James Stewart
speaker
3,838 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Sep
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 — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
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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.
Now, that's just the estimate for an average El Nino.
So a super El Nino would be far more devastating.
None of that makes for great reading at all, does it really?
There's nothing remotely super about any of this for us at all, which does sort of beg the question, why is this happening in the first place?
Well, you might assume it's because of global warming, which is sort of what I think as well, but bear with me here because this sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but scientists are actually continuing to study how global warming affects the El Niño-Southern Oscillation Cycle, and the truth, they say, isn't clear-cut.
Look, as I've alluded to in this video, El Niño isn't new, nor is it particularly special.
It used to be like that uncle you saw at family events every couple of years who sort of said something weird and then you never saw him again until the next event, but this time something is clearly different.
The UN's warned that Earth's climate is further out of balance right now than at any other time in recorded history, so how can both things be true?
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