As summer approaches, their chances increase one of the strongest El Nino events in history. Forecasters are increasingly convinced that this temporary warming of the tropical Pacific will set a new global temperature record, but what does this mean for the climate crisis?
El Nino events are now taking place against the backdrop of human-driven climate change. The relationship between these forces is quite complex, and researchers are still working to understand how they interact. But in recent years, it has become clear that El Nino can amplify the warming effects of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, pushing global average temperatures into uncharted territory.
As humanity continues to fill the atmosphere with carbon, the effects of El Niño will likely become more severe, and the climate will have a harder time recovering from these cyclical temperature increases. Let’s unpack what this all means and how a potentially extreme El Nino could affect our rapidly warming world.
Understanding the Child
The El Niño-Southern Figure (ENSO) is a recurring climate pattern in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that cycles between periods of cool (La Niña) and warm (El Niño) sea surface temperatures. This cycle is irregular, with El Nino and La Nina events occurring on average every two to seven years. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
ENSO is the planet’s largest annual climate change. “This is the 800-pound gorilla in the climate zoo,” Michael McFadden, NOAA’s chief scientist, told Gizmodo. This period changes atmospheric circulation, which in turn affects temperatures and precipitation around the world.
During El Niño, sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific rise above average, injecting additional heat into the atmosphere and shifting the Pacific jet stream southward. As a result, the global temperature rises and significant changes in weather conditions occur in different regions of the world. In many places, El Niño exacerbates extreme weather events that are already more frequent and severe due to human-driven climate change.
“We have surface heat waves that are very deadly, pose significant threats to public health, we have intensified storms, we have more extreme droughts,” Mcphaden explained. “These are caused by a combination of El Nino and climate change over a period of time.”
Mixed warm-up
A strong El Niño that developed in 2023 played a key role making 2024 is the hottest year on record. When La Niña eclipsed in 2025, global average temperatures dropped but did not return to 2022 levels. 2025 actually it happened It is the third warmest year, just behind 2023 and 2024. That’s because more greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and La Nina is counteracting the global cooling effect, Mcphaden explained.
This dynamic manifests itself in unusual regional-scale weather patterns. “Earlier this year, when it was still La Nina, we had a big heat wave in Australia, even though usually La Nina means Australia is cool. So the anthropogenic effect actually counteracted the (La Nina) effects,” Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London, told Gizmodo.
This pattern is also seen in historical temperature records. “La Niña years in the 21st century are warmer than El Niño years in the 20th century because of the buildup of greenhouse gases,” Mcphaden said.
This highlights that the historical temperature record is more like an ascending staircase than a smooth slope. In a 2023 article for The Conversation, National Center for Atmospheric Research Distinguished Scientist Kevin Trenberth, he explained that global warming proceeds as a step strongly influenced by ENSO variability. El Niño years cause global average temperatures to rise, followed by cooling La Nina years. But the net long-term effect is still warming due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
According to the most rigorous model predictions, this year’s El Nino could be even stronger More than the 2023 event. All the experts Gizmodo spoke to for this story expressed confidence that a super El Nino could cause global temperatures to rise above pre-industrial levels by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) in 2026 and 2027. This is the benchmark set by the Paris Climate Agreement to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told Gizmodo: “Maybe a really big El Niño event puts us at a point where we rarely — if ever — get below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).”
But perhaps more importantly, the extreme weather we experienced during a super El Nino would be a preview of the world we’ll be living in permanently in just five or 10 years, according to Swain. “As a climate scientist, that’s a pretty alarming reality,” he said.
More frequent super El Niño?
It is clear that El Nino plays an influential role in global temperature increases, but whether the reverse is true remains an open question. However, there is some evidence that human-driven climate change may make strong El Niño events more frequent.
“They happen infrequently enough that it’s not possible to get a statistically significant sample size from the observations at this point, but the numbers suggest that we may see more extreme El Niño events in the last four or five decades than in the past, which would be consistent with model-based predictions that we’ll start seeing more extreme El Niño events this century.”
Mcphaden agrees and believes this year may provide more data to support the hypothesis. “If this event is really very strong, it would be unusual because the last very strong event was only 10 years ago,” he said. “The typical rate of return for really strong events is 15 to 20 years.”
If Super El Niños are more common in a warming world, it may be because of their role in the global climate system. This phase of the ENSO cycle mainly serves as a release mechanism for stored energy, removing excess heat from the tropical Pacific. But as the global atmosphere warms, the ocean absorbs more heat and thus releases more heat in an El Nino year.
This points to a potential feedback loop. If global warming increases the occurrence of strong El Niño events, these events may in turn amplify the near-term effects of global warming.
It will be a long time before climatologists have the necessary records to fully explore this connection, but what is clear is that El Niño and human-driven climate change are not isolated forces. Unraveling them will be critical to understanding our warming world.
