The Godzilla El Niño
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What's behind Ukraine's military shakeup? The Ukrainians have now surpassed the United States military and basically every other military on the planet in terms of doctrine for how to fight and integrate these autonomous systems on the battlefield, and we should be learning from them. I'm Jon Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan, and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we're breaking down the dismissal of Ukraine's defense minister, the architect of their drone strategy. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to WeatherScope. The biggest news this season, undoubtedly, the huge mass of warm Pacific water known as El Nino.
You might have heard, but El Nino is back. When I hear the words El Nino, my mind immediately goes to one very specific place.
But those of you who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish for the Nino.
Chris Farley, in one of my favorite old SNL sketches, playing the actual El Nino somehow, has this kind of crazy wrestling getup on with his shirt wide open, gusting in the wind.
I challenge any of you punk-ass tropical storms to a no-holds-barred cage match, because El Nino is coming for you, and it ain't gonna be pretty.
Sadly, El Nino is not a legendary comedian standing in a storm dressed like a wrestler. But to be honest, it is kind of a mystery. Somehow, this warm patch of water in the Pacific influences rain and weather and even famines all over the world. And scientists still aren't sure exactly how it works. So today on the show, as we head into what might be the strongest El Nino ever measured, which could make 2027 the hottest year ever measured, we wanted to feature a great episode from our friends over at The Gray Area. Host Sean Illing talks with New York Times climate reporter David Wallace-Wells about the potentially dramatic impacts of the coming El Nino and whether next year might be a preview of what life is like going forward.
Here's Sean and David.
David Wallace-Wells, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Just about everybody has heard the term El Nino, but I think most of us, myself included for the most part until very recently, don't really know what it is. So let's just start there. What is an El Nino?
It's a climatic event that happens irregularly, but pretty often, usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven, in which you get a burst of warmer than normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And then that has a lot of amazingly global consequences in ways that I think are not intuitive to most normies who don't know all about the details of climate science. And in particular, this genre of climate science called teleconnections, where scientists have identified relationships between certain weather events in different parts of the world, even if they can't Always identify exactly what about one weather event is driving another weather event.
They can see in the record that they happen together and that there's some kind of connection for them. And so in this case, you see across the Western US, you tend to see a lot more rain. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia. You see, you know, similar disruption to rain across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa. And you see a kind of a suppression typically of hurricane activity in the Caribbean. which is all to say it's a disruption, it's a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on. But the disruption isn't all in one direction. At the global level, it makes things hotter. And the one that we're seeing this year forming now,
Maybe a record-setting one that drives global temperatures up more than basically anything we've ever seen before. But beyond the global temperature, the impacts that we see in some cases push climate in one direction and in other places in another direction. And I think the best way to think about it is just like we shook up the whole planet's climate system and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non-El Nino years.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–18:00
2
What is El Niño and how does a warm Pacific patch affect global weather?
18:00–25:41
3
How do El Niño teleconnections change rainfall, hurricanes, and monsoons worldwide?
25:41–38:43
4
Why are scientists alarmed about a possible 'Godzilla' or 'super' El Niño in 2026–2027?
38:43–42:31