Live Science spoke with climate change researcher Jong-Seong Kug about how a super El Niño could cause lasting damage to our world.
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Forecasters are warning that the ongoing El Niño is likely to become supercharged in the coming months and inject potentially unprecedented heat into our already warming world.
El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, but models suggest this year's cycle will be exceptionally intense. Super El Niño conditions could contribute to temperature extremes until next year, but scientists are warning that it may also pose longer-term threats.
Jong-Seong Kug, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea, uses observational data and artificial intelligence to model El Niño events.
Kug has found that super El Niño events can drive sudden, dramatic and even irreversible climate regime shifts. Live Science spoke with Kug to learn more about climate regime shifts and the long-term threats posed by this year's ongoing El Niño.
Jong-Seong Kug is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea.
Patrick Pester: Last year, you published a study that found super El Niño events significantly increase the likelihood of potentially irreversible climate regime shifts. With a super El Niño now looking very likely, how concerned should we be?
Jong-Seong Kug: We should be concerned but not alarmist, because our study does not suggest that every super El Niño inevitably causes a climate regime shift. Rather, a super El Niño can push an already-stressed climate ecosystem across a critical threshold. If a system is near a critical threshold, then strong forcing can induce irreversible change.
Current forecasts indicate a very strong El Niño is increasingly likely later this year. We need to watch vulnerable regions closely, particularly those that are already experiencing severe warming, drying, ecosystem degradation or ocean stress.
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PP: What kind of climate regime shift do you fear most?
J-S K: I am particularly concerned about the persistent shift in major ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest moving toward a much drier and degraded state. You know, a long time ago the Amazon was a savannah area, so we are now approaching this kind of tipping point. Also, in the Amazon, this drying can weaken [or] even reverse the forest's role as a carbon sink.
The Amazon is a carbon sink, but imagine it becomes drier and drier, and there's some die-back of the forest. Now, [carbon] sink becomes source. This could amplify global warming long after an El Niño event.
PP: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the threat of extreme climate and weather events in the coming months?
