El Niño events bring more storms and floods in the Americas (Pic: rawpixel)
The world is facing the strongest El Niño weather effect in recorded history.
The weather effect is set to devastate global food supplies. The World Bank has estimated that rice production could fall by up to 50 percent in affected areas.
Climate scientist James Hansen wrote in a newsletter, “It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Niño have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data.”
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (Enso) is a pattern of warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean. El Niño specifically refers to the warming phase of this process.
These events have a huge influence on global weather patterns by disrupting the movement of hot air across the globe.
In Asia, Australia and the Amazon, El Niño can cause droughts and fires. In the Americas it can cause floods and storms. In Africa and Europe, it can cause both.
The Enso is a natural cycle. El Niño events happen every two to seven years, but in recent years they have become stronger and more frequent.
The exact effects of El Niño are hard to predict.
Scientists are unsure if a warming climate has worsened the El Niño itself as the Enso can be hard to study. What is clear is that climate change is worsening the effects of El Niño, and in turn El Niño is driving climate breakdown.
The National Centre for Atmospheric Science in Leeds warns, “Rising background temperatures due to human-driven climate change mean that when El Niño occurs, it can contribute to more intense heat and more extreme conditions.”
The El Niño could send the Amazon rainforest to a “tipping point”—an irreversible cascade of ecosystem breakdown.
An article in the scientific journal Nature says, “Rainforest would give way to savannah and degraded woodland over decades.”
This could wreck global weather systems. The global ecosystem is increasingly unstable and unpredictable.
Natural weather variations can disrupt an already delicate balance, with catastrophic effects for the planet and for us.
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