El Niño could be 'strongest in living memory'

**Valerie Sanderson** (0:02)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson, and on Friday the 21st of August, these are our main stories. Weather experts warned that a developing El Nino event could become the largest in living memory. Imran Khan, Pakistan's former Prime Minister, is returned to jail after being taken to hospital. A report from the Occupied West Bank where Israeli settlers have returned to a village after 21 years.
Also in this podcast, the true story of a man who's cycled from India to Europe for love is turned into a film.

**Priyanka Chopra Jonas** (0:38)
You meet them and you're like, wow, you know, this is a love story with a happy ending because you're still together. They hold hands and they're affectionate and I'm like, I want that after 50 years, you know, it's amazing.

**Valerie Sanderson** (0:54)
It seems every week another report is released about extreme weather and the increasingly worrying state of the climate. Today is no exception. Scientists are now warning that the El Niño weather event developing over the Pacific Ocean is likely to be the strongest in living memory. Professor Adam Scaife is head of long range forecasting for Britain's Met Office, which released the latest data.

**Adam Scaife** (1:16)
I've been involved in long range forecasting for many years and I have never seen an event like this in our forecasts. The tropical Pacific is warming faster than I've ever seen and assuming the forecasts are correct and we've got very high confidence at this stage, we think that when it peaks in November and December, it's likely to be record event, unprecedented beyond anything we've seen in living memory.

**Valerie Sanderson** (1:40)
I heard more from our environment correspondent, Matt McGrath.

**Matt McGrath** (1:44)
I think it's worth bearing in mind that this current El Niño was only declared just over two months ago in June and that declaration means the temperatures in the water have reached 0.5 degrees above the long-term average. Now that's gone from that to 2 degrees in a couple of months. It's likely to go higher to at least 3 degrees according to the Met Office, maybe 4 degrees according to other forecasts. Those are significant increases in temperatures and if you look at what's driving it, there's heat down in the water, perhaps 8 degrees above the long-term average deep in the waters of the Pacific. So that's an awful lot of heat that could come out of the and will come out of the ocean and will have impacts all around the world.

**Valerie Sanderson** (2:21)
A lot of people listening to this, Matt, are going to think, you know, why is El Nino itself so important? What does this system actually do?

**Matt McGrath** (2:29)
What it does really is disrupt the weather patterns and the weather systems that we've all gotten used to around the world. So the monsoon, for instance, the increase of heat, the increase of change in the winds that's caused by the rise of heat in the Pacific, that increases the chance of a very low monsoon, which affects millions and millions of people. You'll also see different aspects of it as well. So you get flooding in some places. We've already seen reports in Peru, which is right in the path of El Nino, right close to it, of getting increased floods in the last couple of weeks. We've seen the Panama Canal declare that they're going to cut the number of ships because they're being affected by a drought. So each and every area around the world, particularly around the tropical belt of the world, is hugely affected from Indonesia to Australia, all around that central bit. But other parts of the world are affected as well. And we're likely to see the biggest overall impact, which is our new record global temperature next year. That will be directly linked, I think, to the added heat that El Nino will push into the atmosphere.

**Valerie Sanderson** (3:25)
I mean, this is a simplistic question, but can anything be done?

**Matt McGrath** (3:29)
I don't think there's anything that can be done directly. And people often talk about these events as being linked to climate change. And this is one of those events that's a natural event, but it occurs in a much warmer world. It's not directly linked to climate change. So us cutting back our fossil fuels and our emissions aren't going to directly impact El Nino, but it's happening in a much warmer world. And if it wasn't happening in such a warm world, it may not have such a direct impact. The floods, the droughts might not be as strong. So I don't think there's anything we can do except bear it, be aware of it, listen to the forecast, be aware of what's happening in the world. But stopping it, I'm afraid it's a natural event. It happens every two to seven years. And we've been having these for almost a thousand years.