The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Here is a new feature for this blog, which I will add daily. This is the latest inciteful Green News Report from my friends Desi Doyen and Brad Friedman at Progressive Voices. Hit ‘continue reading,’ listen, then hit return to see my daily topics:
Dear Diary. It was official as of Thursday. El Niño has been born off the western South American coast. According to models and experts, this is not going to be a typical El Niño event but a whopper in record territory. So, what does this mean for the planet? This El Niño will be interacting with climate change to produce some horrific results. For starters, planetary temperature averages will get boosted and exceed records for the next 2-3 years. Already the are close to record territory as of May:
There will be many other regional effects, which are described in this new Independent article:
Super El Nino is coming our way. We are not ready for what’s in store | The Independent
Super El Nino is coming our way. We are not ready for what’s in store
As meteorologists’ worst fears were answered this week with the confirmation of the most powerful weather pattern of its kind in seven decades, scientists tell Helen Coffey what we can expect to endure here and around the globe
Friday 12 June 2026
People at Bournemouth Beach enjoy the sun on the bank holiday Monday
There’s definitely something coming. We’re very confident about that, and it looks like it will be a big event.”
Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office, recently gave this somewhat ominous proclamation. He was talking about the potential approaching El Nino – possibly so strong it may be classified as a “Super El Nino” – and warned it could “even be of record strength”.
On Thursday this week, his warning was made official. A powerful El Nino has officially formed in the Pacific Ocean, with meteorologists warning that it is poised to reach historic strength and intensify extreme weather events across the globe.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected a 63 per cent likelihood that this El Nino will become so intense by late fall and early winter that it “would rank among the largest El Nino events in the historical record going back to 1950.”
United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has spoken with urgency, describing El Nino as an “urgent climate warning” and stating that “El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world.”
The El Nino effect is a natural, cyclical climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean, characterised by the warming of surface ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.
Under normal conditions, trade winds blow westward along the equator, pushing warm water from South America towards Asia; cold water rises from below to replace this warmer water in a process known as upwelling. But El Nino throws all that into disarray. Trade winds aren’t as strong, and so the warm waters head east towards the Americas instead, forcing the Pacific jet stream south of its neutral position.
Upwelling weakens or stops altogether; without the nutrients being transported from the depths to the shallows of the ocean, there are fewer phytoplankton off the coast, which in turn impacts fish that eat phytoplankton, which in turn impacts everything that eats fish. Entire ecosystems are disrupted by the change.
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Some areas in the northern US and Canada become hotter than usual and experience droughts; the US Gulf Coast and southeast experience wetter weather than usual, and increased flood risk.
The stifling heat that has swept across the UK a few weeks ago could be a sign that normal weather systems will be sent into disarray in the coming months (AFP/Getty)
But the impact of El Nino is far wider than just the Americas: it changes weather on a global scale. Countries around the tropical Pacific, like Chile and Indonesia, are strongly affected, with the former more likely to get heavy rainfall and the latter more likely to suffer droughts. We could see an extreme Pacific typhoon season and a more docile hurricane season in the Atlantic, a much more varied and unpredictable South Asian monsoon season, and a drier-than-normal Australia.
In the UK specifically, the El Nino effect is usually weaker but can lead to more dramatic weather extremes: winter temperatures tend to be colder, especially later in the season, while in summer the mercury soars. The recent heatwave might prove the tip of the iceberg.
“Summer temperatures could certainly be impacted, possibly this year, but more likely next, as the planet heats up,” says Professor Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and author of the new book The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see 40C-plus heat.”
What tips an El Nino into “super” territory is all to do with water temperature. “If sea surface temperatures there are more than 0.5C above normal for the time of year, we say that those are El Nino conditions,” according to Mark Roulston, senior research fellow and director of operations for Lancaster University’s Climate Risk and Uncertainty Collective Intelligence Aggregation Laboratory (Crucial).
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see 40C-plus heat” Professor Bill McGuire, UCL
“Summer temperatures could certainly be impacted, possibly this year, but more likely next, as the planet heats up,” says Professor Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and author of the new book The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see 40C-plus heat.”
What tips an El Nino into “super” territory is all to do with water temperature. “If sea surface temperatures there are more than 0.5C above normal for the time of year, we say that those are El Nino conditions,” according to Mark Roulston, senior research fellow and director of operations for Lancaster University’s Climate Risk and Uncertainty Collective Intelligence Aggregation Laboratory (Crucial).
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see 40C-plus heat.” Professor Bill McGuire, UCL
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecasts that El Nino will begin within the month, has crunched the numbers and given a 66 per cent chance that it will be strong or even very strong by this winter. More than half of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)’s models, meanwhile, are suggesting a potential ocean temperature increase of over 2.5C by the autumn, putting it well within “super” range.
There is growing confidence from scientists that this potential El Nino could be notably strong.
“My personal opinion is that we will see the 2.5C threshold broken, and may even approach 3C – challenging the strongest El Nino on record in 1877-8,” advises Professor McGuire.
1998: A luxury home in the US slips down an eroded hillside following heavy El Nino rains earlier in the month (AFP/Getty)
While organisations around the world have their own exact definitions and thresholds for what constitutes El Nino conditions, this will be “such a significant event, if it happens, that it will be above all of those thresholds and there will be no doubt that we’re in an El Nino,” said Grahame Madge, climate science communicator at the Met Office. “Scientists are telling us that this could be the strongest El Nino event so far this century, comparable to the notable El Nino event in 1998.”
While significant El Ninos occur around every two to seven years, Super El Ninos are rare. Only three others have exceeded the 2C threshold since the mega one recorded in 1877-8: 1982-3, 1997/8 and 2015-16. This latest El Nino could see 2027 become the hottest year on record, pushing global average temperatures permanently past the benchmark of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels set by the Paris climate agreement.
While having a roasting summer might sound appealing to some, Super El Ninos tend to result in widespread humanitarian, as well as environmental, disaster: food shortages and famine due to severe droughts; an increased risk of devastating floods and wildfires. The 1997/8 Super El Nino resulted in the death of an estimated 16 per cent of all the world’s coral reefs.
“I have no doubt that again some people will argue this means global warming has stopped, but it’s a statistical illusion.” Mark Roulston, Crucial
“You’ve got more people that are living in poverty already and if you get a reduction in crop yields because of drought or flooding [from El Nino] then that drives prices even higher,” Liz Stephens, professor of climate risk and resilience at the University of Reading, told the BBC. “So we’re looking at potentially quite huge humanitarian impacts this year, especially if the crisis in the Middle East continues.”
The effects of El Nino events are exacerbated further by an ever-warming planet, compounding the impacts of climate change. Super variants can have such a huge warming effect that temperatures for many years following are notably cooler. This has been used as “evidence” by some climate change deniers in the past; for example, after the 1997-8 Super El Nino, global temperatures didn’t reach the same level until 2014, “which caused some people to declare that global warming was over,” explains Roulston. However, since 2014, global temperatures have continued to climb, surpassing the 1997-8 El Nino-fuelled record.
“If we have another Super El Nino the same thing is likely to occur, with subsequent years being cooler than the spike associated with the event,” Roulston adds. “I have no doubt that again some people will argue this means global warming has stopped, but it’s a statistical illusion caused by picking a record year as your baseline.”
It’s why adapting to El Nino weather should be part of a general adaptation programme aimed at limiting the severe impacts of living in a much hotter world, according to McGuire. “The reality is that our climate is on track to reprise conditions in the Pliocene period, 3 million years back – 3C-plus higher temperatures – and, eventually, sea level 15 to 25 metres higher,” he warns. “And that is the BEST case.”
More:
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)