A New Powerful El Niño is Forming in the Pacific Ocean, Scientist Are Shocked..

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:02]The Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on Earth.

[00:00:11]It covers more than 165 million km, nearly a third of the planet's entire surface area.

[00:00:28]It holds more water than all the land on Earth combined.

[00:00:36]It drives weather patterns across six continents.

[00:00:42]Regulates the temperature of the atmosphere above.

[00:00:46]and influences rainfall, drought, hurricane formation, and agricultural output in ways that affect billions of people who have never seen its shores.

[00:01:02]And right now, something is building in the Pacific that scientists are watching with a level of concern that goes beyond routine monitoring.

[00:01:12]A new El Nino event is forming. Not a typical one, not the modest garden variety warming that climate scientists track as part of the normal variability of the Earth's climate system. What is developing in the equatorial Pacific has characteristics that have made some of the most experienced climate researchers in the world use words they don't use lightly. Words like unprecedented, words like alarming, words that in the careful hedge everything culture of peer-reviewed science represent a significant departure from business as usual. This is the story of what El Nino is, why this one is different, and what it means for a planet that is already running hotter than at any point in recorded human history.

[00:02:10]What El Nino actually is.

[00:02:14]To understand why scientists are alarmed, you first need to understand what El Nino is and how it works under normal circumstances.

[00:02:24]The equatorial Pacific Ocean is governed by a largecale atmospheric and oceanic system called the Walker circulation.

[00:02:34]In normal conditions, strong trade winds blow from east to west across the tropical Pacific from the coast of South America toward Asia and Australia. These winds push warm surface water westward, piling it up in the Western Pacific around Indonesia and Australia.

[00:02:55]As the warm water piles up in the west, it drives intense rainfall and thunderstorm activity over those regions. In the eastern Pacific near the coast of South America, the westward movement of surface water creates a gap that is filled by cold water rising from the deep ocean, a process called upwelling.

[00:03:18]This cold, nutrient-rich water supports some of the world's most productive fisheries off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador. It also keeps the eastern Pacific relatively cool, suppressing rainfall over the western coast of South America.

[00:03:35]El Nino disrupts this entire system.

[00:03:40]During an El Nino event, the trade winds weaken. Sometimes they reverse direction entirely.

[00:03:47]Without the steady westward push, the warm water that had been piled up in the western Pacific begins to slosh back toward the east, spreading across the central and eastern Pacific in a vast pool of anomalously warm water. The upwelling of South America weakens or stops. The cold water that normally keeps the eastern Pacific cool is replaced by warm surface water. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific rise dramatically, sometimes by two, 3, or even 4° C above normal. This doesn't sound like much, but the ocean and atmosphere are tightly coupled systems. A change in sea surface temperature of just a degree or two across millions of square kilm of ocean completely reorganizes the patterns of evaporation, convection, and rainfall across the entire Pacific basin and far beyond.

[00:04:53]The tropical rainfall that normally drenches Indonesia and northern Australia shifts eastward toward the central Pacific. Drought grips Australia, Indonesia, India, and parts of Africa. Flooding and intense rainfall strike Peru, Ecuador, and coastal regions of the Americas.

[00:05:17]The jetream over North America shifts, bringing unusual warmth to some regions and intense cold to others. Hurricane formation patterns change in both the Pacific and Atlantic.

[00:05:31]El Nino is not a local event. It is a global reorganization of how heat and moisture move through the Earth's climate system, triggered by a shift in ocean temperature in one region of the Pacific.

[00:05:49]Why this one is different? El Nino events are not new. They occur with rough regularity every 2 to 7 years on average, though the timing and intensity vary considerably.

[00:06:02]The historical record includes weak events that barely registered, moderate events that caused significant regional disruption, and strong events that produced widespread devastation.

[00:06:15]The El Nino of 1997 to 1998 was the strongest ever recorded at the time.

[00:06:23]Sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific reached more than 3° C above normal. Global mean temperature that year was the highest ever measured to that point. Floods killed thousands in South America. Drought triggered massive wildfires in Indonesia and Australia.

[00:06:44]The global economic damage was estimated at approximately $35 billion.

[00:06:50]It reshaped scientific understanding of how powerful El Nino events could be.

[00:06:57]Then came 2015 to 2016.

[00:07:00]That event surpassed 1997 to 1998 in some measures, producing what meteorologists classified as a super El Nino, an event of sufficient strength and duration to break records across multiple metrics simultaneously.

[00:07:20]What is developing now has characteristics that are causing researchers to sit up very straight.

[00:07:27]The baseline has changed.

[00:07:30]When the 1997 to 1998 event occurred, global mean ocean temperatures were operating within a range that while elevated compared to pre-industrial conditions, had not yet departed from historical norms by the margin seen today.

[00:07:47]When the 2015 to 2016 event occurred, the baseline was warmer still. Today, the global ocean is operating at temperature levels that have no precedent in the instrumental record.

[00:08:02]Ocean heat content, the total amount of heat stored in the world's oceans, has been breaking records consecutively for years.

[00:08:11]The Atlantic Ocean, in particular, reached temperatures in 2023 and 2024 so far above seasonal averages that some climate scientists described the anomalies as off the charts.

[00:08:25]An El Nino event adds additional warming on top of this elevated baseline.

[00:08:32]In previous decades, a strong El Nino pushed global temperatures to records that then subsided when the event ended.

[00:08:40]Now, a strong El Nino is pushing temperatures that are already at records even higher into territory that has no historical analog. The superposition of El Nino warming on top of a climate that has already been shifted significantly warmer by decades of greenhouse gas accumulation is what is making climate researchers genuinely alarmed rather than merely attentive.

[00:09:09]To understand the specific concern about the current situation, it helps to understand something about where heat goes in the Earth's climate system. The planet is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating back to space.

[00:09:24]A result of the greenhouse effect produced by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases in the atmosphere.

[00:09:34]This energy imbalance means the earth is continuously accumulating heat. Most of that heat, more than 90% of it, goes into the oceans rather than into the atmosphere. This is why ocean heat content is one of the most fundamental measures of how much the Earth's energy budget has shifted.

[00:09:56]The oceans have been absorbing this excess heat for decades. The total amount of heat stored in the world's oceans has been increasing steadily with the rate of increase itself accelerating in recent years. And in 2023, something happened that caught the attention of oceanographers worldwide.

[00:10:19]Global mean sea surface temperatures, the temperature of the ocean's uppermost layer, began rising at an anomalous rate. not just elevated above average as they have been for years, but elevated at a pace and to levels that were difficult to explain using the known forcing factors alone.

[00:10:41]even accounting for the early stages of the developing El Nino. Even accounting for a reduction in atmospheric aerosols from reduced shipping fuel sulfur emissions that had previously been providing slight cooling. Even accounting for increased solar activity at this point in the solar cycle. The temperatures were higher than the models predicted. Some climate scientists began describing the anomaly as a possible step change. not just a temporary spike, but a possible transition to a new higher temperature state from which recovery to previous levels might not occur on any time scale relevant to human planning. Others argued that the anomaly was within the range of natural variability, large, but not necessarily indicative of a fundamental shift. The debate is ongoing. The temperatures have remained elevated and the El Nino developing on top of this anomalously warm ocean baseline is adding a layer of uncertainty that the models built on historical data from a cooler ocean may not be equipped to fully capture.

[00:11:56]The consequences of the warming ocean and the developing El Nino were not theoretical.

[00:12:03]They arrived in the observable record with remarkable speed.

[00:12:08]2023 became the hottest year in recorded human history, surpassing 2016 itself, a record set during the previous super El Nino by a margin that was larger than typical year-to-year record increments.

[00:12:26]The global mean temperature in 2023 was approximately 1.45° 45° C above the pre-industrial baseline, approaching, but not yet reaching the 1.5° threshold that the Paris Agreement identified as a key boundary for limiting the most severe climate impacts.

[00:12:49]Several individual months in 2023 and 2024 broke previous monthly temperature records by margins so large that climate scientists publicly expressed surprise.

[00:13:02]July 2023 was described by the World Meteorological Organization as likely the hottest month in 120,000 years. Not just in the instrumental record, but in the paleoclimate record reconstructed from ice cores, tree rings, and ocean sediments.

[00:13:24]Marine heat waves intensified and persisted in ocean regions that had not previously experienced such events at comparable intensity.

[00:13:34]Coral bleaching caused by elevated ocean temperatures that force coral polyp to expel the symbiotic algae that give them color and energy, leaving them white and vulnerable, occurred simultaneously across multiple reef systems worldwide.

[00:13:53]The Great Barrier Reef experienced its most widespread bleaching event on record. Coral systems in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean, and the Red Sea experienced similar events.

[00:14:08]The Amazon rainforest, already under stress from deforestation and drought, experienced a drought in 2023 that killed tens of millions of fish as river levels dropped to historic lows in some tributaries.

[00:14:25]Lake Tittikaka, the world's highest navigable lake, dropped to its lowest level in decades.

[00:14:32]Wildfires burned in regions that had not previously experienced significant fire activity.

[00:14:40]The climate system was responding visibly and rapidly to the combination of long-term warming and El Nino forcing.

[00:14:50]One of the most significant concerns about the current El Nino is the extent to which our forecasting systems may be inadequate to predict its behavior and consequences.

[00:15:02]Climate forecasting models are built on historical data. They are calibrated against the observed behavior of the climate system over the instrumental record. Roughly 150 years of reliable global measurements.

[00:15:17]The models have been refined over decades and have demonstrated considerable skill at predicting the development and consequences of El Nino events. But those models were built and calibrated in a climate that was on average cooler than today's climate. the relationships between El Nino and rainfall patterns, between El Nino and hurricane formation, between El Nino and global temperature records. All of these relationships were established in a climate context that no longer fully applies. The climate system has been shifted to a new state and the behavior of El Nino in that new state is not necessarily the same as its behavior in the old one.

[00:16:03]Some climate scientists have expressed specific concern about the potential for nonlinear responses. Situations where the climate system does not respond proportionally to forcing, but instead jumps to a qualitatively different state. In a climate that is already operating near certain thresholds, an additional push from El Nino warming could trigger responses that the models built on linear assumptions about system behavior would not predict.

[00:16:34]The particular concern involves what are called tipping points. Components of the climate system that once pushed past a critical threshold shift to a new state and do not return to the previous one when the forcing is removed.

[00:16:49]the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and several other major Earth system components have been identified as potential tipping elements that could be pushed toward or past their thresholds by a combination of long-term warming and El Nino forcing. None of these tipping points has definitively been crossed, but the evidence that some of them are approaching their thresholds is mounting. And an unusually powerful El Nino on top of an already stressed climate system reduces the margin between current conditions and those thresholds in ways that the standard forecasting frameworks may not fully reflect. Abstract discussions of climate physics and forecasting uncertainty become concrete when you consider what an unusually powerful El Nino means for the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods, food security, and physical safety depend directly on the patterns of rainfall, drought, and temperature that El Nino disrupts.

[00:18:03]farmers in Australia, India, and subsaharan Africa who depend on monsoon rainfall that El Nino suppresses.

[00:18:12]Fishing communities in Peru and Ecuador whose livelihoods depend on the cold, nutrient-rich upwelling that El Nino eliminates.

[00:18:23]communities in floodprone regions of South America and East Africa who face intensified rainfall and the landslides and flooding that accompany it.

[00:18:35]Food security is perhaps the most direct and immediate concern.

[00:18:41]El Nino events have historically produced significant agricultural disruptions.

[00:18:47]Droughts that reduce grain yields in major producing regions. floods that destroy crops. Temperature anomalies that affect planting calendars and growing seasons.

[00:19:00]A strong El Nino event in a world already stressed by supply chain disruptions, population growth, and the ongoing effects of previous climate related agricultural disruptions has the potential to produce food insecurity at a scale that exceeds what any individual El Nino has caused. Historically, public health is another direct concern.

[00:19:27]El Nino events are associated with increases in the incidence of certain infectious diseases. Cholera and other waterbornne diseases increase in floodaffected regions. While malaria and deni expand their geographic ranges as temperature and rainfall changes alter the habitat of disease carrying mosquitoes.

[00:19:52]A world that has just emerged from a global pandemic has public health systems in many regions that are stretched thin and poorly positioned to absorb additional disease burden.

[00:20:05]The scientists watching this are not alarmists. They are researchers who have spent careers studying the climate system and who are expressing concern because the data is expressing concern.

[00:20:19]The models are being pushed into territory where their historical calibration provides less confidence.

[00:20:26]The ocean is warmer than it has been in the instrumental record. The El Nino developing within that warm ocean has the potential to push global temperatures and regional climate impacts beyond what any previous event produced.

[00:20:42]We have been warned about this moment for decades. The physics was understood.

[00:20:48]The trajectory was projected. What is happening now is not a surprise in the sense of being unpredicted. It is a surprise only in the sense that predictions about the future always feel abstract until the future arrives and the data starts coming in. The data is coming in now. The Pacific Ocean is telling us something. And the scientists who study it are listening very carefully to what it says.