'Super' El Niño is coming. What should you expect?

The world is bracing for the worst effects of a Super El Niño. Or a Godzilla El Niño. But what does that really even mean? For millennia El Niño has shaped weather across the globe, fueling flooding in parts of the U. S., droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia, and disrupting fisheries across the Pacific. Scientists have long wondered if human activities — chiefly the burning of fossil fuels — are making El Niños stronger. Now, on the eve of the strongest El Niño on record, a team of researchers think they have an answer. Interested in more science behind the weather? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate solutions. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  By now, you've probably heard or seen the headlines.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Buckle up. There is some extreme weather coming our way globally.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Because we're in the midst of not just any old El Nino.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  The World Meteorological Organization says that it's, quote, literally off the charts.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Some scientists have nicknamed this a super or even Godzilla event.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  This year, we're really seeing an El Nino for the record books.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Look, as a Godzilla stan, I love any reference to the king of the monsters. But even I'm like, what does that actually mean? That's the question we put to Julia Cole, the last person you just heard. She's a climate scientist and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  This El Nino is stronger at this point in time than any other El Nino that we have good data for.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And she says it's still strengthening.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Normally, El Ninos reach their strongest point around November, December, January.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  So yeah, in Julia's opinion.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  We're virtually guaranteed to get a record breaking El Nino in the coming year.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Now, you might hear that and think, so what? El Nino happens every two to seven years. It's just weather, right? But this weather really packs a punch.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Stronger El Ninos lead to stronger impacts. So we can expect more intense floods, droughts, temperature changes. We also are already seeing tropical storms coming and striking Hawaii. Drought in Indonesia, which is really extreme and leading to wildfires and terrible air quality across that region. Something like a quarter million acres or more have burned as a consequence of the drought in Indonesia.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  So whether you live in the US or abroad, there's a good chance you're going to feel this El Nino. You might already be. Which is why we at Short Wave want to spend some time talking through the science of this natural climate phenomena, starting with a big question that scientists have had about El Nino for a long time. Are we humans making it worse?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  It's been very hard to determine the human fingerprint on El Nino and La Nina because there's a lot of what we call internal variability in them.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Only now, Julia thinks she's found an answer buried in coral. So today on the show, how climate change is impacting El Nino and what that means for all of us living on land. I'm Nate Rot. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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• 4:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so before the break, I said something that I think needs a little more explanation, which is that El Nino, La Nina, this cycle is a natural phenomenon. Where in El Nino, the Pacific Ocean along the equator warms. That warmer water warms the atmosphere above it. Imagine holding your hand above a hot bath, right? Warm air rises.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And at the same time, that rising air is a disturbance in the upper atmosphere that rearranges how the atmosphere circulates over the Pacific and outside the Pacific. So that's how anomalies or climate extremes get exported from the tropical Pacific into North America, South America, and even further beyond.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So in a past life, Julia, I was a climate reporter here at NPR. And whenever I covered an El Nino, I always asked researchers the same question I'd ask after a major wildfire or a hurricane, which is, is climate change? You know, are our actions as humans making this thing worse? And I feel like I always heard some version of probably, maybe. Can you explain why this has been such a hard question to answer?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Well, El Nino originates in a place with very few human inhabitants. And so it's been very hard to suss out long term trends. Over the last 40, 50 years, we've seen a series of quite strong El Ninos. And what we haven't known, I guess, is whether that period of strong El Ninos is really unusual in the context of El Nino's natural long term variability, or whether that is just what El Nino does. We have strong years, we have weak years. We also don't have a lot of data going back very far in time. The best data that we have on El Nino and La Nina come from the satellite based ocean temperature records. And those have only been going on since early 1982, something like that, late 1981.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  But this new study you published claims to finally have answers to whether there are human fingerprints on El Nino. And I kind of want to hold the answer to build a little bit of suspense. But can you tell me how you figured this out?

• 6:10Speaker 03

  So what we were able to do is to use a different source of information on those trends, which is the geochemical record of temperature that's preserved in the geochemistry of these long live corals sitting in the Galapagos Islands.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a tough place to work, too, I've heard, you know, the Galapagos are.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, terrible.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Love it. I love working in the Galapagos. And the Galapagos really is an ideal place to study El Nino because the eastern Pacific side of El Nino has a really strong impact there. It's where the biggest El Nino events have their strongest impact on the ocean's temperature. And so if you could figure out how to get a past record of ocean temperature from the Galapagos, you'd be in good shape to understand the history of El Nino.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  So how do you go about getting these records from corals?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  We look at two different kinds of coral in the Galapagos. We look at living coral that grow in a kind of a mound shape. So we go down on scuba, we take a core, and we bring the core back to the lab and sample it millimeter by millimeter to extract powders that we then analyze for the chemistry. The chemistry of the powders that we sample tell us about the temperature in which the coral grew. And we measure two aspects of the chemistry. And together, those give us histories of the ocean temperature at Galapagos. We also find corals that have been tossed up on the beach by large waves, maybe tsunami. We're able to date them using radiometric methods and understand how old they are. And then we're able to get these month by month records back in time that tell us the monthly temperature history in which that coral grew.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So we can see El Nino because those are the warm years.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  It reminds me so much of like dendrochronology, like using tree ring data to determine drought or wildfire.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Very similar. So we're always trying to figure out how to learn about the past. And corals preserve a record of that, just as trees do, just as ice cores or cave deposits do, or even sediments in oceans and lakes.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so you do this analysis of these coral in the Galapagos and you found what?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  When we looked at the history of ocean temperatures in Galapagos, we found the variability, that is, the range from high to low, was much higher in the last 40 to 50 years than it was in the pre industrial period, 36% higher. We found that that was due to an increase in the intensity of warm events, not cold events, telling us that El Ninos are getting stronger. So I think there are some human fingerprints on El Nino.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  So it basically says, yeah, climate change is probably playing a role in the intensity of El Ninos.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Well, we started running more data and analyzing more cores. And we put it up against a plot of global temperature. And in fact, it looks like a hockey stick. It parallels the rise in global temperature very strongly. And it all kind of fell out in this pattern that was remarkably distinct, that really said that the pre industrial is very different from today.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Were you surprised at all by this?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  I was surprised, to be honest. I thought it would be really interesting if it happened. But I also know that El Nino has tremendous amount of internal variability. And I kind of expected that we would see at least a few intervals in the past where El Nino and La Nina were as strong as today. And we just don't see that, you know?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. What kind of feedback are you hearing from other people that studied this? Because I mean, this is like a huge question that scientists have been asking for a long time. And here you are saying like, hey, I think we've got an answer.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  I'm hearing mostly positive things, right? That this is a really important data set and it adds to our sense that El Nino is getting stronger. This is a really clear demonstration that at this particular site, that seems to be happening, right? I'm also hearing, why doesn't it seem to be accelerating as temperature is accelerating? That's a good question. And I think the reason that we don't see the variability accelerating as temperature accelerates upward is that we know El Nino has a lot of internal variability. And that doesn't go away just because you put a warming curve underneath it, right? So you still have some are strong and some are weak. So we're not saying that global warming has taken over control of El Nino and every event from now on is going to be stronger than the last.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  That is not at all what we're predicting.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  So tell me if this is accurate then. I mean, like my gut takeaway would be, hey, El Ninos are going to be more intense into the future. But you're saying that that's probably true, but we don't know.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess that's where I land on that because the coral data that we have. Don't tell us about the future. But they do say that the trend we're seeing is real and happening. And that's new. We know now that at the moment, they are intensifying with global warming.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  OK. What are the implications of that? Like, if El Niños are going to be more severe, more intense, what kind of weather changes, impacts, are we going to be talking about that?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  This is the biggest source of climate risks and extremes right now on the planet. And we're juicing that up in a warming world, and that's not good news. Another thing we hear a lot about right now with this big El Niño, we expect it to supercharge global temperatures as well. We expect to see record global temperatures as a consequence of the El Niño, possibly in 2026 and almost certainly in 2027. So we've got a warming world, and then we've got a more variable world. And together, these are adding layers of climate risks and hazards to our daily lives all around the world. What we think of as a strong event will be more frequent. If those strong events are imposing climate hardships

• 11:37Speaker 03

  on people or on ecological systems, those events are going to come at a faster pace.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, usually, you might have like a couple of moderate events or weak events, which would give you more time for an ecosystem to recover or for a community or a country to economically recover.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So like, for example, in the case of coral bleaching, we know the big, strong El Niño years are when we see the biggest, strongest global coral bleaching events. If you're hitting a coral reef with a strong bleaching event every 30 years, maybe we can have some recovery there. If you're hitting it with a major bleaching event every two or five or three years, that's a really different story, and it's much harder to come back from that.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Oy. In a year like this, where we're pretty much guaranteed to get the supercharged El Niño, what would be your advice for people to prepare right now?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Well, I think adaptation takes local forms everywhere. And so people have to look in their own communities to say, what are the things that we would need if a typical El Niño impact is actually going to come our way this year, right? So if that were to be a flood, for example, you might want to make sure that culverts are cleared out, make it easy for water to drain. Similarly, if you're looking at an area that's going to get hot and dry and you're thinking about wildfire, well, fire hardening your home and perhaps putting burn restrictions in place. So every community would have a different response.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  I don't think it's something that we can completely adapt our way out of. But by understanding the risks involved, maybe we do a better job at addressing the root cause, right? This is just one more way that human activity, the burning of fossil fuels, is walloping us in terms of climate change, climate variability, climate risks and hazards, and incredibly devastating impacts to people, to ecosystems, to places where we've invested a lot in building homes and infrastructure and all those things.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Julia, thank you so much for bringing this to us and for doing this research.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  You're welcome. It's my pleasure, and thank you for your attention to it.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Aru Nayar and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. I'm Nate Rot. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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