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On a planet already overheating due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the 2026 El Niño will throw fuel on to a raging fire
On a planet already overheating due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the 2026 event will throw fuel on to a raging fireFlooding in Clontarf, Dublin earlier this year.
The 2026 El Niño may affect rainfall patterns. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Timeshould we be worried about El Niño? The phenomenon is a naturally occurring part of what is known as the ENSO cycle and happens every two to seven years. The and other scientific agencies declare an official El Niño event once Pacific Ocean temperatures are 0.5 degrees higher than normal, alongside weakening trade winds.
While it usually brings changes to rainfall patterns across the tropics, leading to droughts and flooding – sometimes catastrophically so – the 2026-2027 El Niño is taking place on a planet that is already over 1 degree hotter due to human-caused global warming.by July 2026, this year’s El Niño looks on track to have no precedent in living memory. But while the ENSO cycle is natural, it is being turbocharged by global heating, in particular ocean warming.
A team of scientists led by Columbia University’spublished in Science last week found that El Niño events over the past 40 years have grown roughly 40 per cent stronger than those seen during the pre-industrial era, in parallel with global temperatures. This would suggest that as the planet heats up we can expect more extreme El Niños. The 2015 “very strong” El Niño saw temperature anomalies well above 2 degrees at its peak.
It brought catastrophic forest and peat fires in Indonesia, extensive coral bleaching and more tropical cyclones. There were crop failures in Southern Africa with up to 10 million people in Ethiopia requiring emergency food aid, and drought and fire risk in Australia. Man jailed for murder of father of five in Cork golf-club attackEl Niños mostly impact the tropics but this does not mean that Europe will not be affected.
The phenomenon, while temporary, can affect rainfall patterns on the European Continent and drive global temperatures up even further, leading to more weather extremes and heat stress. And this summer’s European heatwaves have shown just how dangerous heat can be.
Aestimates that each degree Celsius of global warming adds a month of intolerable heat for one billion people, many of whom cannot afford air conditioning or cooling.a “super” El Niño could be associated with increased rainfall and more storms, driven by a southerly shift in the jet stream. There is limited information on theabout what this year’s monster event might mean for Ireland.
It says only that “the currently developing strong El Niño has the potential, together with the underlying global warming trend, to lead to record high global mean temperatures in the second half of 2026 and in 2027, and to extreme weather events. its influence on Ireland and Europe is comparatively weak, highly variable, and not robust in the present-day climate”. Climate science is not the same as weather forecasting.
Scientists are careful to “stay in their lanes” and only report conclusions they have confidence in. But the public, along with Government agencies and local authorities, needs more than a 10-day forecast when we know this winter is likely to see the strongest El Niño in recorded history.. The last time the Earth had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperatures were 2.5-4 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, and sea levels were 15m-25m higher than today’s levels.
Those conditions developed over thousands of years, however; not 200 years. There is simply no precedent for the pace of global heating that is taking place now, and it is greater than many model estimates in the most recent assessment report of the IPCC.
If this information is not keeping our political leaders awake at night, it should be.that a failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions along with the continued degradation of the biosphere could tip the Earth out of the stable climatic conditions to which human civilisation has adapted, and into a new unstable and “” state. Such a process could unfold slowly or, like bankruptcy, could then happen very quickly if key thresholds or tipping points are crossed.
All of this means that on a planet already heating up due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the 2026 El Niño will throw fuel on to a raging fire. How worried should we be about this year’s ‘Super-Duper El Niño’? A Wicklow woman in Marbella: ‘I would make friends in the summer and they would then go home.
But I found my tribe’Farmer Phil: ‘The story goes that a tree in our field was planted by Cromwell’s grandchildren 350, 400 years ago’‘I’m officially retiring from my primary school - and I’ve had a good run’
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