We underestimate El Niño's impacts to our peril
Wind-driven waves pound the pilings of oceanfront homes on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif., as the first rain from an El Nino-powered storm hits Southern California in December 1997. Credit: AP/Reed Saxon
Trouble is brewing in the Pacific. El Niño is coming. And once again, the world does not seem ready for the challenges it brings.
El Niño is a natural climate event that occurs every few years and lasts up to 12 months. It typically begins in June or July, with its most dramatic impacts on these parts usually arriving in late fall and winter.
The peculiar problem this year is that scientists are increasingly convinced that the developing El Niño will be a strong one, possibly a "super" El Niño, which means its many harmful effects will be worse than usual. That's saying something, given that an El Niño typically brings drought to Australia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa and increased rainfall to South America and across the southern tier of the United States, among other things.
An El Niño begins when surface water temperatures in the Pacific rise 0.5°C above average. We're in super El Niño territory when the rise exceeds 2°C. Some scientists say this year's event could top 3°C. Historically, the stronger the El Niño, the worse its consequences. And those could be exacerbated by the effects of ongoing global warming. El Niño's most common impacts — drought, rain, flooding and severe weather — are all intensified by warmer climates. Since El Niños themselves have a warming effect on global climate, that could make 2026 or 2027 the hottest year on record.
You don't have to look back very far to understand the potential danger here. Severe storms and disruptions to agriculture and global supply chains from the El Niño of 1997-98 caused an estimated $5.7 trillion in damages. One-sixth of the world's ocean reefs died. California experienced record rainfall, Indonesia suffered one of its worst droughts ever, and Florida was battered by its worst outbreak of tornadoes in history.
The 1982-83 El Niño spawned worldwide weather-related disasters like droughts, dust storms, brush fires and flooding, along with a slew of lesser-appreciated but still nasty problems in the United States. Like an outbreak of encephalitis along the East Coast from the abundance of mosquitoes breeding in the warm, wet spring. Like a rash of snake bites in Montana, where rattlesnakes at higher elevations followed mice searching for food who were driven downward by hot, dry weather. Like an increase in shark attacks off Oregon thanks to the unseasonably warm ocean.
Then there was the notorious 1877-78 El Niño, which devastated crops and led to a global famine that killed an estimated 50 million people in India, China and Brazil, among many places. That was about 3.5% of the world's population. Today's equivalent would be nearly 300 million people.
That magnitude of devastation is unlikely to recur. In 1877, no one knew El Niño was coming or what its implications would be. Now we do, which in theory should make us better prepared. And in some ways we are. But there is ample room for worry. Witness our lack of pandemic preparations after COVID-19, our continuing struggles to deal with devastating wildfires out West, and the rising toll of hurricanes and other storms in the southeastern United States. We know they're coming, and yet. Like El Niño.
Drought is one of its most pernicious consequences. Drought contributed to the fall of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the collapse of the Mayan empire in Central America, the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s, innumerable modern conflicts in Africa, and the recent Syrian civil war, which led to a mass migration of Syrians into Europe. The reverberations are still being felt. An El Niño-created drought in today's volatile political and cultural climate could have mammoth ripple effects.
It's probably too late for preparations that would stave off the worst impacts of a major El Niño. But one hopes, contrary to what history has shown, that we will learn from this one.
Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
