NEW DELHI, June 11: “El Nino,” nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced on Thursday.
Experts said the El Nino, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival — or exceed — a record El Nino that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially confirmed the existence of the El Nino, which is a warming of the Pacific near the equator that affects weather patterns across the globe. NOAA’s announcement said there’s a 63% chance that the El Nino will get so intense this late fall and early winter that it “would rank among the largest El Nino events in the historical record going back to 1950.”
The warm, deep waters of an El Nino affect weather patterns by bringing “a lot of extra heat to the surface, fuelling a lot of extreme events for a lot of places around the world,” the experts said.
The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described El Nino as an “urgent climate warning.” “El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” Mr Guterres said in a video message.
The weather pattern’s effects vary by region. El Nino often dampens — but doesn’t eliminate — Atlantic hurricane season activity, but increases it in the Pacific. So while the U.S. East and Gulf coasts may get a break, Hawaii and other islands are more in danger, the experts said.
The drought-stricken West Asia could benefit, climate scientists said. Other places are looking at more danger. Parts of western South America — where the first El Ninos were noticed decades ago — often get heavy rain and floods, along with an extra warm summer. India faces more intense heat waves, while drought, wildfires and heat threaten Australia.
North-eastern Africa is likely going to get weather whiplash from intense drought to dangerously heavy rains. In the U.S., El Ninos can cause more intense storms with heavier rainfall in the South, but they also tend to generally benefit the U.S. agriculture industry, the experts said.
But overall, temperatures raised by the weather pattern can dampen American economic growth. Several climate scientists forecast that 2027 will be the hottest year on record because of lagging effects of this El Nino, which is expected to peak in the fall or winter. “We have pretty clear evidence that the U.S. economy grows more slowly when temps are above normal,” the experts said.
The weather extremes caused by an El Nino also depend on when it develops. Usually El Ninos form in the summer, peak in the late fall or early winter, and peter out the next spring, scientists said. However, some experts forecast that this El Nino would peak a month or two earlier based on strong early signs from recent weeks.
The early indications — including warmer water pushing toward the surface of the Pacific — have been so strong and noticeable that forecasters have all been predicting the same ultra-strong El Nino.
(Manas Dasgupta)
