El Niño Is Back. And Worse Than Ever.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:35)
A powerful super El Nino event is right now brewing deep within the Pacific Ocean.

**Chico Harlan** (0:41)
Phenomen El Nino.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
El Nino.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:43)
Phenomen El Nino.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:46)
The meteorological wrecking ball that is El Nino is back.

**SPEAKER_6** (0:50)
The Climate Prediction Center gives a 69% chance this year's El Nino may be the strongest since 1950

**SPEAKER_5** (0:57)
The heat released by the Pacific Ocean during that event could spike temperatures into unseen territory.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:02)
Making 2027 one of the hottest years, perhaps even the hottest year on record.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:09)
And this year, it's already shaping up to be by far the strongest and most severe on record and to wreak havoc across the world. Today, I speak to my colleague, global climate reporter Chico Harlan about El Nino's history, its inner workings, and its destructive powers. It's Wednesday, August 19th.
Chico, welcome back to The Daily.

**Chico Harlan** (1:42)
Thank you, Michael.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:43)
So I feel like this episode requires a little bit of a confession that despite a lot of us hearing about El Nino our entire lives, and despite pretending we know what it means and invoking it in casual conversation, most of us don't really understand what El Nino does, how it works. And I think if we're going to do justice to a historic El Nino, like the one we're experiencing right now, we should probably start by actually explaining what it is.

**Chico Harlan** (2:13)
So El Nino is a planetary phenomenon that is both totally natural and also a huge chaos agent. And at the core, it is something that happens in the tropical Pacific. It is changes that occur there. And to understand those changes, it helps to think about this rectangle that stretches across the equator in the Pacific Ocean. It would basically run from the coast of Peru, Ecuador, all the way towards like the international dateline. You're almost in the darkest, most uninhabited territory you could find in the Pacific, south of Hawaii and to the north of the small islands like Fiji and Samoa.
And normally, these waters follow a pretty predictable pattern year by year. They don't change so much in temperature. If I can use Celsius, you know...

**Michael Barbaro** (3:01)
You can, you can. For the purposes of this conversation, you can.

**Chico Harlan** (3:03)
Okay. Normally, they top out in around May at about 28 Celsius. So they're pretty warm and they don't cool off that much. But as you enter the summer, the northern hemisphere summer, they start to cool by maybe a degree down to about 27 this time of year.
So that's most years. And of course, this rectangle is completely imaginary. It's been concocted by scientists. And only for this reason. They've realized that when things change or go haywire in this part of the ocean, it affects the entire world. To the point where you could almost say that when this part of the Pacific catches a cold, the whole world has a fever.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:41)
And you're saying in most years, this part of the Pacific doesn't catch a cold and the rest of us don't catch a fever.

**Chico Harlan** (3:48)
That's correct, but in an El Nino year, the sea surface temperatures, the ocean temperatures in that part of the Pacific, rather than gliding down, stays high and sometimes even keeps increasing.
And if the gap between the temperatures in a given year and the usual temperatures is 0.5 Celsius, a pretty small threshold, that is an El Nino. If the gap between the water temperatures is two Celsius greater than usual, then you have a super El Nino.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:18)
Got it.

**Chico Harlan** (4:18)
And Michael, this year we could be heading even for a three degree gap, which is beyond what we've ever seen before. Right.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:25)
Like maybe a super duper El Nino.

**Chico Harlan** (4:28)
Yeah. The terminology doesn't exist for it.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:31)
Well, I want to get back to this year and what all that means. But before we do that, explain why in an El Nino year, these ocean temperatures keep going up rather than gliding back down like they normally would.