James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard yesterday
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Now, some housekeeping here on what actually constitutes a super El Nino, because I'll be honest with you, if you're asking a scientist that term, well, it doesn't actually exist, but it does make for a good media headline and title on this thumbnail.
NOAA, who are the people right on the forefront of this stuff, monitor El Niño with a measure called the Oceanic Niño Index or ONI.
It's basically a three-month running mean of sea surface temperature relative to a 30-year base.
So El Niño is declared, as we said, when that ONI goes above 0.5 degrees Celsius for five or more overlapping seasons.
And just to make things a bit more complicated, NOAA recently changed to a new kind of measuring index called the Relative ONI Index to account for increased background warming, which it didn't previously.
So, within this new way of measuring how strong an El Niño actually is, they class a weak one as between 0.5 and 1 degrees Celsius, a moderate one would be between 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius, and a strong El Niño is 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.
So therefore, with a bit of creative license, a super El Niño would be somewhere 2 degrees Celsius above average or more.
And despite not having a proper term for it, that has happened before.
In fact, it's happened four times since Noah started these measurements.
In 1982, 1991, 1997, and most recently...
in 2015.
In every single case, each relative ONI rating was more than 2 degrees Celsius.
And in November 2015, the index was a whopping 2.4 degrees Celsius.
That's more than strong.
I mean, that rating was looking for a phone booth to take off its glasses and don a superhero cape with.
In all seriousness, though, these giant events have globe-spanning consequences.
The 2015 El Nino coincided with severe drought in Ethiopia, water shortages in Puerto Rico, and an extraordinary Central Pacific hurricane season, all combining to produce record global warmth.
More than 60 million people were affected, with extreme food insecurity primarily across Africa, Central America and the Pacific.
It triggered the most devastating global coral bleaching event in history, and the impacts weren't just felt environmentally.
$3.9 trillion was wiped from the global economy in the following three years due to the lost agricultural productivity and infrastructure damages.
Showing 2461–2480 of 4,486 · page 124 of 225
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