Environment Warning of record global temperatures as chance of very strong El Niño grows

New forecasts show increasing confidence that the developing El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean could be one of the strongest on record with warnings of record global temperatures and huge humanitarian impacts.

Parts of the Pacific have been warming rapidly with data this week showing sea surface temperatures around 0.5C above normal - one threshold used to suggest the onset of El Niño, a natural warming of the Pacific.

It is expected to strengthen over the next few months, peaking potentially as a very strong - or so-called super El Niño - in the autumn.

Scientists are concerned about the consequences it could have on global weather patterns, including the likelihood of 2027 being the warmest year on record.

In their latest outlook, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggest El Niño will begin within the month.

They have increased the confidence to a two-in-three chance that it will be strong or even very strong by this winter.

The rate of warming seen in the tropical Pacific over the last few weeks has been rapid.

Nathanial Johnson, a meteorologist at NOAA described it as a "rare occurrence" should it continue at the current pace - going from the La Niña (a similar cooling pattern) we saw in winter to a potentially strong El Niño, within a year.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) in Australia also forecasts El Niño using a slightly stricter criterion where sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific must exceed 0.8C above average.

Last Time an El Niño Was This Bad, It Killed 50 Million People

As if oil shortages, perpetual wars, and the existential angst of AI weren’t stressful enough, there’s an El Niño brewing — and it’s looking like it’ll be one of the most severe in over a century.

According to numerous weather models, this year’s El Niño — a prolonged climate event featuring unusually warm temperatures, which pops up every couple of years — could easily be the most severe we’ve ever experienced in the modern age. This year’s warm spell could supercharge ocean temperatures by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the Wall Street Journal reports, resulting in widespread droughts for some, floods for others, and perhaps most chillingly, chaos for global food supplies.

To find a historical equivalent, scientists have had to reach all the way back to 1877, when a merciless El Niño unleashed death on a scale few events can rival. Per the WSJ, the catastrophe fueled ongoing droughts, culminating in a global famine that killed at least 50 million people, though some estimates peg the loss of life at an even more horrifying 60 million — around 3 percent on the total population on Earth at the time.

As climate researchers wrote in a 2018 study of the famine: “it was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity and one of the worst calamities of any sort in at least the last 150 years, with a loss of life comparable to the World Wars and the influenza epidemic of 1918/19.”