The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared this week that the El Niño weather pattern is now underway, bringing the threat of more frequent tropical cyclones to the Pacific. , increased rainfall and flooding in parts of the Americas and increased temperatures across the planet.
El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña, are weather patterns that originate in the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years on average and can affect weather around the world.
The past three years have been dominated by the cooler La Niña pattern, but the onset of El Niño will bring warmer temperatures and extreme weather conditions around the world.
The last time strong El Niño conditions were recorded was in 2016, when the world experienced the hottest year on record to that point.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted that there is a 56% chance that when El Niño peaks, typically during the northern hemisphere winter, an event will occur. strong, which means sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific will be at least 1.5°C higher than normal.
“It’s too early to say how the current El Nino story will play out, but if it unleashes its full power in 2024, another global temperature record is very likely to be broken,” said Richard Allan, a professor of climate sciences at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom.
overall impact
Experts also foresee an increase in extreme weather events, from droughts to cyclones.
Typically, the southern United States experiences cooler and wetter weather during El Niño, while parts of the western United States and Canada are warmer and drier.
Tropical cyclones in the Pacific get a boost with storms, which often turn toward vulnerable islands.
Meanwhile, parts of Central and South America experience heavy rainfall, although the Amazon rainforest tends to suffer from drier conditions. And Australia, for its part, endures extreme heat, drought and wildfires.
The first to feel the impact will be the countries near the Pacific, such as the west coast of the Americas, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, but “many remote regions are also affected by El Niño,” emphasized Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of the regional division of climate prediction services of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
“A broad pattern shows that El Niño coincides with a large area of drought in Australia, the Hindustan Peninsula, South Africa and the northern part of South America (…) We also see flooding in the southern US and some parts of Central Asia. Those are not all near-Pacific regions, but they are often affected in the same way when El Niño hits,” Okia added.
Following announcements from the US and Japanese weather bureaus, nations are already scrambling to prepare.
Peru has set aside $1.06 billion to deal with the impacts of El Niño and climate change, while the Philippines, at risk of cyclones, has formed a special government team to handle the anticipated consequences.
Agricultural production at risk
Weather impacts may be milder in Europe.
“Spain, Portugal and France are somewhat more likely to experience a wetter autumn, with generally warmer conditions across much of central and southern Europe in October and November,” Allan said.
But hopefully the economic impacts of the global weather phenomenon will leave their mark.
“The far-reaching and often simultaneous impacts around the world can certainly affect Europe indirectly through socio-economic damage that can cause prices to rise and some goods to become scarce,” Allan remarked.
This year’s El Niño could cause global economic losses of $3 trillion, according to a study published last month in the journal Science. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) levels are likely to decline as extreme weather decimates agricultural production and manufacturing, as well as helping to spread disease.
Early signs of hot, dry El Niño weather threaten food producers across Asia and could see winter crop production fall 34% from record highs in Australia.
Also, rising temperatures could affect palm and rice oil production in Thailand and Indonesia and Malaysia, the latter two supplying 80% of the world’s palm oil.
Meanwhile, US growers are counting on heavier summer rains due to the weather event to ease the impact of the severe drought.
El Niño contributes to global warming
Experts are also concerned about what is happening in the ocean.
After the last recorded El Niño, in 2016, warmer waters caused anchovy populations off the coast of Peru to plummet, killing nearly a third of the corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
The presence of El Niño means that the waters in the Eastern Pacific are warmer than normal. But even before that event began, the global mean sea surface temperature was about 0.1°C higher in May than at any other time. That could fuel extreme weather.
Then there is the ongoing impact of man-made climate change.
“El Niño will add additional warming,” Okia said.
In the next five years, there is a 66% chance that global temperatures will temporarily rise above the 1.5°C limit of pre-industrial levels, set out in the Paris Agreement.
“That’s a combination of El Niño and global warming,” Okia explained.
In recent years, the cooler La Niña cycle helped slow warming. “However, we still saw some extreme temperatures,” the expert added.
In the long term, the relationship between El Niño and global warming caused by human activity does not bode well.
“It is clear that unusually wet, dry and hot extremes will intensify as a warmer and thirstier atmosphere can extract water from the ground even more effectively in one region and dump it as heavy rains in another,” Allan explained.
“Climate change is amplifying the impacts of El Niño which include floods, droughts, heat waves and forest fires,” Allan concluded.
with Reuters
This article was adapted from its original in English.
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