Coming Soon: The Hottest Year On Record Due To El Niño – And Climate Catastrophe
El Niño has begun, on the other side of the planet, and forecasters predict that it could very well be “something we’ve never seen before”.
“This is a very unique situation, with abnormally warm North Pacific, North Atlantic, and the rest of the globe running warmer on average,” said popular forecasters Severe Weather Europe.
El Niño is a naturally occurring weather event that develops cyclically in the Pacific Ocean and will likely add more heat to our planet’s global system.
It is currently growing at a rate that has not been recorded before, with the concerned region of the equatorial Pacific Ocean shifting to a warm phase after a couple of years of cold which is known as La Niña.
Experts are predicting that El Niño – paired with the warming we’ve already caused through climate change – is likely to make 2024 the hottest year on record.
In this stage of El Niño’s cycle, a strong subsurface warm pool hundreds of metres below the sea surface triggered a “strong shift into warm anomalies” in March following last year’s cold phase, which is likely a key early contributor to sever weather patterns to come.
The latest outlook has given a greater than 90% chance of El Niño impacting the next winter season, with a transition being expected throughout the summer months before then.
A strong, sustained “warm zone belt” has been identified along the northwestern coast of South America just off Ecuador and Peru, leading to the last two months recording the warmest daily sea surface temperatures in the past 40 years.
It should be said that this phenomenon cannot be directly attributed to local sea surface temperature increases measured over recent months.
“Usually, there is a larger contrast with an El Niño, but this year, the oceans are already running record warmest, without the El Niño properly developed yet. We are entering uncharted waters with such a global configuration, so this El Niño might be something we have not seen before yet.”
Calling the current pattern “a warning in a bottle”, the forecasters predicted more intense dry seasons and more rain come winter.
Given that Europe is almost half a world from eh origins of El Niño, it tends to be less severely affected than most of North America – global weather patterns cascade and interact endlessly, so it is highly likely that affects will definitely still be felt.
El Niña-El Niño fluctuations are natural, and have been taking place for thousands of years. Despite this, human caused climate change has modified the atmosphere, and base temperatures, enough to throw off natural cycles.
In many cases, this has rendered the emergence of extreme weather patterns and events to be far more likely, even if still emerging attribution science struggles to draw direct causality between atmospheric climate change and any isolated weather event.
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