James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 2d ago
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
Historically, El Niños have caused fish declines and even penguin die-offs in the Galapagos due to changes in ocean currents.
A Super El Niño would only magnify these biological stresses.
And all of that before we've even gotten to the thing that keeps us alive, food.
I mean, even now, climate analysts are already warning that a strong El Niño could significantly strain food supplies.
The India Meteorological Department has pegged the 2026 monsoon at just 92% of its long period average, the lowest in nearly 30 years.
And that has a direct threat to the carif crops, the staples, things like rice, cotton and soybeans that literally feed billions of people.
If the rains fail in August and September, we aren't just looking at dry fields.
We're looking at food inflation that could exceed 4.5%, destabilizing the rural economy for the entire subcontinent.
And there's another twist in this too.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit just released an article noting that an El Nino-driven weather shock on top of war-related fertilizer and fuel disruptions could drive up both prices and inflation.
In short, harvests in those key farming regions, so rice in Asia, coffee in Africa, maize in Latin America, would majorly suffer, amplifying hunger and economic stress not just locally, but across the entire planet.
Analysis by the United Nations World Food Programme warned that the number of food insecure people across the globe could reach levels last seen at the start of the Russian Ukraine invasion in 2022, impacting up to 318 million people across the globe who are already food insecure.
Over here where I am in the UK and into mainland Europe, El Niño's influence is more indirect.
Some studies suggest El Niño's winters tend to be milder and wetter in northern Europe, but their signal is pretty weak, and the summer impacts are even less predictable.
If you look back at some of the developing El Nino years in 1997 and 2015 and even 2023, they all featured at least some hot spells but no simple pattern or something that unified them in any way.
But of course, thanks to our good old friend global warming, any El Nino effect might actually be quite hard to disentangle from the ongoing trend of record summer heat in Europe anyway, so either way.
And all of that stuff we've just talked about doesn't just have a human cost.
There is also quite a large financial one.
In 2023, researchers from Dartmouth University estimated the average El Nino saps about $3.4 trillion from the global economy.
That's because of destroying crops, preventing the flow of goods and services, all that kind of stuff.
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