I will try to make sure these are properly sourced. If you know any of them are dodgy, let me know.
“It’s hard to know if quotes on the Internet are real or made up” Abraham Lincoln.
“El Nino is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” Carl Skau, WFP’s acting executive director. (cited in Ali and Haddad, 2026, Sept 15).
“El Nino is being supersized before our eyes…. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a WMO statement.
“A few inches of extra ocean may not sound like much, but coastal flooding is a game of margins stacked on margins. The wave itself will not flood anything on its own — this is not a tsunami, and there will be no moment when it ‘hits.’ Instead, it quietly raises the baseline the tides ride on top of for weeks or months at a time,”
Macaday, S. 2026. El Niño-born ‘Kelvin waves’ are sneaking towards California. What to know. Sacramento Bee, September 14
https://www.sacbee.com/news/weather-news/article317211661.html
“We can’t just assume that this El Niño is going to be the same as the last because there are so many challenges that have been stacking on top of each other.”
“We have come to a stage where climate change is putting so much pressure on us – on our existing, already crumbling or structurally unsound, systems…. Nature will force us to have a reckoning.”
Elyssa Kaur Ludher, a climate and food security expert based in Singapore.
Holmes et a.l, 2026. ‘Forcing a reckoning’: How Asia is preparing for a ‘supersized’ El Niño. The Guardian, September 18
“I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts. A typical El Niño leads to an equatorial Pacific sea-surface temperature rise of between 1-2 degrees, with 2C being a really big event….This implies that if the forecast is accurate – and other forecast systems show similar extreme values – then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Niño and its worldwide climate influences.”
Professor Adam Scaife, head of long range forecasting at the Met Office (August 2026)