The Godzilla El Niño

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1:06Welcome to WeatherScope. The biggest news this season, undoubtedly, the huge mass of warm Pacific water known as El Nino. You might have heard, but El Nino is back. I am El Nino. When I hear the words El Nino, my mind immediately goes to one very specific place. But those of you who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish for the Nino. Chris Farley, in one of my favorite old SNL sketches, playing the actual El Nino somehow, has this kind of crazy wrestling getup on with his shirt wide open, gusting in the wind. I challenge any of you punk-ass tropical storms to a no-holds-barred cage match because El Nino is coming for you, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

2:02Sadly, El Nino is not a legendary comedian standing in a storm dressed like a wrestler. But to be honest, it is kind of a mystery. Somehow, this warm patch of water in the Pacific influences rain and weather and even famines. all over the world. And scientists still aren't sure exactly how it works. So today on the show, as we head into what might be the strongest El Nino ever measured, which could make 2027 the hottest year ever measured, we wanted to feature a great episode from our friends over at The Gray Area. Host Sean Illing talks with New York Times climate reporter David Wallace-Wells about the potentially dramatic impacts of the coming El Nino and whether their next year might be a preview of what life is like going forward.

2:51Here's Sean and David. David Wallace-Wells, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Just about everybody has heard the term El Nino, but I think most of us, myself included, for the most part until very recently, don't really know what it is. So let's just start there. What is an El Nino? Yeah. It's a climatic event that happens irregularly, but pretty often, usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven, in which you get a burst of warmer than normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And then that has a lot of amazingly global consequences in ways that I think are not intuitive to most normies who don't know all about the details of climate science.

3:43And in particular, this genre of climate science called teleconnections, where scientists have identified relationships between certain weather events in different parts of the world, even if they can't always identify exactly what about one weather event is driving another weather event, they can see in the record that they happened together and that there's some kind of connection for them. So in this case, you see across the Western U.S., you tend to see a lot more rain. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia. You see, you know, a similar disruption to rain across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa.

4:32and you see a kind of a suppression typically of hurricane activity in the Caribbean, which is all to say it's a disruption. It's a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on. But the disruption isn't all in one direction. At the global level, it makes things hotter. And the one that we're seeing this year forming now, maybe a record-setting one that drives global temperatures up more than basically anything we've ever seen before. But beyond the global temperature, the impacts that we see in some cases push climate in one direction and in other places in another direction.

5:06And I think the best way to think about it is just like we shook up the whole planet's climate system and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non El Nino years. How is it that warming in one part of the Pacific scrambles weather patterns across the world? I mean, it's very butterfly effect-y, but is there a fairly simple causal explanation here? As best I understand, the answer is no. And I mean, this is an area of science that is still evolving. Climate scientists are trying to figure out how it is the case that something that happens in one part of the world affects other parts of the world.

5:40And it's just a reminder, as I think climate kind of always reminds us, that this system is quite mysterious and complex. There is an enormous amount about this system that is still deeply mysterious to us, and which I think in many people should inspire some amount of kind of awe and mystery. What is particularly scary about this El Nino? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed? Well, there are a few different components to it. The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than anyone that's ever been experienced before. And that can sound a little like a quotidian observation.

6:27It is the case, given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, that just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before. And so any unusual event is going to happen in an unprecedented set of climate conditions. But I do think it's worth emphasizing that fact, maybe because we've normalized it so much that, you know, we don't raise our eyes or raise our eyebrows when we see that we're setting new records for global average temperature. And that means that novel events like an El Nino are happening on top of that baseline. But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is a super El Nino.

7:03Some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Nino, which is to say, you know, the temperature levels that we're going to see, the boost that we're going to see because of this event may be bigger than any similar event ever observed before in modern history. And that's particularly alarming because some of the events in that period in the late 19th century had absolutely catastrophic global impacts. The El Ninos in particular of the late 1870s were among the most produced, perhaps the most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced. We're talking about famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world from Africa to South Asia to China.

7:50And I don't want to suggest that this El Nino is capable of producing that kind of suffering, just, you know, obviously 2026 is a different world than 1878. But it gives you a good framework with which to understand how these kinds of, you know, how the consequences of an El Nino may filter through our political world. If, you know, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there's a kind of fertilizer shortage as a result of the war in Iran. You know, we probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don't die.

8:29But there will be considerable political disarray that results, you know, bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. And I'm not saying that's inevitable because of this El Nino. A lot of it is unknown. But I think it reminds us that a huge amount of even what we take for granted as stable features of modern life in the 21st century are nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance and perturbation by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop. David, it definitely does not inspire confidence that researchers are using terms like Godzilla, El Nino, and super duper El Nino.

9:15That does not sound awesome. I mean, when will this thing officially arrive? When will we actually start to feel this thing? So the basic structure is that it arrives at the end of the calendar year, reaches a peak early in the winter of next year, and then dissipates over the following nine months or 12 months. So we're talking about something that we're going to start to notice at a global level, say November, December of this year, and see in a peak in the winter, spring of next year. But there are already effects, which is why we're able to see it coming. How unevenly will the effects of this be distributed in this country, for instance, right?

10:00Who will see more rain? Who will see more droughts? Who will feel this thing the most regionally? Well, different people are going to be hit by different effects. So, you know, I mentioned earlier the risk of a really serious hurricane is actually considerably lower in an El Nino year than in a normal year. And that means, you know, for plenty of people living on the coast in the Gulf Coast or Florida, they may be relieved. and have relatively... That's all I know about El Niño. In California, they're likely to have really significant rainfall events, some, you know, raising the possibility of these atmospheric river events that we've seen more and more of over the last decade.

10:39And on some level, that seems reassuring because at the moment, the American West as a whole is quite starved for water. And as a result, we are really worried this year about a quite bad fire season in the United States and particularly the American West. And it may well be that we do have a really bad fire season in which many, you know, much of the forest of the West goes up in smoke. And then immediately afterward, there's a period in which we have really intense rainfall, and that can produce landslides and mudslides at local level, but also at a kind of regional level. In 2018, we had a similar dynamic.

11:16It wasn't powered by El Nino, but the horrible wildfires in California gave way to a really intense period of rain. And there were mudslides, lethal mudslides in Santa Barbara, where a number of people were killed. Now, exactly where this stuff falls geographically is a bit chancy. We don't know whether Los Angeles is going to have a more intense experience of El Nino than San Diego, for instance. A lot of this is climate, but a lot of this is weather, and a lot of that is left up to chance. But as always with climate disasters, it's the most vulnerable who bear the brunt of the impact and the relatively privileged who are able to protect themselves from it.

12:00That's not an absolute rule, but in general, the people who are exposed to climate disaster are the people who are exposed to all of the ravages of the modern world, which is to say, you know, poorer, browner, less educated. And in that sense, I think we can expect El Nino to arrive as a, you know, grotesque, as a sort of nightmare of our social pathologies. The last super El Nino was, I think, 2015, 2016. Just for scale, you know, how bad was that one? And how much worse might this one be compared to that? Yeah, well, the easiest way to measure it is to say that it set all of these global temperature records.

12:42and produced a ton of heat waves. And this one is on track to be larger. It's on track to be larger than every El Nino on record going back to the ones in the 1880s and 1870s. So exactly how that will have particular effects on crops and heat waves and droughts in particular parts of the world, a lot of this is rolling the dice. But we are looking at a more intense El Nino on top of a considerably higher global average temperature baseline in a world that is remarkably exposed still all of these decades after we started worrying about warming, remarkably exposed still to the ravages of climate impacts.

13:28And on that point, I mean, you know, I don't want to dwell too much on the experience or the example of the LA fires from last year, but I do think it's really illustrative. And I think it just reminds us that, you know, yes, climate has differential impacts. Yes, it does punish the poor and poorly resourced more than those who can do something to protect themselves. But wealth itself is not a perfect buffer. It often, you know, teaches us deluded lessons about how safe and protected we are. And in the case of Los Angeles, I think it meant a lot of people didn't believe that any disaster of that scale was possible in their own lives.

14:09And they sort of assumed, based on the social bubble in which they lived, that they were perfectly protected. And we may tell ourselves, living in little privilege bubbles, that we are safe. And in any given year, most of us will be. And most of our lives will be normal. But privilege is not a perfect protection against these impacts. Next year, 2027, could be a preview of what normal, what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that. So here we are in 2026, and the global average temperature is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. It doesn't sound like very much on any given day.

15:00That kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person. But it is a global average, and it hides a lot of extremes. It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris Agreement in 2015. We said we would definitely keep warming below two degrees and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that came about because after a longer period in which climate scientists and climate policy people were talking about two degrees as a good target, there was emerging science and emerging political sense among the world's most vulnerable countries that two degrees wasn't enough.

15:44that 1.5 degrees was itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic. And when we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of one degree of warming. And we are now in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, and in a single year at 1.5. And we are heading quite rapidly, not just past the goal that we set for ourselves as a more ambitious goal, 1.5 degrees, but towards that less ambitious goal, 2 degrees, which again, many of the world's most vulnerable countries rose up in protest about saying, this is not acceptable for us.

16:28And now it seems, practically speaking, inevitable. We're heading towards a future that we defined as unacceptable. And when I say that, I don't just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined as unacceptable. I mean that when they published their research into the difference between these two levels, 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that report was the event that gave us the huge global climate awakening in late 2018, 2019, into 2020. It's the reason that we know who Greta Thunberg is. It's the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. It's the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal and a Green Deal in Europe.

17:12All of that and all the talk that presidents and prime ministers, all the lip service they paid to climate change at Davos and at the UN in the years that followed, and all of the similar talk that we heard from the world's corporate leaders, all their CEOs and plutocrats, all of that came out of a report that was basically saying we need to limit warming below two degrees. That fear, that panic, that sense of urgency, and that sense of, you know, this must be a top priority, a top political and social priority for the world. All of that was the result of a scientific report documenting how bad things would be at two degrees.

17:50And we now know that we will be heading north of two degrees. So the things that terrified us into action, not that long ago, six, eight years ago, are now our inevitable future.

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19:31Is it your belief that 2027 will be a real no bullshit test of how much climate disruption we can effectively manage at this stage? I think it's going to be a test on that score, which we will fail. And the question is, what impact that makes socially and politically? We are already seeing every year in countless ways how poorly prepared we are for the climate present. But most of the time, it isn't producing the kind of political response and social response that I would like to see. And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue to be that going forward, even into a much warmer future, where rather than changing course on the mitigation side, yes, but also more profoundly perhaps on the adaptation side, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal.

20:39as sort of the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change. Yeah, I would say a decade ago, a lot of people, myself included, I guess, really did believe that extreme weather would eventually force climate action. Can we just say by now that that theory has failed? or that at least anything short of near apocalyptic will not spur climate action? Is that where you are? What I would say is that, you know, people are complicated and populations are complicated and politics is complicated. We have seen a number of disasters of a scale that would have been completely unthinkable to previous generations over the course of this generation.

21:33And, you know, I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye-opening event more than 20 years ago now, and seemed for a time to mark a high point in American climate concern, helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us, you know, an upsurge of climate urgency and, you know, the election of Barack Obama, who, when he accepted the nomination or won the nomination for the Democratic nomination for president, said that this would be the moment that we look back on this, the moment that the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal. There was a lot of, you know, an upsurge of concern then.

22:19We've seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then. Again and again, there's a period of intense national focus and then a kind of a withdrawing from the story of climate change. But I think that that narrative that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by climate disasters and then forget about them entirely is also too simplistic. because whatever you think looking out at the climate landscape today and looking at headlines and watching cable news and listening to politicians, you might think that everybody had moved on from climate and was no longer worried about it.

22:56The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we're basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we've ever been. There were a couple points during Donald Trump's first term where, you know, the respondents in the surveys might be one point higher than we are today. But, you know, those points aside, we are more Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina. They're more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency. They're more worried than they were at any point in the Barack Obama presidency. And they're more worried at any point than they were in the Joe Biden presidency.

23:28So we have a interesting political story here just in America, where we're kind of telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate and has maybe judged the Democratic Party to have made a miscalculation in prioritizing climate during the Biden years. But in fact, at the level of individual people, how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities, and the future of their country, they are just about, if not more, worried about climate impacts than they've ever been before. But our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

24:07The question is not, are they worried? The question is, are they worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway against the problem. I mean, I would, I would, I think that that's an important - I'm not saying they're not, I'm just posing the question. I would, I would say a couple of things about it. The first is that, um, you know, you often hear from, um, people who think we needn't worry as much about climate changes as democratic politicians say did in the period 2018 to 2023. you often hear from those people that most Americans are not willing to pay, say,$10 a month or whatever to take action on climate.

24:50In some ways, I feel like it's a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades. But the other thing I would say is that this, to some degree, has been true for a number of years, but is becoming even more true and in the future will become even more true. And it's not the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action on the mitigation side or on the adaptation side. But, you know, what's called the levelized cost of electricity, which is a somewhat misleading measure of how expensive electricity is, but has been the sort of industry standard for a generation.

25:35Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that's ever been produced. Now, it's misleading. That measure is misleading because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system of electricity. And because you get more solar when the sun's shining and get more wind power when the wind's blowing, you need to build out around that to have a reliable supply of electricity. But according to some new reports that have just been published over the last month or so, because batteries have now made this incredibly dramatic improvement in their cost, like solar did a decade ago and like wind has done, you can now use batteries, very cheap batteries, to even out the distribution of solar and wind power.

26:23And that means that the overall cost, according to this recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system. And we know that those price declines are going to continue for renewables, and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels. So to the extent that we're talking about power and electricity, we know that this bargain, this calculation, is a more rapid transition better for us or worse for us. We know that going forward, it will be a better deal to do more renewables and not do fossil. And the world sees that. I'm not like an economic determinist. I think that politics plays a huge role here, as does culture and, you know, other social cues.

27:07But when you look around, you know, let's say the United States right now, in the United States, we have a president in the White House who is remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America. And yet last year, when he returned to office, more than 90 percent of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. What that means is that for every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year, the share is going to be even bigger. It's expected to be 93%, which is about what it is around the world entirely.

27:48And with the Iran War II, we see many countries around the world looking at the logic of their dependence on fossil fuels and thinking, why would I continue to depend on international actors who may be malevolent or may just be indifferent, but are not, you know, they're not domestic. They're international. They have their own interests. Why would I depend on them to import a power source and depend on them in such a way that I need it continuously supplied to my country at prices that they determine, not me, when And I can just do a one-time importation of green energy infrastructure and then start to collect the dividends in the form of sun and wind, which never stop and are domestically controlled.

28:33And so you've seen in the wake of the Iran war, a huge number of countries all around the world, and I think most importantly around the developing world, who've made huge investment in policy recalibrations to promote a more rapid renewable buildout. So I think we're in a place now where, you know, if you're talking about this as a race, if you're talking about this as a contest, it seems obvious that the green stuff is winning. The problem, which we could talk about, is that it's not winning nearly fast enough to avoid some of these quite scary climate outcomes. I mean, you just mentioned the Trump presidency.