Are we ready for El Nino?
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What is El Niño, and how can Pacific Ocean warming affect global weather?
A super El Niño is on its way. If it plays out as predicted, there will be very few places, if any in the world, that will be left untouched by its effects. And this comes on the day when the Climate Change Advisory Council here warns the Irish government to stop treating extreme weather events as one-off emergencies. Caroline O'Doherty is with me, climate and science correspondent with the Irish Times, and Michelle McCrystall, who's assistant professor at the Department of Physics at Maynooth University. And you're both welcome. Caroline, I'm going to start with you because you've been writing extensively about El Niño and what it might look like. And I was shocked to see that in all of the research that you've done, you've come to the conclusion that it's being described across the board as a Godzilla-like blockbuster.
What is it? When's it coming? And what's it going to do to us?
OK, well, El Niño, even though we're describing it in kind of supernatural terms here this time around, it is a natural phenomenon. You know, our climate is kind of quite apart from climate change. What actually drives our climate are all sorts of, you know, natural occurrences, natural movements of air and currents, ocean currents and so on. And El Niño comes around sort of every two to five to maybe seven years at a stretch. And it's kind of at a very simplistic, and Michelle will explain this in more detail maybe, but very simplistically, it's a buildup of heat in one patch of the Pacific Ocean. Now, we're many thousands of kilometers away from that. So you'd kind of wonder what's going on there.
How could that affect us? The heat that builds up in the ocean there, it kind of spills up and outwards around the world and it affects air and sea currents differently. And that has incredible knock-on impact on heat for a start. It spreads more heat around the world at a time when we already have extra heat built into our systems. But it also really disrupts rainfall. And it disrupts rainfall in different ways. So there are places around the world, unlike ourselves, where we usually get rain in every season, if we can even discern our seasons anymore. And there are places around the world that get rains only at a certain time of the year. Or they get the big wet and then the small wet. or they get the wet and the dry, or they get the monsoon.
And they're very dependent. Their whole systems are built around when the rain comes. And then what can happen here is that it either cuts short the rains, the rains disappear entirely, or the opposite happens. The rains that they're expecting, that they need, come in absolute uncontrollable currents and they get floods. So you get this kind of places that have quite large weather swings from one part of the year to the other.
When did this El Niño begin, and what impacts are already appearing?
And those swings are either reversed or completely disrupted and can cause absolute chaos. And when are we expecting this? So it's actually already here. You know, the World Meteorological Organization has been warning that an El Niño was appearing. It was building. It was getting stronger since late spring. So it's already happened. And we're all seeing the, you know, certainly the intense warming has already happened. The monsoons in India seem to be kind of light. You know, there's already there's huge concerns around East Africa where they've had drought for the last two or three rainy seasons haven't happened. They are due their rains in the next couple of weeks. There's an indication that they make a really severe flood.
So it is already happening.
OK, Michelle, just to come to you, because you have a really interesting analogy about this, which will help us understand it. You say it's like a boiling pot.
How does the “boiling pot” analogy explain El Niño’s growing ocean heat?
Talk to me about what it looks like.
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. As Caroline said there a minute ago, we've got this anomalously warm water and this moves across to the eastern Pacific. Normally that will be in the west. And, you know, we all understand that idea. We put a pot of water on a stove, for example, and you see it starting to bubble and it takes a little bit of time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is El Niño, and how can Pacific Ocean warming affect global weather?
0:01–2:38
2
When did this El Niño begin, and what impacts are already appearing?
2:38–3:31
3
How does the “boiling pot” analogy explain El Niño’s growing ocean heat?
3:31–4:26
4
Could El Niño bring warmer winter weather to Ireland and Europe?
4:26–4:56
5
Is Ireland prepared for El Niño risks to extreme weather and supply chains?
4:56–7:57
6
What practical steps can Ireland take to prepare for floods and severe winter weather?
7:57–9:35
7
How could El Niño worsen drought and flooding in Somalia?
9:35–11:09
8
How does climate change intensify the effects of El Niño?
11:09–12:07