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
But don't be fooled, because that's just on the surface.
It's what's brewing below that's starting to ring alarm bells.
NOAA reports that ocean subsurface heat content has been climbing for months and is now well above normal.
In March to April 2026, meteorologists observed bursts of westerly winds driving warm water eastward, a classic precursor to El Niño.
Usually Pacific trade winds are easterly, holding warm water in the west, but those winds are faltering.
as they weaken a series of Kelvin waves, massive pulses of warm water, are traveling thousands of miles across the ocean.
And when they hit the South American coast, they sort of uncork the heat and suddenly you've got all this energy just sat there waiting to be unleashed.
In fact, NASA have just caught one of these Kelvin waves in action with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite.
You can clearly see it cross the Pacific Ocean and hit the South American coast.
But here's the catch, because on top of the natural cycle happening, this time we're layering a natural surge onto a planet that's already spent 12 consecutive months above the 1.5 degree warming threshold.
2024 was the hottest year on record, and it occurred during an ENSO-neutral year.
There was no extra heating boost from El Niño.
So before we even add in a naturally occurring event that increases temperatures, we're already working with a much higher baseline, and that's a problem.
It's a bit like a loaded spring.
That heat hasn't fully reached the surface yet, but when it does, it can rapidly trigger El Niño conditions.
The scary thing is that exact same pattern showed up before the 1997 and 2015 Super El Niños 2.
So the big question is then, how big is this one going to be?
Well for starters, NOAA's Climate Prediction Centre has placed the odds of El Niño emerging by July at 82%, with a 37% chance of a very strong El Niño by winter 2026.
The UK and European estimates are, how do I put this, a little more aggressive.
Met Office data here in the UK shows two degrees Celsius anomalies by September 2026.
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