This Year's El Niño Is a 'Postcard From Our Future', Climate Scientists Warn
The Climate Impact Lab warns this year's El Niño will bring temperatures that climate change is expected to deliver 20 years into the future.
The current El Niño will act as a "postcard from our future", delivering temperatures that climate change is projected to bring about 20 years from now, the Climate Impact Lab at the University of Chicago has warned.
The assessment frames the ongoing El Niño as a preview of the conditions that global warming is expected to make routine within a generation. In effect, the heat and weather extremes associated with the present cycle offer an early look at the climate baseline that lies ahead.
El Niño is a periodic warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that reshapes weather patterns worldwide, influencing rainfall, drought and temperature extremes across multiple continents. Its effects typically extend well beyond the Pacific region.
The warning from the University of Chicago researchers places the current episode in a longer-term context: what is now an anomalous warm phase could, under continued warming, become the ordinary state of the climate two decades down the line.
The finding adds to a growing body of scientific work examining how natural climate variability and human-driven warming interact, and what that combination means for the near future.