David Friedberg: El Niño Could Trigger a Global Food Crisis

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]This science corner is about the dreaded El Nino season that is coming up. This is a forecast for sea surface temperature anomalies. Ocean temperatures are going to exceed anything we have seen in recent history.

[00:00:13]That top image is the sea surface temperature anomaly. That means how different the ocean temperatures are.

[00:00:18]And this is compared to 1877 when we had the biggest El Nino year ever. Why does this all matter? The reason is the oceans are the battery of weather. And at this point there is so much excess energy stored up in the oceans. It's about 11 million terowatt hours. That's 500 years worth of human energy in this ocean. And over the next few months that energy is going to be released into the atmosphere. 99% confidence that will make the upcoming year the hottest year on record by far that humans have ever experienced. Southern Argentina, Chile, Brazil could see record shattering heat waves. And this is where things start to get a little nasty because when that happens, the crops start to fail.

[00:00:54]Hundreds of millions of people depend on the exports out of Brazil. Brazil's the world's largest a exporter and the scariest one of all is if the monsoons fail which is now a very high probability event in India 150 million farmers in India and one and a half billion people that depend on that food.

[00:01:08]If you think about the second and third effects of this over the next year you could see energy prices spiking and electricity spiking and the grid failing in parts of the southwest, commodity prices spiking all over the world. And then you would see places like India, the Philippines, Vietnam starting to face some sort of unrest if there isn't enough food supply that's coming into those markets. And then the question in India is a really nasty one because there isn't a really good solution.