There is waiting finally it’s over: El Niño has officially started.
On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the semiannual climate event had arrived. Congratulations if you used the pre-July 1 Kalshi forecast.
Forecast markets aren’t the only places where a lot depends on El Niño. This phenomenon – characterized by hotter-than-usual waters in the eastern tropical Pacific – has a huge impact on weather in almost every corner of the globe. And given that this year’s iteration will be one of the strongest ever, the effects are likely to be particularly severe.
There are several ways to measure El Niño, but NOAA’s threshold is based on temperatures above average by 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 C) over a three-month period in a specific part of the Pacific. (If you want to impress and/or bore someone at a party, this area is called NINO3.4). The Pacific has exceeded this threshold thanks to rapid increases in temperatures in record weeks. But there are also other signs of El Niño, including: sea level rise to 7 inches (18 centimeters) in the eastern tropical Pacific, thanks to winds blowing from the west that cause water to accumulate there.
Changing ocean temperatures, in turn, affects the atmosphere in the region, which in turn has a domino effect on weather around the world, from increasing the risk of damp weather in the southwestern United States to reducing the likelihood of an lively hurricane season in the Atlantic. Drought is becoming more likely in places like Indonesia and the Sahel region of Africa. El Niño also releases additional heat into the atmosphere, further warming an already warming planet. In tiny, El Niño is like a car engine: fire it up and the atmosphere moves.
The key questions now are how mighty this year’s El Niño will be and how this will affect its effects. The answers seem to be “a lot” and “quite a lot.” NOAA gives this year’s El Niño a 63% chance of exceeding the 3.6 degree F threshold, which would qualify it as a Super El Niño. But climate models are hopeful that they could well exceed this threshold. Some say it exceeds 5.4 F, making it the strongest El Niño on record.
Four other El Niños reached the super threshold and all led to widespread problems around the world. Returning to the car analogy, if an average El Niño resembles the engine of a Toyota Prius, a super El Niño is more like that of a Ferrari Luce.
The 1982-83 event – the first in recorded history – caused Lake Mead to flood, while the 1997-98 version caused the worst drought in Indonesian history. The latest iteration in 2023–2024 resulted in the worst drought in South Africa in 100 years, leading to 61 million people requiring food assistance. All the heat in the ocean is also harming coral reefs, which are already struggling to adapt to rising temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
And that’s actually another issue related to what will happen with this year’s El Niño. Never in the history of mankind has the world been so sizzling. If you cause an El Niño, there will likely be rapid warming this year and next. If I were placing bets, I would definitely bet on 2026 being one of the hottest years on record.