Extreme Weather and El Niño

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian. As some listeners know, when I'm not hosting at WNYC, I host a public radio show called Climate One Solutions and Stories as our environment changes. For Health and Climate Tuesdays, I thought we should talk about El Nino. And quick refresher, El Nino is a climate pattern. The winds that normally blow warm water west from South America to Asia get weaker. So all that warm water concentrates in the part of the ocean near the equator off South America's coast. And that has a ripple effect on jet streams and weathered patterns. Generally, temperatures spike and some places get drier while others experience more rain and flooding.
El Nino is cyclical, it's natural, and normally it usually peaks around the end of the year. Now a new cycle is upon us and some of you may have noticed that we're feeling the impact sooner and more intensely. Experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now put the odds of a very strong El Nino this fall and winter above 90 percent with a 69 percent chance. It becomes the strongest event since records began in 1950
Here to walk us through what's different about El Nino this cycle and what to expect and the economic impact of extreme weather generally, I'm joined by David Gelles, a reporter on the New York Times climate team where he leads the Times Climate Forward newsletter and event series. And quick plug, they are hosting their live event Climate Forward on September 23rd, 2026 David, welcome back to WNYC.

**David Gelles** (1:53)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Kusha Navadar** (1:54)
So how would I do at that crash course on El Nino? Is there anything you want to add?

**David Gelles** (1:59)
You got it. I feel like my work here is done, but we still got plenty to talk about, obviously. No, that was a really succinct summation of the actual phenomenon. And I think you raised one of these big important questions, which is what is the interplay? What is the dynamic between El Nino, this naturally occurring phenomenon and the manmade climate change, man-made global warming that we have all been experiencing so intensely in recent years, even before this El Nino kicked in? What is the interplay here? We're going to find out over the next several months.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:37)
Yes, and I want to dive into that. Let's set context for listeners because you recently wrote a piece in The Times called Early Onset El Nino, which I really enjoyed that headline. What about this year is early onset?

**David Gelles** (2:51)
Well, I think what we found in talking to experts around the world is that just as you said, we're starting to maybe feel the effects here in New York City. People all around the world are already seeing the impacts of what seems to be these signature characteristic El Nino phenomenon earlier than expected. And that's because this El Nino, as you said, is expected to be so intense. There is more heat emanating from the Pacific Ocean. It started earlier. It is expected to continue throughout the end of this year, maybe even early into next year. And as a result, all of the effects are just starting to get magnified. So what does that mean? That means in parts of the tropics, it's already incredibly dry and hot, much more so than it would have been at this time of year normally.
And so we're seeing terrible wildfires in Indonesia, for example. Already in parts of Africa, that might still have been expected to be getting some rain in the late spring, it was starting to dry out. And so there's concerns about drought and famine. And so that early onset quote, which I think delivered to a colleague of mine, Chico Harlan, really tried to convey the sense that, oh, we know that we're going to have a big phenomenon and it might be here even sooner than we imagined.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:14)
Can you point to any examples in the US where we might have felt early onset?

**David Gelles** (4:19)
Yeah. Again, here, I think we just have to have a little humility. It's very hard with any weather event to say that is specifically because of global warming. What we can do with these things called attribution studies, as you know, is say, well, that's a storm or that's a heat wave was made more likely, much more likely perhaps because of something like man-made global warming. I think we need to have some similar humility when it comes to El Nino. It's not going to be the case that we can say that that rain cloud was specifically the result of El Nino. But what we can say is that these phenomenon are becoming much more powerful, much more likely because of El Nino.