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el niño
The Climate Crisis Won't Let the Political Cycle Ignore It for Too Long
But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.
The politics of climate begins with… climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heatwave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that:
The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.
Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.
Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.” She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.
Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes:
Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.
The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital,” creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.
The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”
But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to The Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.
Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm:
Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.
In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News:
“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”
I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.
Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.
But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the right-wing Reform Party, which, according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.
The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said:
Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband… It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.
Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: Nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage:
News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures—for example, 3 in 5 stories during the May heatwave did not—while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.
I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:
The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.
And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: At a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term:
Experts told The Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]
Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment, and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”
Indeed, 40 progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero:
There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.
If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the 60% of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took right-wing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.
And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week:
The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools, and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.
My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: Recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis:
Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil, and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.
“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”
American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.
That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.
It starts now.
The Climate Crisis Is About to Usher in a World We Haven't Seen Before
That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.
And then came March.
The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by President Donald Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels.
March was the single craziest month in US weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for The Associated Press:
March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.
The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to), and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4°F (6.3°C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.
As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm:
In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-10 warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.
Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history:
The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.
As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:
Climate change is kicking our butts
And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than 60%. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:
For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5°C above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972-73, 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16, and 2023-24. Only one of those events, in 2015-16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.
Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather:
Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the Earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this Earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote Monday in The Guardian
A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.
The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.
I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:
The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by President Donald Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.
My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.
And by that I mean that the last few weeks have also produced a new round of research on the damage that human warming of the Earth is doing to its most basic systems. For simplicity’s sake let’s concentrate on one big system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current or AMOC, that system of currents (like the Gulf Stream) in the Atlantic that are the planet’s biggest heat distribution system.
The collapse of the AMOC has been a recurring nightmare in the climate literature—I first wrote about it in The End of Nature in the 1980s. But the prevailing theory was that it would take a good long while, probably more than a century. In recent years that consensus has been weakening, and the fears of a much more rapid failure of these currents—which keep Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be—have grown rapidly. We’re about a decade out from an ominous paper in Nature that warned that an anomaly in the north Atlantic—a “cold blob” in an otherwise rapidly warming global ocean—could signal that melting ice pouring off Greenland was fatally weakening the currents, by changing the salinity and hence the density of seawater. Research since them has not been comforting, with at least one prominent paper warning the collapse could come as early as the 2030s. Last year Iceland declared an AMOC collapse as a “national security risk,” since the disappearance of the current could turn the temperate country into what one of its foremost experts called “one giant glacier.” It would certainly be a civilizational event for all of Europe.
Anyway, a new paper last week in Science seemed to indicate, with data gathered from four mooring buoys along the western edge of these currents, that there is:
a meridionally consistent decline in deep western overturning transport across these latitudes over the past two decades. This decline, observed at the western boundary, may serve as an effective indicator of AMOC weakening
Here’s how Alec Luhn explained the significance in New Scientist:
The study’s analysis of the latest RAPID-MOCHA data shows that the flow of the AMOC is declining by about 90,000 cubic metres of water per second each year, a faster rate than what has previously been observed. That means between 2004 and 2023, the AMOC weakened by about 10%.
But the uncertainty range of this change in flow is almost as large as the change itself. For this reason, Xin’s study also analyses pressure changes at three mooring arrays that have been installed since 2004 in the western Atlantic off the West Indies, the US East Coast and Nova Scotia, Canada. There, it finds an even greater weakening of the AMOC, with much less uncertainty.
“It is the strongest direct observational evidence so far” that the AMOC is weakening, as models have long shown, says Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Meanwhile, another new and equally ominous paper in Nature late last month showed that a collapsing Atlantic current system would release prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, thus dramatically increasing overall global warming even as Europe froze. As William Hunter helpfully explained in (of all places) the Daily Mail:
The scientists’ computer simulations revealed that halting this key current will release vast stores of carbon currently trapped deep beneath the ocean.
This would increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 47 to 83 parts per million, triggering up to 0.27°C (0.5°F) of additional warming worldwide.
"Our study shows how an AMOC collapse could flip the Southern Ocean from a carbon sink into a carbon source, releasing vast amounts of CO2 and fuelling further global warming," said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, "The ocean has been our greatest ally, absorbing a quarter of human-made CO2 emissions."
The scariest piece of the puzzle in the new study may be the profound, and completely opposite, consequences for the two poles. As the authors put it:
regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7°C (60°N-90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6°C (60°S-90°S).
A world in which the Arctic quickly cooled 12°F just as the Antarctic warmed by 10°F would be a very very different world indeed, one capable of violent change on a scale I don’t really want to imagine. In any event, as Potsdam Institute director Johan Rockstrom explained:
The more CO2 in our atmosphere at the stage of shutdown, the higher the likelihood of additional warming. Put simply, rising emissions today increase the risk of a stronger climate response down the line.
And that’s the one part of the equation we can do something about. We have one tool to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: the substitution of clean energy for fossil fuel. Our weapons in this fight are solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We need to crash them into place before these systems crash down upon us. That’s the job.
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