is has to do with how high ocean temperatures reach above average. That warmer water affects the atmosphere, shifting and amplifying weather patterns.
This year’s El Niño is colliding with already-hot ocean temps and a summer of extreme heat.
That means the warmth it brings could push the planet’s monthly global average temperature above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming—long considered the limit we should strive for to keep climate change’s “unpredictable and extensive damage” at bay.
In reality, it’s worth pointing out, there is no safe limit to global warming. We’re already seeing climate change’s impacts, in the form of the hottest summer on record for the U.S. and multiple back-to-back heat waves across Europe. But every bit of temperature increase amplifies climate impacts, and limiting warming can help stave off more extreme disasters.
We’re not in a plus-2-degree world yet: Outside of the El Niño cycle, our planet won’t hit that level of warming for another decade or two, experts say.
But if El Niño brings us there temporarily, we may get a glimpse of what that world will look like.
“The next 12 months could be a real stress test: record heat, extreme weather, crop losses, and cascading impacts,” Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, wrote on Bluesky about this year’s El Niño. “In part, a preview of our future.”
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist also at Berkeley Earth and climate research lead at Stripe, has been describing this El Niño as a “time machine.” The warming this climate phenomenon brings, through the end of 2026 and into 2027, could be the same as what scientists predict the temperature of 2037.
El Niño vs. greenhouse gases
But there is a catch. El Niño and greenhouse gases have different impacts.
“[T]he future world that has been warmed by greenhouse gases and a present-day world that has been temporarily warmed by El Niño can have the same global-average temperature while having significant differences in the impacts of this warming,” Hausfather and the climate scientist Andrew Dessler wrote in a piece on The Climate Brink, their joint Substack.
What we all refer to as climate change has to do with global warming driven by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Those emissions trapped heat, warming the planet below it.
El Niño, however, is more like a “redistribution of heat” already within our climate, the climate experts write. During an El Niño, winds change and spread warm ocean water into other areas, which affects the warmth of the atmosphere.
That means El Niño’s warming isn’t global: Some parts of the planet see warmer temperatures, but others get cooler. El Niño also shifts rainfall patterns in a way that isn’t equal around the world.
In that sense, this El Niño won’t mimic the complete picture of the planetary-wide, human-caused, greenhouse gas-fueled global warming that we’re on track to see in 2037.
But to certain regions of the world, it will bring some of those amplified impacts that a hotter Earth has in store—like record-breaking heat and periods of extreme precipitation—in a way that no El Niño ever has before.