Early this year, researchers became convinced we were in for a “super El Niño”.
Speaking to HuffPost UK way back in April, Professor Bill McGuire, a professor specialising in climate hazards and author of The Fate Of The World: A History And Future Of The Climate Crisis, said: “El Niño is a climate phenomenon that develops every few years, and which involves the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean becoming hotter than normal.”
The signals suggesting the power of the coming phenomenon have been so strong that the UN issued an urgent climate warning over the issue. Prof McGuire told us: “The signs are that it could even be the biggest for a century and a half”.
Now, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today, Professor Adam Scaife, the head of long-range forecasting at the Met Office, agreed, saying it looks like the next El Niño will be “the largest since the 19th century”.
“During a normal El Niño, the temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean typically reaches 0.5°C or more above normal,” Prof McGuire shared previously,
“If this figure reaches 1.5-2°C, the event is described as a super El Niño.”
On BBC Radio 4, Prof Scaife stated: “We’re expecting the biggest El Niño for over a century, peaking at something over 3°C. That is unheard of in modern climate records… It’s up 2°C already.”
We’ve only had five super El Niños in the last 75 years, with the most extreme being the 2015-16 event. The bigger the El Niño, the stronger its effects on the world’s weather systems.
That means we could see “particularly strong [impacts] throughout the tropics, where we expect really severe droughts in places like South America and the west Pacific”, Prof Scaife explained.
Flooding could happen in other parts of the world, and overall, the globe will likely be left hotter.
These destabilising effects could affect everything from our international food supply to disease and fire risk. The economic burden of previous El Niños has run into the trillions of dollars.
Though they are linked to an overall hotter climate, the effects of El Niños vary from place to place. In the UK, for instance, they can sometimes lead to colder winters.
Prof Scaife said: “There are wave-like disturbances that come out from the tropics and affect places like the UK. So we already see signals for increased rainfall and storminess in the autumn here in the UK around November time”.
After an emergency meeting last week, meanwhile, PM Andy Burnham also said: “We might be in for a wet autumn and winter straight after this, because of El Niño and some of the issues there, which was reported to Cobra”.
Source: Read the original article on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk