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:
Main Topic: Is Climate Change Supercharging El Niño? A Debate Rages.
Dear Diary. My readers know by now that the current El Nino is expected to grow to be a whopper, not just any strong episode, but one of record proportion by this fall. Some scientists think that climate change is behind this El Nino’s epic growth. Others do not. That’s the type of debate I like to see and the only type of debate that I will allow on this site. The ship has long ago sailed on whether or not climate change is occurring. The only debate left is how fast and how badly our long-term burning of fossil fuels will affect our climate.
Now back to the debate on whether or not climate change is affecting ENSO. Since all ocean basins are warming, including the Pacific, it makes sense to me that El Ninos are affected. Just by what proportion is a big unknown. Here are more details from the New York Times:
Is Climate Change Supercharging El Niño? – The New York Times
Is Climate Change Supercharging El Niño? A Debate Rages.
As a new, potentially record-breaking El Niño begins, researchers are vigorously debating whether climate change is driving the phenomenon’s intensity.
Fighting a wildfire in South Sumatra, Indonesia, during an El Niño-exacerbated dry season in 2023.Credit…Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
By Chico Harlan
Published June 19, 2026
It’s a vigorous debate taking place right now among scientists around the world, with far-reaching implications for extreme weather and costly disasters: Is climate change making El Niño more intense?
El Niño, the natural phenomenon that occurs every few years and pushes up global temperatures, has just begun and is expected to continue through 2027. Scientists say this latest version is likely to be especially potent and could smash records.
As greenhouse gasses heat the planet, El Niño events over the past few decades have been comparatively strong. The run of powerful El Niños since the 1980s stands out when measured against the past 600 years.
That’s led some scientists to suggest that climate change is supercharging El Niño. Others say there is no clear evidence to support that theory.
“It’s highly contested, because it’s such an important question to get right,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.
It’s a mystery that might not become clearer until years into the future, as more data piles up.
The question is crucial, because El Niños disrupt weather patterns globally, often in devastating ways — driving temperatures higher, increasing the likelihood of drought in some places and flooding in others. The events are essentially ocean anomalies, and if climate change makes these anomalies larger in size, that means more chaos and damage.
But the debate shows that there are limits to how fully scientists can understand some of the most complicated consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions, which result primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.
El Niño events are notoriously complex. They are driven not by a single cause, but by a series of feedback loops in the ocean and atmosphere. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration once described El Niño, and its cool Pacific counterpart known as La Niña, as a cycle “controlled by hundreds of dimmer switches.” Climate change can fiddle with those switches, turning some up and others down. But does that lead to a stronger or weaker signal?
Taking break in Lyon, France, during a May heatwave this year. This year’s recently-declared El Niño has been forecast to reach or break heat records.Credit…Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“El Niño is the noisiest part of the climate system,” said Axel Timmermann, the director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea. “We’re trying to look for a change in the noise.”
Of 16 scientists who spoke with The Times, eight said they see compelling evidence that climate change is likely increasing the intensity of El Niño events. Among them is Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at NOAA, who cautioned that the science is “very uncertain,” but said the development of another strong El Niño this year would be “pretty remarkable.”
If the current El Niño reaches the proportions that many forecast, it would mean three of the six strongest events since 1950 have come in the last 11 years.
Daily sea surface temperature in the central Pacific, where El Niño is detected
El Niño events are measured by looking at changes in sea surface temperatures in a vast rectangular zone in the central Pacific, where temperatures are currently soaring. Many forecasts indicate that temperatures there this year could rise more than 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 3 degrees Celsius, above the longer-term average, giving rise to an El Niño of unprecedented amplitude.
“It could be evidence that a climate change signal in today’s ENSO cycle is beginning to emerge from the background noise,” Dr. McPhaden said, using the acronym for the cycle of El Niños and La Niñas.
Perhaps the most assertive case is made by Wenju Cai, a scientist at the Ocean University of China, who has spent more than 20 years running climate models and trying to tease out a potential link between rising emissions and more powerful El Niños. In a 2023 study published in Nature Dr. Cai and other scientists simulated hundreds of years of El Niño and La Niña events in an imaginary world where greenhouse gas concentrations remained at the low levels of before the Industrial Revolution. The odds of such a world producing a 60-year run of strong events comparable to modern times: 2.5 percent.
“It’s almost impossible to have this without climate change,” Dr. Cai said.
Many future-looking models also project El Niño intensity to increase.
Still, other scientists caution that models can have flaws. They note that there are limits in the historic record. Precise oceanic readings date back to the 1950s. A decent account of ocean temperatures, from sailors’ logbooks, extends into the 1800s. Beyond that, scientists have tried to understand El Niño’s fluctuations by looking for signatures of weather and temperature change left in corals and tree rings. That provides a meaningful estimate about the amplitude and frequency of past events, but not certainty.
Clara Deser, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the El Niños of recent decades might be “just a random signal.”
“I’m the skeptical scientist,” Dr. Deser said. “How much is just due to the chaos in the climate system that can give you a whole string of heads — or tails — for no apparent reason?”
A road destroyed by flash floods in Maalimin, Kenya, in 2023.Credit…Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Because there is no consensus, scientific groups have tended to move carefully. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s pre-eminent climate science body, wrote that there was “low confidence” that human-caused climate change had influenced the changes in El Niño and La Niña. Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization, in an advisory about the developing El Niño, said there was “no evidence that climate change increases the frequency or intensity of El Niño events.”
Responding to a question from The Times, the W.M.O. stated that its position reflects “the current assessed state of the science.”
“However it is important also to acknowledge the ongoing scientific debate,” the organization said. “This is not a settled scientific question.”
A road destroyed by flash floods in Maalimin, Kenya, in 2023.Credit…Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Because there is no consensus, scientific groups have tended to move carefully. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s pre-eminent climate science body, wrote that there was “low confidence” that human-caused climate change had influenced the changes in El Niño and La Niña. Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization, in an advisory about the developing El Niño, said there was “no evidence that climate change increases the frequency or intensity of El Niño events.”
Responding to a question from The Times, the W.M.O. stated that its position reflects “the current assessed state of the science.”
“However it is important also to acknowledge the ongoing scientific debate,” the organization said. “This is not a settled scientific question.”
Dr. Cobb, an I.P.C.C. lead author, said she personally thinks that climate change is intensifying the pattern. In 2019, she coauthored a research paper, based on coral analysis, that concluded modern day El Niño extremes were “significantly stronger than those of the preindustrial era in the central tropical Pacific.”
There is widespread agreement that any El Niño occurring now, compared with preindustrial times, will yield more extremes around the world, with a moister atmosphere supercharging floods and hotter temperatures amplifying droughts.
“El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this month. “Impacts will hit even harder.”
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 Tuesday:
(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.)