Weekend Listen: Is the world prepared for a 'super' El Niño?

**Akshat Rathi** (0:01)
More than 50 million people were killed between 1875 and 1878 The period is now remembered as the Great Famine. And one of the primary causes behind the famine was a naturally occurring phenomenon called El Nino. In fact, the 1877 El Nino is the strongest ever recorded. As of June, we have entered another El Nino event. And scientists are expecting this one to be very strong. Some call it a Super El Nino or even a Godzilla El Nino. So are we better prepared in 2026? There are, after all, five times as many people as in 1877, and the planet is 1.4 degrees Celsius hotter. This is Zero. I am Akshat Rathi. This week, Understanding a Monster.
Since 1970, our appetite for fossil fuels has been increasing global average temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Celsius every decade. That is typically how much a single El Nino event raises global average temperatures by. And it does so by releasing vast amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean.
So this El Nino will not just cause disasters around the world, but it will also give us a taste of what climate change could look like in 2035, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the same rate. To understand the El Nino phenomenon, I'm joined today by Mingfang Ting, Professor of Climate at Columbia University. We talk about the science of El Nino, how prepared the world is, and how scientists are responding to the increased political attacks on an overheating planet.
Professor Mingfang Ting, welcome to Zero.

**Mingfang Ting** (2:02)
Thanks for having me.

**Akshat Rathi** (2:03)
So we are about to enter what people are calling a super El Nino. Before we start to talk about the super part, can you just walk us through the very basics of what an El Nino is?

**Mingfang Ting** (2:16)
El Nino is one of the most influential climate pattern. It impacts not only the local region where it starts, which is the tropical Pacific, but it also impacts regions far from that region, through something we call teleconnection. It can cause droughts in some parts of the world and flooding in other parts, or hurricanes and other activities. So El Nino is a natural phenomena. To understand why El Nino occurs, we have to start from the normal state. So during the normal state of the tropical Pacific, we have the steady trade winds that blows from the east toward west, which basically pushes warm surface water that is exposed to the sunlight toward the west, and forming something we call the Western Pacific warm pool.
The warm water there then fuels precipitation, the rainfall, the convection and the rainfall that leads to rainy climate in regions like Indonesia, Northern Australia, and relatively cool climate in the eastern part of the Pacific, like the coast of Peru. And it also, the cooling, the warm water being moved away also allows the deep, cold, and rich water come to the surface. That also helps the ecosystem there, allows fish to flourish in that region.
During El Niño, which is a disruption of this normal cycle, and what happens there is the wind tends to weaken, the trade winds tend to weaken, and that allows the warm water that is pushed toward the west to spread back toward the east, covering pretty much the majority of the tropical Pacific. The tropical Pacific is a huge basin. So that allows a lot of the heat from the surface to be sent back to the atmosphere, increases the global mean surface temperature and causing convection changes that alters the atmospheric circulation, which means high pressure, low pressure in different regions. So that then leads to anomalous climate linked to surface temperature, as well as precipitation, droughts and other other phenomena.

**Akshat Rathi** (4:54)
And the opposite happens in a La Nina phase, where instead of the heat being released from the Pacific, more heat is stored in the Pacific, right?

**Mingfang Ting** (5:02)
Exactly. So there is an opposite phase of the El Nino, we call it Enso, El Nino Southern Oscillation Cycle. And the opposite phase is the intensification of trade winds. So the wind actually becomes abnormally strong, that pushes warm water further to the west, that allows the warm pool to shrink. And that causes more or less opposite kind of impact to a lot of the global climate phenomena, but not exactly. You know, there are some some asymmetries between the two.

**Akshat Rathi** (5:39)
And just so we understand, obviously, the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean by quite some distance. And when the heat from the Pacific Ocean is released or absorbed in these two phases, it has these global impacts because it can make a big global difference to average temperatures, right? What is the range in which typically global average temperatures increase or decrease during an El Nino versus an Kala Nino?