A “Super El Niño” Is Coming - And It Could Trigger Global Climate Chaos

0:00Hi, I'm Neil. And I'm Ken. And we are from the Triviality Podcast, a pub trivia-style game show where a lack of seriousness meets a little bit of knowledge. Join us each week for an hour-long game of general knowledge trivia featuring special guests from around the world, plus tons of extra themed episodes. If you want to improve your trivia game, or you just want to scream at us in your car when we get easy questions wrong, then we're the show for you. Find Triviality on all your favorite podcast apps. But you know that, because you're already listening to a podcast. Weather models have begun to show that a very strong El Nino climate phase could develop later this year, potentially the strongest we've ever seen.

0:38Many are calling this a super El Nino or even a Godzilla El Nino. It could bring droughts to some areas of the world, floods to others and set the planet up for the hottest year ever recorded. Yeah, we don't want Godzilla rising out of the water at any time. I've worn my t-shirt just accidentally, actually. Nice coincidence. No Godzilla El Nino, please. Yeah, not now. You know, it's bad. It could be made worse by climate change, and that's what we're going to get into on this episode of The World, the Universe, and Ask for New Scientist. I'm Dr. Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr. Penny Sarche. Today we're joined by climate reporter Alec Loon.

1:13Alec, remind us, what exactly is El Nino to begin with? So El Nino is a natural climate pattern. It's a phase where a lot of warm water, basically the winds, the trade winds that blow east to west in the Pacific Ocean, they slow down and a lot of warm water sloshes back across the Pacific Ocean from Indonesia towards South America. And that warm water, there's less cold water being upwelled. And so that warm water just sits there and heats up the atmosphere, heats up the whole planet and causes a lot of crazy weather around the globe. So what's the sort of point then at which things are different enough that it kind of triggers an El Nino?

1:56And how does that differ from a super El Nino? So the way that scientists measure El Nino is by how much hotter the Central Pacific is than the long-term average. And so if it's 0.5 degrees Celsius hotter, that's an El Nino. But if it's two degrees hotter, if it reaches that point, then that's much, much hotter than the long-term average. That's considered a very strong or super El Nino. And that looks like what may be coming down the pipeline this year. And they've decided also to call it Godzilla. I mean, that's been called for a number of years now, but I hadn't heard it. Me neither. Any understanding of why they've chosen this kaiju to make it sound more scary?

2:36Yeah, basically. The technical term is very strong El Nino. That morphed into super El Nino because that sounds maybe better in a headline. And then somebody took the extra mile to Godzilla. Sure. Okay. So you spoke to a number of people for this piece and here's Adam Scaife at the Met Office. That's the UK's National Weather Center. The forecast from now is warming faster in the tropical Pacific than at any other time so far this century. So something unusual is going on. So Alec, he's talking about something unusual. Is that the reference to the super part of the El Nino? Yeah, exactly. So we see El Nino every couple of years, but right now the temperatures are getting so warm so fast that scientists think we may be heading for this super El Nino when temperatures are even more elevated in the Central Pacific and the global temperature can be even more elevated.

3:33if it did turn out to be a strong El Nino, that could raise global temperatures by an extra 0.2 degrees Celsius. So if you think about climate change as the tide slowly coming in, raising the temperature, then El Nino is like a giant wave that just raises it even more, but temporarily. It lasts typically a year and a half, two years. When did we last see this kind of effect of El Nino adding on top of the effects of climate change? So the last El Nino was in 2023-2024. And that, of course, brought the hottest year on record, 2024. What's kind of scary is that then we went into La Nina, the alternate phase in the Pacific, and that actually tends to cool global temperatures.

4:16But even though we were in that cooling phase, 2025 was one of the top three hottest years ever, despite the cooling, right? So now we're going into El Nino, maybe a super El Nino. it's highly likely that 2027 is going to set a new record for hottest year on record. Wait, is that 2027 or this year? So the El Nino is kind of developing this year. We're going into it. But the reason it's called El Nino, it's named after the Christ child because the Peruvian fishermen who first started noticing it hundreds of years ago noticed it tended to peak in December. So we're looking at, yeah, probably the temperatures are going to start rising towards the end of the year.

4:57and then 2027 is going to be the peak of that El Nino. I mean, Godzilla works better as this evil thing, not the Christ child, right? Let's name this terrible weather phenomenon, climate phenomenon after the baby. Christmas weather, yeah. So why then are we talking about a super El Nino right now? What are the hints that we're getting that are making us think we're heading for this? So first off, there's kind of been a burst of westerly winds. So remember that we were talking about the winds blowing east to west, those trade winds. Well, instead, we've got these bursts of westerly winds going from west to east, and those are starting to drive that warm water into the central Pacific and possibly kick off this strong El Nino.

5:39But while it seems to be that we're heading into an El Nino, it's very uncertain at this point what the actual magnitude is going to be. There's a thing called the spring predictability barrier. Basically, it's early days. we're just starting to see the first signals of El Nino. We don't see enough signal yet. We don't see enough of a change yet to see kind of how much we're going to get. And so as we go into May and June, the models are probably going to do a much better job. We're going to be much more confident in what they're predicting. But I will say that if you look at the spread of models, and they all predict slightly different temperatures, and they're all slightly different probabilities that we're going to get a super El Nino.

6:16But if you take the top two models, so the ones that are predicting the very highest temperatures. They're predicting over three degrees temperature anomaly in the Pacific, which would make this the strongest El Nino ever. Mega Super Godzilla, whatever El Nino. Yeah. And we've also been hearing initial suggestions for a long time now that we're going to get a big one. So all in all, it doesn't look good at all. What are the impacts? Here's where it gets really complicated because it's totally different for different regions of the world. Some of the clearest links are in the southern United States.

6:51It tends to be wetter, stormier weather across the southern U.S., but then across the northern U.S., it tends to be drier and hotter. There tends to be wetter, stormier weather in China. There was a Super El Nino event in 1997, 1998, and there was so much rain in China at that point that more than 3 ,000 people died from flooding. So that's an area that could get hard hit. And then other areas, it's the exact opposite, really hot, dry weather, raising the risk of wildfires, heat waves, drought. So Australia is probably going to be seeing some really hot weather. Places like Central and Southern Africa, parts of the Amazon rainforest could be seeing hot weather.

7:36So totally different all over the globe. For Europe, it's the absolutely most complicated thing of all because the UK, for instance, sometimes during El Nino, it sees hotter summers and colder winters. Sometimes during El Nino, it sees milder, wetter winters. And it really depends on how El Nino interacts with other oscillations in the climate. And so it's really hard to tell what's going to happen to the UK and northwestern Europe. Yeah, super complicated. Imagine the models for this, how they model this. Another person you spoke to was Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

8:13And listen to what he said. Things are perturbed. They're shifted away from normal. Things are shifted further away from normal. It's not necessarily that the storms, let's say rainfall is more, but it's just happening in places that don't get it. We call it an intensification of the hydrological cycle because El Nino can cause significant changes in normal precipitation. can just be exacerbated by the climate change. We've mentioned on various podcasts recently about all the other shocks we're getting, food shock in particular as a result of the Iran war. This on top of that, it's just going to compound what we're already looking at down the line in terms of food security, isn't it?

8:54Yeah. So we were talking about impacts. So, you know, Amazon region, parts of South America, hotter, drier. That's where there's a lot of coffee production. So if it's a drought there, that's not going to be good for coffee. Coffee prices could go up. Central Africa, Western Africa, there's a lot of chocolate production there. So hotter, drier drought weather there, chocolate prices could go up. So this isn't good for farming, whether it's hot, hotter, or wetter, and all sorts of commodity prices could go up. And both really important cash crops there for those local regions. And they're both already expensive anyway.

9:28So yeah, we could be seeing, And then once the fertilizer impact comes down the line, which we're expecting, I mean, we were talking about stockpiling food on a recent podcast. And this is another thing that governments should start putting messaging out about what they and people should do personally as well. Yeah. You know, I used to laugh at the people who are like burying barrels of food in their backyard and prepping for Armageddon. But actually, they're looking pretty prescient right now. Yeah. This message is sponsored by the UK government. Most self-driving cars are trained in good weather, which is why they can struggle when the weather turns bad.

10:08Now a UK-German research team funded by Horizon Europe is simulating blizzards, fog, and torrential rain in the lab to fix that. You can read the full article from New Scientist CoLab at newscientist.com slash roadview. Worth five minutes of your time. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed.

10:47Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. So I'm kind of familiar with this story that climate change just makes everything less predictable. It exacerbates everything that's already bad. What do we know about climate change and super El Nino events? Should we expect more El Ninos to be super El Ninos? So this is a huge debate. It's not very clear. The answer is probably. So basically some research has found that over the past 50 to 60 years, El Nino's and La Nina events seem to be getting more frequent and more intense. And the shift between them is getting bigger and bigger.

11:28So we're having these bigger swings between cooling La Nina and warming El Nino. But, you know, there's other research out there that says that El Nino has been getting more frequent over the past 7 ,000 years. So that wouldn't be because of human-caused climate change. That would just be a natural fluctuation. So it's really hard to say. we have about 150 years of data. And when you're talking about something like El Nino, that's not really enough to kind of draw huge conclusions. But it does feel like it. I know this is not scientific, but, you know, we only just got out of an El Nino. And now we've got another one coming down the pipeline.

12:04Yeah. And what's clear is El Nino is getting hotter because those, the Pacific Ocean, ocean everywhere is getting warmer, that water is getting warmer. So then when El Nino comes, it's even warmer than it was before. And, you know, some people have actually, the U.S., the National Weather Service in the U.S. has actually changed its definition of El Nino. And rather than comparing the current ocean temperatures against the long-term average, which is rising with climate change, they're comparing it against average temperatures in other parts of the world right now. Because, yeah, it clearly is getting warmer with climate change and, you know, but the baseline is also rising.

12:41So it's a tricky question. I think the One thing that's very clear is that the impacts of El Nino are going to be worsened by climate change. When you have a warmer atmosphere, that means that that atmosphere can hold more moisture. And so that would make the flooding that is caused in some regions by El Nino worse. When the atmosphere is warmer, there's more evaporation out of the ground and the soil gets drier. That makes the drought, heat waves, wildfires even worse in those regions. so it does amplify the impacts everywhere. Well, so, you know, we talk about the climate crisis as a risk multiplier and then it's multiplying the risk of a risk multiplier, the El Niño.

13:23So, again, really not what we want. Yeah, I mean, it's very bad but it will come to an end in about a year or two where it will probably swing back into the La Niña phase and get that cooling effect again. So, you know, this is just a natural climate oscillation. And the real problem is that it's going on against the background of climate change and warming temperatures. We'll leave it there. Thanks to our guest, Alec Loon. And do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.