El Niño climate patterns supercharged by burning of fossil fuels, study finds

Heavy rain in San Francisco, California, on . Photograph: Anadolu/ View image in fullscreen Heavy rain in San Francisco, California, on . Photograph: Anadolu/ El Niño climate patterns supercharged , study finds ‘Godzilla’ event currently brewing could push 50 million people into acute hunger before the end of next year A series of strong El Niño climatic patterns in recent decades, such as the “Godzilla” event currently brewing that is set to warp weather around the world, have been supercharged , a major new study has found. El Niño is a naturally occurring phenomenon, taking place every two to seven years, when the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean heat up, causing a cascade of impacts around the world. The latest developing El Niño, set to peak later this year, is set to be the strongest in living memory and has been informally dubbed a “Godzilla” event. It’s well understood that El Niño, which typically brings a surge of global heat, further amplifies the escalating climate crisis, with next year almost certain to be the hottest on record globally. We are seeing a shift where El Niño doesn’t look like what it did prior to industrial times. That is bad news for climate hazards and for people, particularly those who are badly impacted and yet have done little to cause climate change.” As the world has heated up due to the use of fossil fuels, a string of recent “super” El Niño events has provided extra acceleration, with intense events causing the global temperature record to fall in 1998, then 2016 and then further in 2024. Such strong El Niño episodes have become far more common as overall global temperatures have risen, scientists found in the new research, which painstakingly analyzed the composition of large boulder-like deposits of coral fossils found on the Galápagos Islands. These old corals, which date to 1,000 years ago, contain chemical compositions that indicate what the sea surface temperature was like when they were alive. The Galápagos, situated off the coast of mainland Ecuador, is “right in the heart of El Niño country”, Cole said, where surrounding waters heat up during such an event. While El Niños remained fairly stable for most of this long period, things started to change around the time the world started to mass industrialize in the late 19th century. This process has become even more extreme in the past 40 years, with El Niños’ variability now around 37% higher than during preindustrial times. “After the El Niño in 1982, we start seeing much more variability; it’s a lot more extreme and looks like nothing in the previous 1,000 years,” said Cole, whose team managed to rule out any random or naturally occurring reason for this switch. “What surprised me was how consistent it was.