The apocalyptic El Niño we didn't see coming

Toxic smoke haze is blanketing Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, after weeks of fires in Indonesia. In central Chile, flash flooding has trapped people on their roofs, and already Australia’s spring is unusually hot. Scientists have confirmed it’s an El Niño year, and it’s expected to be one of the worst on record, tipping the odds for these extreme weather events. But we haven’t always had this warning — in 1982 there was a whole heap of apocalyptic weather, and no unifying theory to bring it all together. That “super El Niño” would totally change how we think about forecasting the weather. Now climate change threatens to send us back to the 1980s. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

• 0:00Speaker 13

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  Hello listeners, this is Planet America's John Barron. And this is Planet America's Chas Luchedello. And both of us are here to have a fireside chat. Yes, that's right. Planet America's fireside chat is back. We're talking a lot about the midterm elections, which are coming up in early November, Chas. These are crucial for President Trump, although he's not on the ballot and this won't stop him being president. But the stakes are still pretty high.

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  They certainly are, and we're going to tell you why and so much more on Planet America's fireside chat podcast on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people. If you were in Melbourne on the afternoon of February 8th, 1983, you might have thought that the world was ending. It had been hot all day, 43 degrees and still climbing. And at three o'clock in the afternoon, daylight turned to midnight.

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  Billowing red dust from the Malle and Western Districts hit the city at about 10 to 3, reducing visibility to only several metres.

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  The giant dust cloud was up to three and a half kilometres high in some places and stretched from Mildura to Melbourne. In pictures, it looked like the poster for an apocalyptic blockbuster.

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  It produced an eerie red blanket, which Hollywood producers would pay millions to create. The city was blacked out and motorists found themselves forced to use their headlights.

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  It's one of those events that if you were in Melbourne at the time, no matter your age, you can still say exactly where you were. One woman saw it out the hospital window as she was delivering a baby and she absolutely flipped out, thinking that she was in labour while the world was ending. One kid remembers his teacher getting everyone under the desks, fearing that it was a nuclear attack. Planes were grounded, trees fell, train lines were in chaos, and then it was over.

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  In just half an hour, the storm had passed, leaving most to rub the dust from their eyes.

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  As I say, everyone who was in Melbourne that day remembers it well, but pretty much nobody else does. That's because it was only one of a whole heap of terrifying apocalypse-adjacent events to happen that year. At the time, most people were baffled by the high concentration of bizarre catastrophes happening around the Pacific. Even scientists didn't really understand what was going on. All they knew was that suddenly, all at once, the weather had gone insane all over the place. These days, we have a pretty good idea of what happened that year.

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  In fact, the same thing seems to be about to happen this year too.

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  With an El Nino weather pattern on the way, there are warnings this one could be record-breaking.

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  This event is likely to be the strongest El Nino in our historical record.

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  This year's El Nino, which has been labelled a super El Nino, is projected to cause 450,000 deaths.

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  The extreme weather has already started. There is flash flooding in central Chile. Police have been helicoptering people to safety after they were surprised by floodwaters. In Indonesia, fires have been burning for weeks and the smoky haze is causing trouble in Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

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  What is going to happen to your body after being exposed to this, right?

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  India, meanwhile, has had a weak monsoon, leaving parts of the country short of water.

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  El Nino is strengthening, adding fuel to a planet already on fire.

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  In 1982, when we had an absolute whopper of an El Nino, we had no warning. This time we do. The story of how that changed is fascinating and it raises a lot of questions about what we should do now. I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

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  So the dust that tore through Melbourne that day in 1983 had come from the Malle region in the north-west of Victoria. Drought had turned it into a big red dust bowl, starting in April the previous year. In the autumn and winter of 1982, there wasn't enough rain across Victoria, New South Wales and a lot of South Australia. By spring, everyone was feeling pretty worried about it.

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  Normally at this time of year, they'd be bailing hay here, but as you can see, it's cracked and rutted, as if it had already undergone the ravages of a long summer.

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  In his 81 years, Bill Bishop has seen a devastating succession of droughts.

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  In the upper Hunter region of New South Wales, this cattle farmer cut his herd in half to match the amount of feed on the ground.

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  Regardless of the fact that it might rain the next day, I'm prepared to reduce my stock numbers 50 or 60 or even 75% and have the money put away in the bank for the sales that I've made to be able to buy in again after the drought is over.

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  But remember, this is a huge gamble for Bill because as far as he's aware, the drought could break at any time. Will the drought that we're seeing at the moment break?

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  Well, your guess is as good as mine. How long is this drought going to last? Yes, but I wouldn't have a clue.

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  Over history, Australia had had a lot of people trying to solve this problem, many of whom turned out to be crackpots. A man named Inigo Jones became a Queensland folk hero by claiming he could predict the weather years ahead of time. He did this by observing the movements of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and watching sunspot cycles.

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  The mathematician Pythagoras and the astronomer Galileo, Jones claimed, pointed the way to his theories.

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  Jones had a private observatory in Queensland's Glass House Mountains, which he funded by selling subscriptions to his forecasts to farmers like Bill Bishop.

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  I paid my dues and got forecasts for the next five years. I also asked him to send down his forecast for the past 20 years. I checked on what went on the previous 20 years. It was almost exactly opposite to what was forecast.

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  By 1982, pretty much everyone agreed that forecasting beyond a couple of weeks in the future was impossible using the technology they had at the time.

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  The Bureau of Meteorology recently abandoned their experimental monthly forecasts when they failed to achieve a 50% accuracy.

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  Bill was one of a group of farmers and scientists who came together in August of that year to try and tackle the drought.

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  The seminar, Farmers and the Weatherman, is being run by the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science.

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  And what the farmers really wanted from the scientists is a reliable drought prediction service. They want to know ahead of the summer when it's going to be a really bad one. Knowing when a drought is coming would save them countless millions. This news report is generally upbeat, like reports about emerging science often are. Most of the attendees seem to think that a solution is just around the corner.

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  There's a prevailing mood of optimism that science is winning the race for this knowledge. That is until late in the proceedings, when this unexpected depression sets in.

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  The unexpected depression the ABC reporter is talking about here is a scientist named Neville Nichols, who is introduced as though he's just there to harsh everyone's buzz. I'm kind of surprised that they didn't play a sad trombone sound.

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  I'm very pessimistic about the immediate future. I've had a long history of research into long-range forecasting, over 100 years of it. And there's no generally applicable, usefully accurate long-range forecast system available.

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  Fine, if they're not going to introduce a sad trombone sound, I will. Adair, hit it.

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  My position is probably more pessimistic, as you said, than most of my colleagues.

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  The problem is that there are too many different factors that determine the weather. The ocean temperature, the air pressure, the wind, mountain ranges, the soil moisture, volcanoes, air pollution, carbon dioxide, bushfires, the hole in the ozone layer, they all affect the weather as well as each other. Not to mention Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, if you're a subscriber to Inigo Jones's newsletter. The challenge was to find some metric or measurement in all of that mess that would reliably predict the long-term weather.

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  At the moment, we're really in a stage of still trying to understand what causes the climate to vary from year to year.

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  There is an incredible irony to this report, though. This guy, who arrives at the end of it like a fart in an elevator, was at that moment actually closer than anyone else in Australia to finding that key metric.

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  Neville Nichols was a researcher with the Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre, the ANMRC. The forecasters are particularly interested in a thing called the Southern Oscillation. The Southern Oscillation Index wasn't a new idea, nor was it a particularly complicated one.

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  The Southern Oscillation is a measure of the difference in atmospheric pressure between Tahiti and Darwin. In other words, we take The pressure at Darwin, away from the pressure at Tahiti, and get this graph.

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  So you take the air pressure in Tahiti, halfway across the Pacific Ocean between Australia and South America, and you subtract the air pressure in Darwin. The reason they'd measured this is they'd noticed that changes in this index tended to coincide with changes in the ocean temperature across the Pacific.

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  It was not well accepted, it was not accepted at all that this was useful for forecasting, you know, for making seasonal forecasts and things like that. It was more an interesting scientific phenomenon.

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  This is John McBride, who at the time was a young researcher at the ANMRC. He'd become fascinated by Neville Nichols's work on the Southern Oscillation Index and its relationship with other weather patterns.

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  He was doing what I thought were sort of extraordinary papers, but everyone in Australia, even internationally, were kind of ignoring him because back then it was not accepted that you could do seasonal forecasts.

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  What Nichols had noticed was that you could use the Southern Oscillation Index as a predictor of tropical cyclone behaviour.

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  He was writing extraordinary papers. He wrote a paper in 1979 where you could use the Darwin pressure in June, July, August to forecast the number of tropical cyclones in the Australian region in the following summer.

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  McBride thought that Nichols was on something big, and he wanted in.

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  I got very interested in Neville's work.

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  They started looking at whether there was a broader relationship between that index and wet and dry weather, pulling out historical weather data and comparing it to movements in the index.

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  We do March, April, May. Then we do June, July, August. So we were kind of mapping over the country the instantaneous links between the rainfall and the Southern Oscillation Index. And they started to wonder,

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  could you use these links to predict dry weather further in advance?

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  Could you forecast September, October, November rainfall using June, July, August pressure? By measuring this pressure,

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  what they were actually measuring was the movement of a giant pool of warm water in the middle of the Pacific.

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  So this is the bit where I explain how this phenomenon works, how the movement of this pool of warm water creates El Nino and La Nina. And there have been lots of attempts to explain this over the years.

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  Imagine a giant hairdryer blasting hot air all over eastern Australia.

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  But I actually think metaphors just make this all a little bit more confusing. So I'm going to try and do this without a metaphor.

• 12:25Speaker 20

  Okay, so the Earth rotates from west to east, right? Once each day. We can't feel the effects of that, but it's enough to shift the atmosphere. The west-to-east rotation leads to a persistent wind at the equator, moving from east to west. Usually that wind pushes warm water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean from east to west. So it pools up in the Western Pacific, around Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, basically off the coast of North Queensland. This means rain around the big hot pool of water, what northern Australia experiences as the wet season. Sometimes the east-to-west wind blows harder,

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  pushing the warm pool of water up against the Queensland coast and bringing heavier rain across Australia. And at other times, the east-to-west wind is weaker, which makes the pool of warm water drift back towards South America. Rain means low air pressure, so you can measure the air pressure on either side of the Pacific and get a good idea of what the big warm pool of water

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  is doing at any given time.

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  And that's why when you take a reading of the air pressure in Tahiti and subtract the air pressure in Darwin, you get this number that tells you about how much rain you're likely to get, the Southern Oscillation Index.

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  Trouble with all this is there's a lot of high and low and east and west to remember. The solution the world has come up with is actually a bad one. They adopted and adapted a term historically used by Peruvian fishermen to describe an annoying warm current that arrived around Christmas time and ruined their anchovy harvest. In Peru, of course, Christmas means the arrival of El Nino Jesús, or Little Boy Jesus. So now, when the hot pool of water is over by South America for an unusually long time, we call it El Nino. And the opposite, La Nina, meaning little girl. It's not a good system. I don't like it personally.

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  I can never remember which one is which. The best kind of mnemonic for remembering this we've got is El Nino means no rain, as in El Nino Rain. But that really only works if you're in Australia or in the Western Pacific. But anyway, that's what we're stuck with, unfortunately.

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  Pouring through all that data, Nichols and McBride found that the Southern Oscillation Index moving up or down could be predictive of whether there was going to be El Nino Rain.

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  Their colleagues weren't sure. We'd all gather in a room and have our morning tea at 10 o'clock or 10.30, and people would ask what we were doing, and they were kind of disbelieving.

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  The other meteorologists were like, "Cool idea, guys. Have fun wasting your time."

• 15:26Speaker 02

  No, it's saying, well, you know, maybe it's just statistics, it's just correlations, but there's no physical mechanism by which you can have forecasts on that time scale.

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  The thing is, most years, the effect of the El Nino Southern Oscillation is small. To prove their theory correct to their colleagues and the public, Nichols and McBride would need a really, really big El Nino to happen. Conveniently for them, and basically nobody else, in 1982, the Southern Oscillation Index began to drop hard.

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  Most parts of Victoria have received only 25 to 50% of the normal winter rains.

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  The acting Premier, Mr. Fordham, says the drought is now undoubtedly Victoria's worst for 40 years.

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  The farmers say there's nothing else they can do but kill the sheep as humanely as possible.

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  Nichols and McBride were confident that this was an El Nino year. By June, the Oscillation Index was lower than it had been at that time of year since 1905, which also had been a massive El Nino. But when their colleague, the highly respected meteorologist Adrian Gill, took a look, he wasn't so sure.

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  However, he, you know, representing the global community of oceanographers and meteorologists, did not believe us. They thought there was no El Nino developing.

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  Gill had been using ocean surface temperature readings to predict El Nino, rather than the Southern Oscillation Index. And monitoring at that time was pretty bad. And the numbers, to him, weren't lining up.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  I remember the three of us sitting in a room and arguing about this.

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  By August, things were getting weird. Bushfires started in Victoria, much earlier in the year than usual.

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  Swirling winds which fanned the flames along the gullies pampers the firemen. Most of the men were surprised to be called into duty this early in the season.

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  Indonesia was suffering the effects of the dry and hot weather, too. A fire in Borneo started in November and burned an area about the size of Taiwan. Meanwhile, over in Hawaii, Thanksgiving was ruined when Hurricane Iwa smashed into the islands.

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  There is only storm damage as far as the eye can see.

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  As I said, El Nino Rain only applies to Australia and the Western Pacific. Everywhere else, it's El Nin... lots of rain and El Nin... no electricity to cook your turkey with.

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  There are frozen turkeys but no ovens to cook them in. But there will be Thanksgiving dinner, even if it has to be cooked on barbecues and hibachis.

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  On the South American coast, there was catastrophic flooding in Ecuador and Peru. Warm, wet weather in the area led to an explosion in insect-borne diseases like encephalitis, dengue, malaria, and bubonic plague in New Mexico. Yeah, plague. At the beach, warm water brought increased shark attacks to Oregon beaches.

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  It hit me and it threw me, and I landed in the water. And when I came up, I looked and it was still... had a hole in my board in its mouth.

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  A tornado tore through Los Angeles. Coastal erosion changed the shape of the seafloor and led to an increase in spinal injuries from surfers wiping out on the huge waves.

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  Nichols and McBride were confident that all of this would just keep getting worse until the Southern Oscillation Index started heading up again, showing the warm pool of water was spreading back to the Western Pacific where it belonged. Then the sun went out in Melbourne.

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  The dust gets everywhere, in your nose, in your eyes, in the back of your throat.

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  The dust storm of 1983 was quickly eclipsed by a more horrific event.

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  On February 16, 1983, Ash Wednesday,

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  the sun rose over a countryside brittle dry

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  from more than a year of drought.

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  The forecast that day was for a maximum of 42 degrees with hot, dry, northerly winds. Fire authorities declared it a red alert day. That night, the ABC's Nationwide Programme began with a list of the towns across the country that had been destroyed by fires.

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  Just some of the names and places that are now part of the history of Ash Wednesday, 1983. It's a day that none of us who live in this part of the country will ever forget.

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  Peter Couchman hosted the programme, standing on a giant map of South Australia and Victoria with burn marks on it,

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  showing the areas burned by the fires. At least 2,000 homes are known to have been destroyed or seriously damaged. A dozen or so towns have just literally been wiped off the map.

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  The fires killed 75 people and injured thousands more. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals and countless native animals were killed. It was a terrible end to an apocalyptic summer. And it was the end. The Southern Oscillation Index began climbing almost immediately after the fires were extinguished. But it was this event which got people interested enough to look for answers about why the summer had been so bad.

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  Kind of came from nowhere, you know, sort of, I guess, in the lifetime of, you know... Active scientists working on atmosphere and ocean and so on.

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  And in the break room at the Australian numerical meteorology research centre, Neville Nichols and John McBride's research was suddenly taken far more seriously.

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  They finished their paper. It's called "The seasonal relationship between Australian rainfall and the southern oscillation", and it showed a clear relationship between the two.

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  We sort of went from people working on things that were wrong to heroes almost overnight. It changed how scientists think about weather forecasting and how we hear about it. I believe it was the stimulus for the Bureau Meteorology starting to issue seasonal forecasts.

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  Since it was published in mid-1983, the paper Nichols and McBride worked on has been cited more than 850 times.

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  Neville and I never really appreciated that. It took decades probably for us to realise the importance of the piece of work.

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  And every time the southern oscillation starts to fall below normal, we start to prepare for drought and fires.

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  Climatologists are concerned about another El Nino following sustained falls in one of their key monitors for the event, the Southern Oscillation Index. And when it starts to rise above normal...

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  That indicates La Nina is developing.

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  And we in Australia start preparing for floods.

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  So all that's nice, right? The farmers got their wish. They didn't need to subscribe to Inigo Jones's insane newsletter anymore. They could just look at the Southern Oscillation Index. Now, it wasn't a perfect predictor of natural disasters. Most of Australia's worst bushfires have not taken place during El Nino periods. But for farmers, it's the best they've got in terms of long-term drought predictions. However, there is a new problem.

• 22:29Speaker 20

  See, the other way that we measure the southern oscillation is just by measuring the ocean temperature. If you look at the chart of ocean temperature variation in the middle of the Pacific back since 1900, you'll see that it goes up and down a lot, but it goes up more than it goes down. Climate change means that the ocean is getting gradually warmer, and we're not really sure what that's going to mean for the whole cycle. Is El Nino going to happen more often as the atmosphere and the ocean temperatures warm? What does an El Nino year mean in a warmer world? Will the impact it has on things like rainfall, drought, storms and such get more extreme?

• 23:15Speaker 20

  We have a little bit of an idea about what could happen. Take it from this meteorologist who says that he's not great at sport.

• 23:22Speaker 16

  Picture me trying to play basketball. Once in a great while, I might get a layup. I might get a slam dunk. I'm not a super tall person. But imagine, if you will, that the floor of the basketball court is kind of being raised a little bit every single time I play a game. So each time, the odds of me actually getting a layup or a slam dunk are going up just a little bit.

• 23:41Speaker 20

  This is the part we know for sure. Climate change is raising the floor of the basketball court, changing the odds in the favour of extreme weather. A CSIRO study in 2023 found that climate change was making El Nino both more frequent and more extreme.

• 23:59Speaker 16

  Weather is made up of natural variability, a lot of randomness, ups and downs, dips and crests. But with climate change, we're sort of skewing temperatures hot. We're raising that background and we're pushing otherwise exceptional events into record territory.

• 24:11Speaker 20

  But it's also making the Southern Oscillation Index a less reliable indicator of weather. The 2023 El Nino didn't produce a severe drought. In fact, the summer was unexpectedly wet. Understanding what climate change is doing to this system is the main game for climate scientists right now because without it, we're thrown back to the 80s. At the end of 2024, the experts started telling farmers not to pay too much attention to the index and focus on other indicators instead.

• 24:45Speaker 12

  The Bureau is encouraging farmers to focus on its long-term forecasts rather than outlooks for climate indicators like El Nino or La Nina.

• 24:57Speaker 20

  For what it's worth, the Southern Oscillation Index is dropping this year, potentially faster than it did in the crazy summer of 1982. If you're in Melbourne and you see the sun go out in the middle of the day, it's okay. It's not the apocalypse. Well, not quite.

• 25:22Speaker 20

  This episode of If You're Listening was written by Jess O'Callaghan and me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It was produced by Jess O'Callaghan and Adair Shepherd. Thanks to ABC climate reporter Romy Stephens for sharing her interview with John McBride. Romy is reporting on El Nino all through this spring, so if you want to know the latest as things start to heat up, follow her work. The ABC archive team was also extremely helpful this week in digitising a bunch of film from 1982 and 83 that was just sitting there covered in dust. While writing this episode, Jess became a little bit obsessed with Inigo Jones and the other weather prophets of the 20th century

• 26:04Speaker 20

  who tried to convince farmers that they'd cracked the code of predicting droughts. The stories of these guys are apparently extraordinary, and Jess will be bringing us those on Tuesday. I'll catch you then.