Thanks to El Niño, the world is about to experience something like time travel to the year 2050. It won’t be pleasant. But rather than devolve into panic at the grim climate future it portends, we should use it as a warning about the need to do more to slow global warming.
Climate scientists warned recently that the likely return of the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific later this year could cause global temperatures to temporarily surge 1.5C above their pre-industrial average in 2024. That margin represents a warming benchmark the whole planet has set as a barely tolerable maximum for many decades in the future, not for the next few years.
The repercussions could be grim. The strong El Niño of 2015-16 produced the highest average global temperature on record, in 2016, along with a horrific drought in Ethiopia, a powerful cyclone in Fiji, rain and snowfall records in parts of the US and history’s worst coral reef die-off. For some reason, it didn’t cause flooding in California; but El Niño events typically strengthen atmospheric rivers of the sort that have been drowning that state for the past few weeks.
