Forty three years ago, on this day, October 21st, 1983, University of Maine student paper editorial Doomsday revisited
“The news coming from Washington Tuesday was gloomier than usual. The Environmental Protection Agency warned the continued warming of the earth’s climate due to pollution could create serious problems as early as the 1990s. The EPA released its report, titled, “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” and concluded that regardless of any future restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels, the warming of the earth’s atmosphere is inevitable….”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 343ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that from the late 1960s university publications had been going into depth on global environmental issues, including the possibility of climactic change, either colder or warmer. By the mid 70s, it was pretty obvious it was going to be warmer.
Thespecificcontext was that the Environmental Protection Agency had just released a report called, “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?” with the answer “almost certainly not.” And then two days later, I think after this publication, the National Academies of Science, Academy of Sciences had released the Nierenberg report, basically pouring cold water on everything.
What I think we can learn from this is that this stuff was understood in 1983 though, to be fair, this was the most dangerous and tense part of the Second Cold War, and you could easily be forgiven for not worrying about climate change and the greenhouse effect, because nuclear war was going to get you first.
What happened next. Nuclear war didn’t get us first, which is of course a good thing.
Someone could do a thing about university newspapers and all this shit.?
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
Xx
References
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
The latest weekly “El Nino Digest” Times (‘END Times’, geddit?) is up as a pdf and a word doc.
Text below
Colour Me
Or “Ocean Colour Scream”…
“Monthly SSTs for September were more than 3°C above average across the central and equatorial Pacific, including much of the Nino 3.4 region. The largest anomalies occurred farther east along the Peruvian coast and west of the Galápagos, reaching 6–7°C above average in those areas.”
In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven…. So I propose to share tiny flashes that have illuminated my sombre life and… have a joke per issue, as far as possible, El Niño or weather-themed.
What do you call a woman who sits at her kitchen table setting fire to her bills, IOUs and council tax demand?
Answer on the last page of this issue.
Welcome to the 5th of at least 7 weekly issues of the ElNiño Digest Times (END Times – geddit?). The why should be self-explanatory, but here’s a FAQ just in case. We are still just about in the first of the three phases of El Niño but not for long…
Here’s the database I’ve begun (but almost certainly will not maintain). It’s largely based on two Google Alerts for “El Niño” and “Impacts” and “Godzilla”. Plus things people (like you) send me.
There are a lot of good El Niño explainers out there – this one, by Al Jazeera is really good and I will link to it at the top of every digest until someone suggests a better one (ideally with the url written on a £50 note).
Editorial
I just today (Saturday 17th) read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” You can find it online here. It was published in 1953 (by coincidence an extremely important year for climate science – Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass made his presentation about the long-term implications of carbon dioxide build-up at the American Geophysical Union in May of that year, and it went ‘viral’). Spoilers ahead: it concerns a family on a vacation trip through the Deep South against the knowledge that there is an escaped – and armed – ‘madman’ on the loose. The family disregard the warnings, fail to do the sensible things and are undone by childish actions (does any of this sound at all familiar?) I am drawing a long bow here, of course. In no reasonable way can this short story be read as “anthropocene fiction” (though doubtless an ambitious honours or Masters student could give it a red-hot try.
Suffice (sic) to say that there comes a point, after an accident, where you can mewl all you like about the unfairness of it all, how it coulda shoulda been different, but whatever you say, you are STILL looking down the barrel of a (literal, in the story) gun, and that is all there is too it, possible moments of grace or not aside. It is what it is.
Next week, I will somehow find a way to editorialise on the book I just bought in the charity shop – the Jungle Book (“Do you like Kipling?” “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled…”)
Well,thisis exciting…
LINK. Short version seems to be “don’t be surprised if Godzilla doesn’t come back more regularly, bringing his friends.”
The three phases of ElNiño
The Antici…pation
From early this year until … (looks at watch)… about now. Scientists saying they’ve double-checked and triple-checked and they’re as sure as they can be. Disaster management folks pleading for money and decent plans. Politicians telling us to stock up, or declaring States of Emergency in advance, with an eye on their 2028 Presidential run… Journalists writing SEO-ed disaster porn speculations. Everyone holding their breath, putting their fingers in their ears to not hear the Doomers gloating “I told you so.”
“Then someone yelled out ‘Contact!’”
The rolling roiling disasters, especially salient when (rich) White People in Peril can be filmed. The shark in the shopping mall meme resurfaces. The re-insurers point to their fine print, and some insurers go belly-up. The rich libertarians squeal for state bail-outs. Food prices through the roof. Hard-to-replace infrastructure washed away.
Back to the perfect paradise
The wreckage is quietly swept away, the global machine reboots, and the important (rich white) people continue their merry way. The End. (Actual outcomes may vary; always read the label).
Colour Me Amazed
Or “Ocean Colour Scream”…
“Monthly SSTs for September were more than 3°C above average across the central and equatorial Pacific, including much of the Nino 3.4 region. The largest anomalies occurred farther east along the Peruvian coast and west of the Galápagos, reaching 6–7°C above average in those areas.”
In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven…. So I propose to share tiny flashes that have illuminated my sombre life and… have a joke per issue, as far as possible, El Niño or weather-themed.
What do you call a woman who sits at her kitchen table setting fire to her bills, IOUs and council tax demand?
Answer on the last page of this issue.
Welcome to the 5th of at least 7 weekly issues of the ElNiño Digest Times (END Times – geddit?). The why should be self-explanatory, but here’s a FAQ just in case. We are still just about in the first of the three phases of El Niño but not for long…
Here’s the database I’ve begun (but almost certainly will not maintain). It’s largely based on two Google Alerts for “El Niño” and “Impacts” and “Godzilla”. Plus things people (like you) send me.
There are a lot of good El Niño explainers out there – this one, by Al Jazeera is really good and I will link to it at the top of every digest until someone suggests a better one (ideally with the url written on a £50 note).
Editorial
I just today (Saturday 17th) read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” You can find it online here. It was published in 1953 (by coincidence an extremely important year for climate science – Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass made his presentation about the long-term implications of carbon dioxide build-up at the American Geophysical Union in May of that year, and it went ‘viral’). Spoilers ahead: it concerns a family on a vacation trip through the Deep South against the knowledge that there is an escaped – and armed – ‘madman’ on the loose. The family disregard the warnings, fail to do the sensible things and are undone by childish actions (does any of this sound at all familiar?) I am drawing a long bow here, of course. In no reasonable way can this short story be read as “anthropocene fiction” (though doubtless an ambitious honours or Masters student could give it a red-hot try.
Suffice (sic) to say that there comes a point, after an accident, where you can mewl all you like about the unfairness of it all, how it coulda shoulda been different, but whatever you say, you are STILL looking down the barrel of a (literal, in the story) gun, and that is all there is too it, possible moments of grace or not aside. It is what it is.
Next week, I will somehow find a way to editorialise on the book I just bought in the charity shop – the Jungle Book (“Do you like Kipling?” “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled…”)
Well,thisis exciting…
LINK. Short version seems to be “don’t be surprised if Godzilla doesn’t come back more regularly, bringing his friends.”
The three phases of ElNiño
The Antici…pation
From early this year until … (looks at watch)… about now. Scientists saying they’ve double-checked and triple-checked and they’re as sure as they can be. Disaster management folks pleading for money and decent plans. Politicians telling us to stock up, or declaring States of Emergency in advance, with an eye on their 2028 Presidential run… Journalists writing SEO-ed disaster porn speculations. Everyone holding their breath, putting their fingers in their ears to not hear the Doomers gloating “I told you so.”
“Then someone yelled out ‘Contact!’”
The rolling roiling disasters, especially salient when (rich) White People in Peril can be filmed. The shark in the shopping mall meme resurfaces. The re-insurers point to their fine print, and some insurers go belly-up. The rich libertarians squeal for state bail-outs. Food prices through the roof. Hard-to-replace infrastructure washed away.
Back to the perfect paradise
The wreckage is quietly swept away, the global machine reboots, and the important (rich white) people continue their merry way. The End. (Actual outcomes may vary; always read the label).
Quotes of the Week
El Niño’s added ocean heat affects the atmosphere, causing weather patterns around the world to shift. Consider it kind of like a domino run, where one tile starts a chain reaction. Such a major slug of heat in the Pacific will act more like a shove then a light flick on the atmosphere, and the resulting shifts in weather are expected to be generationally intense.
“Since September 20th, when Odalys formed, it’s been berserk,” said Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach, who forecasts and studies storm activity. “This year just everything that forms is just lasting a long time and getting really powerful.”
“For children, El Niño is far more than a weather pattern. It can mean increased displacement, malnutrition, water shortages, and disease outbreaks. Children are also at risk of schools closing, while families could experience added financial hardship,” Catherine Russell, who heads the agency, said.
“Most of us climate change ecology people are kind of perversely excited about it,” says John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s an experimental treatment that nature is providing to us.”
Whether this “super” El Niño will translate into superdamage around the world remains to be seen. Other ocean phenomena, such as water temperatures in the Indian Ocean, can either moderate or amplify an El Niño’s effects, says Chris Funk, an applied climatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose work focuses on developing weather forecasting tools to predict drought, famine, and other natural disasters. He says the indicators so far point to a wild ride for people and ecosystems. “The pretty obvious conclusion is that we should buckle up.”
Ian Lisk, a chief meteorologist at the Met Office, warned attendees of a recent Airports UK annual conference that “we don’t get normal weather any more, fundamentally…. None of this is good news. The heatwaves and the events of this last summer had nothing to do with El Niño.”
“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”
Noam Chomsky
Money
(always the 5th element, whatever Aristotle thought)
“Developing countries face a triple shock from the energy crisis, El Niño and surging borrowing costs and need urgent support from the international community, the UN’s development arm has warned.
“Speaking before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok this week, the UNDP’s administrator, Alexander De Croo, called for “solidarity and global action”.
“Developing countries, their hands and legs are being pulled in different directions: it’s truly hard for them,” he said.
“Before the meetings, the UNDP published a report, No Time to Recover, which lays out the risks of what it calls the “compounding crises” of energy, climate and debt.”
“BANGKOK — The Philippine central bank is planning for a “Godzilla” El Niño on top of a prolonged oil shock, as the Southeast Asian nation tries to rein in inflation from three-year highs.
Governor Eli Remolona said Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas now sets policy using scenarios that factor in oil prices and the severity of the weather event. “We have the regular, ordinary El Niño, which is bad, and then we have the Godzilla El Niño, which is really, really bad,” he said Wednesday on a panel at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.”
“The arrival of the 2026/27 El Niño brings renewed uncertainty to Brazil’s agricultural sector, with regional impacts varying widely. Central and Northern areas face higher risks of heatwaves and below-average rainfall, while the South is bracing for excessive precipitation. These shifts threaten to disrupt planting schedules for soybeans and second-season corn, reduce water availability for pastures, and strain livestock welfare. High temperatures may also jeopardize critical coffee and orange flowering periods as well as sugarcane yields. In response, Brazilian producers should be prepared for elevated input costs, rising insurance premiums, and recurring infrastructure vulnerabilities associated with severe weather events. These financial impacts may have lasting effects well into future harvests, heightening the strain on Brazil’s agricultural sector.”
Brazil: Bracing for Impact – How the 2026 El Nino Affects Brazil’s Agriculture Attaché Report (GAIN) | BR2026-0040
“In this paper I use a new approach to estimating the impulse response functions of El Niños. I find that El Niños pose material upside risk for PCE prices and employment. The longer-run price effects are driven by core services and food prices and depend on whether La Niñas follow El Niños, a very common occurrence. After modest offsetting initial effects, employment increases are widespread in terms of both sectors and states in the year following the El Niño. These results indicate El Niños can have material impacts on the US.”
Roth Tran, Brigitte 2026. “In Hot Water? The Macroeconomic Impacts of El Niño.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2026-21. https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2026-21
Don’t go visiting waterfalls…
“Heavy rainfall fuelled by a supersized El Niño weather pattern briefly forced Argentinian authorities to close tourist access to the famed Iguazu Falls, amid fears that rapidly rising water levels would cause the river to burst its banks.”
The effects are already being felt. In Somalia, heavy rains have flooded parts of Mogadishu and damaged health facilities, echoing the El Niño-linked floods of 2023 that displaced 1.2 million people.
PETALING JAYA: The meteorological department has forecast scorching weather between March and May next year due to the Super El Nino phenomenon, potentially breaking Malaysia’s record high temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius.
Its director-general Hisham Anip said Malaysia’s maximum temperature could exceed 41 degrees Celsius based on an analysis of the current El Nino phenomenon, alongside the impacts of climate change and global warming.
“If we look at current climate change trends, the rate of temperature increase in the country is approximately 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade.
The degree of difficulties may vary between states, but the fact that around 40 per cent of India’s landmass spread over 15 of the 36 states and Union Territories received less than normal rainfall will remain a matter of concern…
“India is well placed with its foodgrain stocks — a massive pool of 602 lakh metric tonnes of wheat and rice — three times the prescribed buffer stock. Food will not be a problem even if India experiences a rare second successive failure of SWM season in 202, as a section of meteorologists fear. India’s real problem is drinking water supply in states that ended up with serious deficit rains and irrigation for agriculture.”
International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva told AFP she is “very concerned” about El Niño’s global impacts, particularly on food security. The IMF is “getting ready” to offer support to countries that may struggle to absorb the impact, she added. The United Nations Development Programme also warned Sunday that the combined impacts of higher borrowing costs, surging energy prices and the powerful El Niño created “a perfect storm that could throw tens if not hundreds of millions of people back into poverty.”
Londoners are being urged to sign up for flood warnings amid growing concern that extreme weather fuelled by a “Godzilla” El Niño will batter the UK this winter.
Flood action online is designed as a one-stop shop for people to understand the flood risk to their homes and take action to reduce it, as well as providing easy access to weather alerts from the Met Office during incidents.
Up to 1.7 million UK households will not turn on their heating this winter in an effort to save money – as a record El Niño threatens to unleash extreme weather this winter.
A poll for Uswitch suggested that as many as 1.7 million households will turn off their heating to save money on costs, with only 40% planning to turn it on if they get too cold.
“Colder, calmer weather in UK winters is known to present a challenge for energy production from renewable sources, especially when it is also cloudy. Wind power generates 40% or more of the UK’s electricity during winter, and cold, calm periods can require more gas power to make up for lower wind generation and increased demand for heating.”
UK weather tends to be less directly affected than other areas of the world, but due to the strength of this El Niño the extent of the forecasts suggest there is an increased likelihood of wetter and stormier conditions during autumn and early winter, alongside a slightly increased risk of colder weather and cold snaps later in winter.
What’s likely around the winter peak from October to December 2026:
Increased likelihood of stormier conditions
Increased likelihood of heavy rainfall and flooding
Early 2027:
Slightly increased likelihood of ‘cold snaps’
In the UK this could cause:
Flooding
Power cuts
Damage by high winds
Snow and icy conditions
These events are something the UK experiences every year. While El Niño does not directly cause individual storms, floods or cold weather events, forecasts suggest it could increase the likelihood of some weather patterns that make these impacts more likely.
With around 50% of UK food imported, including 80% of fruit and vegetables from countries such as Spain and Morocco, supply could be impacted by events in countries of origin, which would have a knock-on effect for UK shoppers of driving up prices and scarcity. This is especially true for foods that can only be grown and cultivated in certain areas of the world.
“We are a long way behind in terms of what is needed for adaptation as a country. The very hot summer we have just had has alerted people to what has been coming for a long time. It is going to get worse than this,”
James Richardson, the chief analyst at the Climate Change Committee
Not long ago the idea of a book on Amazon forest fires would have seemed as absurd as a book on Amazon snowstorms, according to Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate in Oxford University and Lancaster University and an expert on human-driven disturbances in the world’s biggest tropical forest. “Fires just didn’t happen before because the forest was too humid,” she explains.
But decades of deforestation and climate disruption have changed that completely. Swathes of the Amazon are now drier and more flammable, particularly in El Niño years which are associated with lower rainfall.
Synopsis: Every Tuesday, we discuss how environmental issues intersect with business, politics and society.
After three years of clear skies, the haze is back in Singapore. One contributor to the pollution is the El Nino weather phenomenon, which causes drier, hotter weather in South-east Asia.
Science Talk: In this episode of Science Talk podcast, we sit down with Dr. Zeke Hausfather (https://thebreakthrough.org/people/ze…, a leading climate scientist known for translating complex data into clear, accessible insights. While not a “typical academic,” he holds a PhD and has played a major role in advancing public understanding of climate science. He is currently affiliated with Berkeley Earth (https://berkeleyearth.org/team/) and is also working in the private sector on carbon removal solutions.
This wide-ranging conversation tackles some of the most urgent and debated questions about our planet’s future. What exactly is happening to Earth’s climate—and why? Do we now have enough evidence to definitively prove that climate change is real? We also explore the growing discussion around whether 2027 could become the warmest year on record, especially in the context of a potential Super El Niño.
I am not a climate scientist. I am mostly collating what other people say, not pushing my own “angle”. I will get things wrong – when I do, I’ll fess up, no fuss. I will quote from “reputable” sources, but sometimes the truth is an outlandish outlier.
Blah blah information provided for lulz only. No responsibility taken for your failure to create broad-based social movements that prevent shit getting even worse and instead leading us into the pit of Sarlac.
The digest is inspired by the awe-inspiring and heart-breaking “CO2 Newsletter published by American geologist William Barbat from 1979 to 1982.
That joke!
Bernadette! Ba-doom, tish.
What do you call a hairless murder ape using its opposable thumbs to dig up coal and set fire to it?
3. What is “Drilled”, how did it come to be and why should everyone listen to it?
Drilled started out as a true-crime podcast about climate change and is now a global newsroom producing both the podcast and cross-border investigations into climate obstruction with a wide range of partner outlets.
It started out because I had been a longtime climate reporter in print and was wishing I could do radio and then thought well I probably could if I learned how, so had gone to work for a radio station. They had trained me in audio reporting, but I was still working as a climate reporter, at the time mostly for The Guardian where I worked on retainer for several years. There was a bit of a narrative podcast boom at the time, driven primarily by the podcast Serial, and I thought there should be something narrative on climate–only a handful of climate pods existed and they were all interview-based, not stories. But I couldn’t think of something that could carry a whole podcast season either.
Then I got assigned to cover one of the early climate liability cases in California, where the cities of Oakland and San Francisco were suing some of the world’s largest oil companies for their role in delaying action on climate change and thus increasing the costs of adaptation for cities. The judge in that case had called for a climate science tutorial — he was an eccentric guy, known for such things – and both legal teams showed up in San Francisco prepared to present on who knew what, when, and what they’d done with that information. All the characters were there: The eccentric judge, the scientists, the slick oil company lawyers, the activists, and I thought “aha! that’s it, I’ll make a true-crime podcast about climate change.”
At the time, people weren’t really talking about climate as a crime so it was somewhat novel and I thought it was a great idea, but none of the podcast companies were interested. They all said there wouldn’t be enough of an audience. I was really convinced they were wrong so I made it anyway with an audio engineer friend and a small seed grant from a nonprofit, and we wound up getting a million listens to our first season, so that proved that there was an audience. By that point I had ideas for the next three seasons and now we’re working on Season 18.
4. This book – how did it come to be? What is it trying to achieve? What does it do that other books (Ross Gelbspan, Oreskes and Conway) that have looked at climate propaganda didn’t do?
It had a very circuitous path!… The idea I initially pitched him was a whole book on Herb Schmertz, the legendary VP of public affairs for Mobil, and one of these days I still want to write that book. BUT understandably he thought it was a bit too niche. So we bounced ideas around for about a year and basically co-wrote the proposal for the book. Which is highly unusual! I felt like other books had focused on one particular type of propaganda — science denial or PR or lobbying — but none had looked yet at how it all works together. I also thought there’d been this tendency to frame this issue as though one industry figured this stuff out and then another industry copied it, which didn’t jive with the documentation I’d seen. I think it’s helpful for people to see how this works across industries and how these strategies were really concocted to help all industries and companies avoid regulation and get around democracy in a variety of ways.
6. I’ll give you five minutes with Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Let’s say he’s read your book. What ELSE would you say to him?
I’d tell him to talk to Tessa Kahn of Uplift about why everything he’s said about North Sea oil is wrong
8. Any shout outs to other climate journalism, journalism full stop – people who deserve more attention than they are getting?
Always! Let’s see, well first I want to make sure to shout out all the other reporters working with Drilled – Alleen Brown, Royce Kurmelovs (who is single-handedly producing a massive amount of Australia’s investigative climate journalism), Nina Lakhani, Diana Taremwa-Karakire in Uganda, Rishika Pardikar in India, Alice de Souza an excellent Brazilian journalist living in the UK, Ana Dominguez in Argentina, Jose Catalayud in Spain, Alex Brutelle in France. Then I think the folks at the Intercept Brasil are some of the best journalists around. Sharon Lerner does incredible work at ProPublica. Hilary Beaumont all over the place, Sara Sneath at The Guardian. Kendra Pierre-Louis has been doing amazing climate reporting for years. I know I’m immediately going to kick myself for forgetting someone.
El Niño’s added ocean heat affects the atmosphere, causing weather patterns around the world to shift. Consider it kind of like a domino run, where one tile starts a chain reaction. Such a major slug of heat in the Pacific will act more like a shove then a light flick on the atmosphere, and the resulting shifts in weather are expected to be generationally intense.
“Since September 20th, when Odalys formed, it’s been berserk,” said Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach, who forecasts and studies storm activity. “This year just everything that forms is just lasting a long time and getting really powerful.”
“For children, El Niño is far more than a weather pattern. It can mean increased displacement, malnutrition, water shortages, and disease outbreaks. Children are also at risk of schools closing, while families could experience added financial hardship,” Catherine Russell, who heads the agency, said.
“Most of us climate change ecology people are kind of perversely excited about it,” says John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s an experimental treatment that nature is providing to us.”
Whether this “super” El Niño will translate into superdamage around the world remains to be seen. Other ocean phenomena, such as water temperatures in the Indian Ocean, can either moderate or amplify an El Niño’s effects, says Chris Funk, an applied climatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose work focuses on developing weather forecasting tools to predict drought, famine, and other natural disasters. He says the indicators so far point to a wild ride for people and ecosystems. “The pretty obvious conclusion is that we should buckle up.”
Ian Lisk, a chief meteorologist at the Met Office, warned attendees of a recent Airports UK annual conference that “we don’t get normal weather any more, fundamentally…. None of this is good news. The heatwaves and the events of this last summer had nothing to do with El Niño.”
“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”
Noam Chomsky
Money
(always the 5th element, whatever Aristotle thought)
“Developing countries face a triple shock from the energy crisis, El Niño and surging borrowing costs and need urgent support from the international community, the UN’s development arm has warned.
“Speaking before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok this week, the UNDP’s administrator, Alexander De Croo, called for “solidarity and global action”.
“Developing countries, their hands and legs are being pulled in different directions: it’s truly hard for them,” he said.
“Before the meetings, the UNDP published a report, No Time to Recover, which lays out the risks of what it calls the “compounding crises” of energy, climate and debt.”
“BANGKOK — The Philippine central bank is planning for a “Godzilla” El Niño on top of a prolonged oil shock, as the Southeast Asian nation tries to rein in inflation from three-year highs.
Governor Eli Remolona said Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas now sets policy using scenarios that factor in oil prices and the severity of the weather event. “We have the regular, ordinary El Niño, which is bad, and then we have the Godzilla El Niño, which is really, really bad,” he said Wednesday on a panel at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.”
“The arrival of the 2026/27 El Niño brings renewed uncertainty to Brazil’s agricultural sector, with regional impacts varying widely. Central and Northern areas face higher risks of heatwaves and below-average rainfall, while the South is bracing for excessive precipitation. These shifts threaten to disrupt planting schedules for soybeans and second-season corn, reduce water availability for pastures, and strain livestock welfare. High temperatures may also jeopardize critical coffee and orange flowering periods as well as sugarcane yields. In response, Brazilian producers should be prepared for elevated input costs, rising insurance premiums, and recurring infrastructure vulnerabilities associated with severe weather events. These financial impacts may have lasting effects well into future harvests, heightening the strain on Brazil’s agricultural sector.”
Brazil: Bracing for Impact – How the 2026 El Nino Affects Brazil’s Agriculture Attaché Report (GAIN) | BR2026-0040
“In this paper I use a new approach to estimating the impulse response functions of El Niños. I find that El Niños pose material upside risk for PCE prices and employment. The longer-run price effects are driven by core services and food prices and depend on whether La Niñas follow El Niños, a very common occurrence. After modest offsetting initial effects, employment increases are widespread in terms of both sectors and states in the year following the El Niño. These results indicate El Niños can have material impacts on the US.”
Roth Tran, Brigitte 2026. “In Hot Water? The Macroeconomic Impacts of El Niño.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2026-21. https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2026-21
Don’t go visiting waterfalls…
“Heavy rainfall fuelled by a supersized El Niño weather pattern briefly forced Argentinian authorities to close tourist access to the famed Iguazu Falls, amid fears that rapidly rising water levels would cause the river to burst its banks.”
The effects are already being felt. In Somalia, heavy rains have flooded parts of Mogadishu and damaged health facilities, echoing the El Niño-linked floods of 2023 that displaced 1.2 million people.
PETALING JAYA: The meteorological department has forecast scorching weather between March and May next year due to the Super El Nino phenomenon, potentially breaking Malaysia’s record high temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius.
Its director-general Hisham Anip said Malaysia’s maximum temperature could exceed 41 degrees Celsius based on an analysis of the current El Nino phenomenon, alongside the impacts of climate change and global warming.
“If we look at current climate change trends, the rate of temperature increase in the country is approximately 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade.
The degree of difficulties may vary between states, but the fact that around 40 per cent of India’s landmass spread over 15 of the 36 states and Union Territories received less than normal rainfall will remain a matter of concern…
“India is well placed with its foodgrain stocks — a massive pool of 602 lakh metric tonnes of wheat and rice — three times the prescribed buffer stock. Food will not be a problem even if India experiences a rare second successive failure of SWM season in 202, as a section of meteorologists fear. India’s real problem is drinking water supply in states that ended up with serious deficit rains and irrigation for agriculture.”
International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva told AFP she is “very concerned” about El Niño’s global impacts, particularly on food security. The IMF is “getting ready” to offer support to countries that may struggle to absorb the impact, she added. The United Nations Development Programme also warned Sunday that the combined impacts of higher borrowing costs, surging energy prices and the powerful El Niño created “a perfect storm that could throw tens if not hundreds of millions of people back into poverty.”
Londoners are being urged to sign up for flood warnings amid growing concern that extreme weather fuelled by a “Godzilla” El Niño will batter the UK this winter.
Flood action online is designed as a one-stop shop for people to understand the flood risk to their homes and take action to reduce it, as well as providing easy access to weather alerts from the Met Office during incidents.
Up to 1.7 million UK households will not turn on their heating this winter in an effort to save money – as a record El Niño threatens to unleash extreme weather this winter.
A poll for Uswitch suggested that as many as 1.7 million households will turn off their heating to save money on costs, with only 40% planning to turn it on if they get too cold.
“Colder, calmer weather in UK winters is known to present a challenge for energy production from renewable sources, especially when it is also cloudy. Wind power generates 40% or more of the UK’s electricity during winter, and cold, calm periods can require more gas power to make up for lower wind generation and increased demand for heating.”
UK weather tends to be less directly affected than other areas of the world, but due to the strength of this El Niño the extent of the forecasts suggest there is an increased likelihood of wetter and stormier conditions during autumn and early winter, alongside a slightly increased risk of colder weather and cold snaps later in winter.
What’s likely around the winter peak from October to December 2026:
Increased likelihood of stormier conditions
Increased likelihood of heavy rainfall and flooding
Early 2027:
Slightly increased likelihood of ‘cold snaps’
In the UK this could cause:
Flooding
Power cuts
Damage by high winds
Snow and icy conditions
These events are something the UK experiences every year. While El Niño does not directly cause individual storms, floods or cold weather events, forecasts suggest it could increase the likelihood of some weather patterns that make these impacts more likely.
With around 50% of UK food imported, including 80% of fruit and vegetables from countries such as Spain and Morocco, supply could be impacted by events in countries of origin, which would have a knock-on effect for UK shoppers of driving up prices and scarcity. This is especially true for foods that can only be grown and cultivated in certain areas of the world.
“We are a long way behind in terms of what is needed for adaptation as a country. The very hot summer we have just had has alerted people to what has been coming for a long time. It is going to get worse than this,”
James Richardson, the chief analyst at the Climate Change Committee
Not long ago the idea of a book on Amazon forest fires would have seemed as absurd as a book on Amazon snowstorms, according to Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate in Oxford University and Lancaster University and an expert on human-driven disturbances in the world’s biggest tropical forest. “Fires just didn’t happen before because the forest was too humid,” she explains.
But decades of deforestation and climate disruption have changed that completely. Swathes of the Amazon are now drier and more flammable, particularly in El Niño years which are associated with lower rainfall.
Synopsis: Every Tuesday, we discuss how environmental issues intersect with business, politics and society.
After three years of clear skies, the haze is back in Singapore. One contributor to the pollution is the El Nino weather phenomenon, which causes drier, hotter weather in South-east Asia.
Science Talk: In this episode of Science Talk podcast, we sit down with Dr. Zeke Hausfather (https://thebreakthrough.org/people/ze…, a leading climate scientist known for translating complex data into clear, accessible insights. While not a “typical academic,” he holds a PhD and has played a major role in advancing public understanding of climate science. He is currently affiliated with Berkeley Earth (https://berkeleyearth.org/team/) and is also working in the private sector on carbon removal solutions.
This wide-ranging conversation tackles some of the most urgent and debated questions about our planet’s future. What exactly is happening to Earth’s climate—and why? Do we now have enough evidence to definitively prove that climate change is real? We also explore the growing discussion around whether 2027 could become the warmest year on record, especially in the context of a potential Super El Niño.
I am not a climate scientist. I am mostly collating what other people say, not pushing my own “angle”. I will get things wrong – when I do, I’ll fess up, no fuss. I will quote from “reputable” sources, but sometimes the truth is an outlandish outlier.
Blah blah information provided for lulz only. No responsibility taken for your failure to create broad-based social movements that prevent shit getting even worse and instead leading us into the pit of Sarlac.
The digest is inspired by the awe-inspiring and heart-breaking “CO2 Newsletter published by American geologist William Barbat from 1979 to 1982.
That joke!
Bernadette! Ba-doom, tish.
What do you call a hairless murder ape using its opposable thumbs to dig up coal and set fire to it?
3. What is “Drilled”, how did it come to be and why should everyone listen to it?
Drilled started out as a true-crime podcast about climate change and is now a global newsroom producing both the podcast and cross-border investigations into climate obstruction with a wide range of partner outlets.
It started out because I had been a longtime climate reporter in print and was wishing I could do radio and then thought well I probably could if I learned how, so had gone to work for a radio station. They had trained me in audio reporting, but I was still working as a climate reporter, at the time mostly for The Guardian where I worked on retainer for several years. There was a bit of a narrative podcast boom at the time, driven primarily by the podcast Serial, and I thought there should be something narrative on climate–only a handful of climate pods existed and they were all interview-based, not stories. But I couldn’t think of something that could carry a whole podcast season either.
Then I got assigned to cover one of the early climate liability cases in California, where the cities of Oakland and San Francisco were suing some of the world’s largest oil companies for their role in delaying action on climate change and thus increasing the costs of adaptation for cities. The judge in that case had called for a climate science tutorial — he was an eccentric guy, known for such things – and both legal teams showed up in San Francisco prepared to present on who knew what, when, and what they’d done with that information. All the characters were there: The eccentric judge, the scientists, the slick oil company lawyers, the activists, and I thought “aha! that’s it, I’ll make a true-crime podcast about climate change.”
At the time, people weren’t really talking about climate as a crime so it was somewhat novel and I thought it was a great idea, but none of the podcast companies were interested. They all said there wouldn’t be enough of an audience. I was really convinced they were wrong so I made it anyway with an audio engineer friend and a small seed grant from a nonprofit, and we wound up getting a million listens to our first season, so that proved that there was an audience. By that point I had ideas for the next three seasons and now we’re working on Season 18.
4. This book – how did it come to be? What is it trying to achieve? What does it do that other books (Ross Gelbspan, Oreskes and Conway) that have looked at climate propaganda didn’t do?
It had a very circuitous path!… The idea I initially pitched him was a whole book on Herb Schmertz, the legendary VP of public affairs for Mobil, and one of these days I still want to write that book. BUT understandably he thought it was a bit too niche. So we bounced ideas around for about a year and basically co-wrote the proposal for the book. Which is highly unusual! I felt like other books had focused on one particular type of propaganda — science denial or PR or lobbying — but none had looked yet at how it all works together. I also thought there’d been this tendency to frame this issue as though one industry figured this stuff out and then another industry copied it, which didn’t jive with the documentation I’d seen. I think it’s helpful for people to see how this works across industries and how these strategies were really concocted to help all industries and companies avoid regulation and get around democracy in a variety of ways.
6. I’ll give you five minutes with Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Let’s say he’s read your book. What ELSE would you say to him?
I’d tell him to talk to Tessa Kahn of Uplift about why everything he’s said about North Sea oil is wrong
8. Any shout outs to other climate journalism, journalism full stop – people who deserve more attention than they are getting?
Always! Let’s see, well first I want to make sure to shout out all the other reporters working with Drilled – Alleen Brown, Royce Kurmelovs (who is single-handedly producing a massive amount of Australia’s investigative climate journalism), Nina Lakhani, Diana Taremwa-Karakire in Uganda, Rishika Pardikar in India, Alice de Souza an excellent Brazilian journalist living in the UK, Ana Dominguez in Argentina, Jose Catalayud in Spain, Alex Brutelle in France. Then I think the folks at the Intercept Brasil are some of the best journalists around. Sharon Lerner does incredible work at ProPublica. Hilary Beaumont all over the place, Sara Sneath at The Guardian. Kendra Pierre-Louis has been doing amazing climate reporting for years. I know I’m immediately going to kick myself for forgetting someone.
This page contains content authorised by a previous Minister of a former Department and is available for archival purposes only.
18 October 2010
Media Release
Joint media release The Hon Wayne Swan MP Deputy Prime Minister, Treasurer
The Government announced today the membership of the new roundtable that has been established to engage the business community on the Government’s climate change policies.
The Roundtable will include business leaders from right across the economy, including major sectors like mining, transport, manufacturing, energy, retail and banking. The Roundtable will also include leading peak bodies, such as the Business Council of Australia, AI Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
This new Roundtable will play a critical role in providing advice to the Government on the economic and business issues surrounding climate change.
The introduction of a carbon price will reshape the business environment for all Australian companies, providing businesses with the certainty they need to begin the transition to a low pollution economy. This new Roundtable will ensure that the views of the business community are front and centre as we progress this important economic reform.
Business leaders around the country understand that if we are to remain internationally competitive over the long term, then our industries must become less carbon intensive. The best way of doing this is by establishing a carbon price in the economy.
The simple fact is that in order to promote business certainty and to underscore Australia’s long-term competitiveness, introducing a carbon price is the only economically responsible thing to do.
The roundtable will also discuss how the Government’s climate change policies intersect with our other economic policies, including tax reform.
The Roundtable will be co-chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, Wayne Swan, and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet. The Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, will also be a member.
The composition of the roundtable reflects extensive discussion with business leaders and peak bodies. To keep the Roundtable to a manageable size, the Government has not been able to accommodate all interested parties. Ministers will continue to be available to discuss issues with all parties as we develop our policy position.
Member organisations of the Business Roundtable and their representatives include:
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Peter Anderson
Lend Lease, Maria Atkinson
National Australia Bank, Cameron Clyne
BHP Billiton, Hubrecht (Hubie) van Dalsen
Investor Group, Nathan Fabian
National Farmers’ Federation, Ben Fargher
AGL Energy, Michael Fraser
Qantas, Alan Joyce
Origin, Grant King
Woolworths, Michael Luscombe
BlueScope Steel, Paul O’Malley
Energy Supply Association of Australia, Brad Page
Rio Tinto, David Peever
Shell, Ann Pickard
Australian Industry Group, Heather Ridout
Business Council of Australia, Maria Tarrant
Woodside, Don Voelte
Clean Energy Council, Matthew Warren
Toyota, Masahide (Max) Yasuda
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 337ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that the ALP had spent a chunk of the 2000s trying to turn climate change into an issue they could use to peel away voters from the Liberals under Prime Minister John Howard. In late 2006 their luck had changed and new leader Kevin Rudd was able to club Howard with the issue. Rudd had then absolutely destroyed his credibility, and – fatally – allowed his chief of staff to brief against Julia Gillard, his Deputy. Gillard finally snapped and Rudd slunk away without even a vote (he knew he’d be hammered). Gillard had then called a slightly-early Federal election.
The specific context – Gillard managed to promise “no Carbon Tax” in the last days of the campaign. Then, oops, didn’t win a majority and so needed the support of Independent MPs to form a government. And those who were up for supporting her wanted… a carbon price. Which would be hard to distinguish from a “carbon tax.” (It probably COULD have been done, but, well, for reasons, it didn’t happen). So here we see Gillard trying to get business on board…
What I think we can learn from this is that business will turn up for a “grip and grin” but will basically play dead if things get too hot around a policy issue, as they did the following year, when Tony Abbott, Liberal leader, launched his “great big tax on everything” campaign.
What happened next 2011 was a blood bath. Gillard got her legislation through, but it was a very Pyrrhic victory.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
Xx
References
xx
You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Fifty three years ago, on this day, October 2nd, 1973, the Adelaide News (now defunct) editorialises on ‘natural gas’ (methane).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 328ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was, South Australia was looking hungrily at oil and gas fields in the northern part of the state, and here we see a senior physicist, and by this time I think Governor General, wanting to sound the alarm, what we learn is that there were people capable of taking a systems approach. Oliphant, I think, was not that bothered by the carbon implications at this point, but more by the “all eggs in one basket”, question and wouldn’t long-term solar be better.
What I think we can learn from this – we used to have grown ups in positions of authority? Maybe? Or maybe rose tinted glasses are at play, idk.
What happened next Oliphant was of course ignored, as scientists have been ignored, and we have committed ourselves to fossil fuels in a big, big way, and the consequences are coming due.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
Xx
References
xx
You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Last Friday Dr George Adamson of Kings College London very kindly conducted an hour long interview about, well, El Niños and the history of how they’ve been conceptualised, what we might expect and what to watch out for. I think it’s an excellent use of your time. It’s been lightly edited, but meaning preserved.
Marc Hudson
Is this El Niño different, and if so, how?
George Adamson
It is different in the sense that it’s stronger. The warming is more intense. So the way that global scientists tend to define El Niño now is the way it’s defined in America; and there’s a whole other history there about why the American definition gets taken up by everyone else, which I won’t go into. But that defines El Niño through temperature rises in a region called Niño- 3.4, and there’s a history of that region which I won’t go into.
Marc Hudson
I read that it was an accident in a radio interview in one of your chapters, kind of something like that.
George Adamson
Yeah, yeah. A guy wrote it down literally on the back of a napkin. But it’s a rectangular block of water in the equatorial Pacific, towards the eastern side of the Pacific, but not actually hitting the coast, which gets the maximum level of warming during El Niño events – or most El Niño events.
It’s also an area where temperature there has most impact on the weather patterns in the USA, which is why NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took it up, which then got taken up by the World Meteorological Organisation.
That is hitting very, very warm temperatures. In fact, we’ve hit record temperatures already.
Marc Hudson
Two months early.
George Adamson
Yeah, normally in September it doesn’t usually peak – certainly, the ones that we’ve got measured – haven’t peaked until much much later than that. So it is different. You have to bear in mind that the background is changing as well. So the ocean as a whole is getting warmer.
So a direct comparison doesn’t quite work. In fact, NOAA has started to use a slightly different measure, rather than just looking at what’s called the ONI, Oceanic Niño Index, which is how much warmer is it than the average. It’s a measure that takes account of the fact that the average is moving. That doesn’t give quite so high extremes, but it is still unusually warm. And of those that we have good measurements for, which is early 80s-ish onwards, depends on how you measure it, maybe early 70s onwards. This one looks like it will be by far the strongest.
So it is stronger, and there are various things that you expect to come with that. You expect to have heavy rainfall in Peru. One thing that is different in this El Niño, well, maybe different from 2015-16, is the 2015 -6 El Niño was not associated with heavy rainfall in the classic El Niño region of Peru.
I was going to say it’s unusual in that sense. Actually, every El Niño is unusual. Back in the 90s, particularly with the 97-98 El Niño, scientists thought they had the answer, and they basically understood how El Niños worked.
And almost every single one since then has been surprising. This one is surprising in its intensity. But we should probably expect to have heavy rainfall in Peru. We should expect collapse in some fish stocks off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, with impacts on food. We should expect disruption to growth of crops pretty much all the way along the western coast of the Americas, north and south, and other parts of the Americas as well, Brazil, for example.
And we expect and are already seeing a particularly intense haze event, or they call them “haze seasons” now. But these are totally manufactured anthropogenic seasons in Southeast Asia, which is where the forests are burnt every year. And this is happening so often that it creates so much smoke that has created a haze season in Southeast Asia. That is becoming strong, and you expect it to be strong because the rainfall in Southeast Asia will be lower than normal, which means the fires will burn bigger and longer. And the reason I’m kind of stuttering a bit when I’m saying that is because there never used to be a “haze season”, and El Niño does not cause it. El Niño makes it worse, but the fires are set by people. You know, they didn’t used to burn that much forest in Southeast Asia, but they do, and without the rain, that’s going to be an even bigger problem.
Marc Hudson The next question is“what should cautious readers/viewers be alerted to in terms of hype, misinformation, disinformation?”
So the hype, I think -and I’m slightly jumping forward here to some of your future questions. – the hype for me comes in the relationship between El Niño and climate change.
Now, El Niño, or what we now call El Niño. The term has changed a lot over the 150 years or so that it’s been common parlance. But what we now call El Nino is, as far as we can tell, a natural phenomenon. And it occurs basically because the Pacific is really really wide, so the winds can blow unabated, and that changes the the height of the surface water, and it changes some of the atmospheric patterns because of that, just because of the Earth is turning. But ultimately, if you are pushing water from one side of an ocean to another, you get a gravitational difference: one side of the ocean is basically higher than the other, and there will be certain periods where gravity does its thing, and that water kind of sloshes back, and and that changes the ocean temperatures and the atmospheric patterns.
Ultimately, it will be unstable because the Earth is turning in the other direction, so it will spring back again. And that will happen. It happens a little bit in the Atlantic, which is much much narrower. It happens a little bit in the Indian Ocean. It happens a lot in the Pacific Ocean. And as long as we have continents. If you think 250 million years ago, when we had Pangaea, it was one supercontinent, and then a massive ocean, there would have been enormous El Niños, and so that will always happen.
There is also climate change, and climate change is an anthropogenic phenomenon caused by ; we all know what climate change is.
I would say be aware of two things. The minor thing to be aware of is hype about the relationship between climate change and the strength of this El Niño. There’s a real tendency, I think, because we can see, you know, with our own eyes, climate change “out there” now. It’s not just an idea; like it is changing the world around us.
It’s tempting to think, “well, that must be why the El Niñois so strong”, and I can’t say definitely that that’s not the case. You know, maybe at some point people will be able to draw that link. What I can say, when I was writing the book and doing some work in that area around 2020-2021ish, I had a look at the various climate model runs on what was going to change with El Niño going forward
And almost everything was predicted: less El Niños, more El Niños, more variability, less variability, stronger La Niñas, you know, etc. etc. So be wary of people drawing that link too much.
What you can say is that “climate change warms the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and more energy, so some of the impacts of an El Niño will be stronger,” in the sense of an impact of anything. You know, hurricanes can be stronger, and in the Pacific, hurricanes anyway tend to be stronger during El Niño events. So, the maximum intensity of hurricanes is likely to be stronger. Global temperature will rise next year, almost definitely.
So this is where you need to be wary the other way. Global temperature will rise next year, and what you’ll see is “El Niñowas pushing global temperature to levels never seen before”, and that’s kind of half true, but also very very misleading.
Because you have basically the pool of warm water which usually sits on the western Pacific; during an El Niño event, that becomes much larger across the Pacific, which means a lot of that water from the ocean can get released into the atmosphere. And that has always been the case.
So, if you looked at a pre-climate change graph of global temperature – as much as it’s possible to do that – what you’d see is peaks and troughs, and a lot of those peaks would be associated with El Niño years, but they would then be associated with troughs, where that warmth was then locked back into the ocean. So, what will happen in 2027, and it is already happening now, is that energy that is in the ocean will be released into the atmosphere, and the following year, some of that energy will go back into the ocean.
So, were climate change not happening, it would just be a curio for scientists: “oh, it’s interesting. You get a warm year and then you get a cold year, isn’t that interesting?” But for the vast majority of people, it would be totally uninteresting.
What’s happening here is a lot of that energy will be released into the atmosphere, and when it drops again, and it all averages out in five or six years’ time, the trend will have been upwards because climate change makes it warmer. So, really watch out for that. What will happen next year is the temperature will get warmer because the temperature always gets warmer, and El Niño is just part of the noise within the upwards trend. So that’s one thing to to watch out for.
And then the other one is this the more directly, I don’t want to use the word sceptical, but you know obfuscation that will come with El Niño, where people say, “Oh, it’s hot. Oh, well, it’s just El Niño, we don’t need to talk about it.” Again, that’s partly true, but totally misleading.
Marc Hudson
Yeah, as I said, it’s already there in the Daily Mail. They’ve got various techniques that they use all the time, and then El Niño, when possible, they use. Its own form of pulse and press disturbances with a pun on ‘press’ I guess I’ll have to work that in somehow.
Various researchers have pointed to how El NiñoLa Niña is gendered, and I came across this via the footnotes in the chapter “climate change and society” in your book, and I went and read the Julia Miller piece, which I thought had some useful points. How does this gendering shape our perceptions, and what does labelling this one a “Godzilla” do? I mean, how do these framings make it easier and harder to think in certain ways, to get constructivist?
George Adamson
Yeah. Okay.. So La Niña was a term that was invented in the 1980s.
So El Niño, as I said, is a term that has changed over the years. It was originally used by Peruvian fishermen to refer to an annual water current, which you get every single year off of South America. And as more and more attention was focused on it, it shifted in meaning towards this multi-year, variable Pacific-wide global phenomenon that we talk about now.
So whilst the meaning of El Niño has changed, it has changed organically. La Niña was very specifically introduced. It was introduced in the 1980s. And it was introduced because you know when there’s warm years, those warm years are followed by cold years. When there’s years where it’s particularly wet over Peru and particularly dry over Indonesia, there’s also a reverse. You know the kind of extremes of the norm. If you want to be cynical about this, then you can just say that if you normalise anything,, so you have the y-axis going through the zero, you’re necessarily going to have a negative and a positive.
And people were throwing around words for these ‘negative’ El Niño events. One I really liked was El Viejo, so the old man for El Niño is young man. I almost wonder just the whole connotations of what we now call La Niña is, and even what El Niño is, would have been very different if it was the old man and the young man. But that didn’t stick.
There was a time in the 70s where the term anti-niño or anti-El Niño was going around, but you couldn’t use that because El Niño comes from baby Jesus. It’s the “boy”, the “Christ child”. So anti niño becomes the antichrist. Okay, so we can’t have the “antichrist”!
So George Philander is a South African scientist who was working in America. He came up with this idea of let’s call it La Niña. What it does, calling it La Niña, is kind of two things.
One is, we have assumptions in Western society about what is masculine and what is feminine, and masculine is stronger, it’s hotter, it’s drier. Feminine is you know more wet, cooler, and less intense. So La Niña gets associated with nice spring rains, whereas El Niño is fierce summer droughts. Actually, La Niña, or what we now refer to as La Niña, can be associated with devastating floods in lots of parts of the world and in droughts in some places. La Niña is not “less bad” than El Niño. The global hydro-meteorological hazards that you get during a La Niña event are just as fierce as they are during an El Niñoevent. They’re not quite the opposite, but they happen in different places, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I think that El Niño. What we’ve done is, we’ve given a complicated pattern of ocean atmosphere variability, which takes place in the Pacific and affects the whole world, a name. We’ve called it a thing, which means as soon as you do that, you put boundaries on it.
So, I mean, use an analogy of naming storms. Naming storms kind of makes sense because a storm literally is bounded. I mean, you know, because of the way the high pressure sits in a storm, the edge of a storm is very, very defined, and and and the edge of a hurricane will be. You can have clear weather. You know, you can see a hurricane coming across the ocean. El Niño is not like that. It’s not bounded. It’s not bounded in space. It’s not bounded in time, and it’s certainly not bounded in the effects that the variability that you see around the world that is associated with an El Niño event is certainly not bounded, and it is always changing. But calling it El Niño gives an illusion that this is the case, and when you call the other side of El Niño La Niña, I think that even really strengthens that because you know we all naturally, you know we understand boy girl, we understand binaries. We live in a world where you know 95% of the population are one gender or another.
So you know we live in a world of binaries. We kind of understand that, and I think it then strengthens the mental shortcut that people make about El Niño being a bounded thing.
So we can forecast El Niños quite well a long time in advance, which is a really wonderful thing. Just the scientists found in the late 80s, early 90s that variability in the Central Pacific was quite predictable. You know, a long time before we had really good general circulation models, people discovered they could forecast El Niño using really quite simple models of basically just what’s happening in the equator. Now we have a whole bunch of models, so disaster managers in various different places should be able to use those models to prepare for what’s happening in their country.
But I think that when you then frame that as “an El Niñois coming”, you lose some of the benefits there because that leads to an assumption that things will be the same as they were during the last El Niño. I mean, that was a big problem in Peru in 2015-16, as everyone assumed it would be like it was in 97, 98, and it wasn’t. And in fact, actually, Peru got El Nino type flooding in 2017 when no one was expecting it.
And the problems with the definitions and the forecast was not clearly the only problem with what was happening in Peru at that time, but it didn’t help. So bounding it and then giving it a life and gives it lots of agency, and then it becomes much easier to say things like, “Oh, you know, it’s 21 degrees on the 25th of September where I am at the moment. Well, that’s happening because of El Niño.” I mean, the relationship between what’s happening in the Pacific and what’s happening in summer autumn temperatures in the UK is very weak. It’s not, not there, but it’s very, very weak. It’s very, very difficult to work out, in the moment, what is causing our weather to be what it is. And even this idea of what’s causing it to be what it is, you know, weather fluctuates.
You know, I’m, I’m going to kind of contradict what I said earlier about climate change when I said “it’s complicated.” In another way, climate change is very simple. You know, my simple answer to the question “why is it so warm in late September?” is “it’s climate change.” You know, there are all kinds of things that are happening that make our weather fluctuate. You know, the fact that we have high pressure and it’s warm is caused by all kinds of reasons. The fact we have high pressure and it’s this warm is caused by the fact there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that wasn’t there before. So El Niño, the more you personalise something, the easier it is to blame, and “Godzilla” does that as well. You know this idea of the Godzilla. It interests me that that idea of Godzilla is circulating so much this year because that was thrown out in 2014 or 2015 because that 2015 El Niño took a year longer to develop than people thought. So somewhere during that period and it was Bill Patzert, a climate scientist at NASA who came out with it, and the general feeling amongst the community was, “this is ridiculous”. I mean, I interviewed a whole bunch of American El Niño scientists in late 2016, and they went, “you know, there’s this term Godzilla knocking around, and none of us pay any attention to it,” and then suddenly this year [2026], it’s common parlance. You know, I have people in India coming to me and saying, “Oh, George, you know, you work in El Niño. Like we’re all talking about how it’s going to be a Godzilla El Niño.” Yeah. So that’s just as an academic interest, I find that fascinating.
Marc Hudson
Can I interject a second on the Godzilla thing? Well, I mean, obviously we both know that it was the Godzilla monster comes from the Japanese, post-Hiroshima, feeling that there will be revenge, that there will be a reckoning. And it also occurs to me that there is a subset of climate activists so exhausted by their inability to get policy change that they’re wishing for and wanting some sort of enormous “slap”. You know that Batman meme where he slaps Robin,
where people are hoping that an outside agent – a Godzilla – will just come and cut through all the flimflam and make it easier to talk about – and take – action to fix our broader problem. So El Niñoitself and Godzilla El Niño especially, become a hoped for saviour almost.
George Adamson
That’s so interesting because that was happening in 2015 as well. So 2015 was a really strong drought year in California, and it was being described as the reason that it was in drought was because there was a an unusual mass of warm water sitting somewhere off the coast of California, which was deflecting away the the rains that would usually hit them, and that mass got called the Blob.[Wikipedia]
And what happened in 2015 was that people were hoping that El Niño would come and fight the Blob. I think that is actually one of the Godzilla monsters, as he fights something called the Blob. So there’s cartoons out there, Godzilla versus the Blob, which I use in some of my lectures. So yeah, I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing. That actually people want it. People want Godzilla to come out and start smashing buildings, so that people go, “Oh yeah, there’s a there’s a problem here.” Yeah, I mean, my sense is that won’t work.
Marc Hudson
Mine too.
George Adamson
Yeah, I don’t know. That’s something to keep an eye on. I think if you’re watching the media coverage, watch Godzilla, and see what Godzilla does as an idea.
Marc Hudson
At the moment, my Google alerts is “El Niño” and “Impacts”, but I think I might add El Niñoand Godzilla, and see what happens. Right, we’re almost done. Based on previous El Niños, how might we see politicians using El Niño to frame or reframe their climate and energy policies? What blame shifting will happen, and how might the denialists or lukewarmers use El Niñoto push their perspectives?
George Adamson
I’d say based on El Niño on previous El Niños, it will do nothing to climate and energy policy.
Marc Hudson
But what about politicians’ efforts to reframe? I mean, you think that they won’t use it, or
George Adamson
So it will. They will use it in disaster management. So this is the discourse with this El Niño is new because climate change is so strongly woven into it. It was a bit in 2015-16 in the two previous big ones, the 1982 and the 1997 El Niños, climate change wasn’t really being talked about. Politicians were using it to deflect against poor disaster management. Like, “oh, it flooded here.” “Well, you know, the flood defences have fallen apart over the last 20 years,” “oh yeah, but it’s El Niño.” It’s not. I think it probably will depend on the politician. You know, in this country, I don’t imagine that our Prime Minister will say anything about El Niño at all. I can imagine that you know the esteemed president of the USA might might mention it once or twice.
Marc Hudson
And get his sharpie out and do some weather modification?
George Adamson
Yeah and probably do some climate modelling with his pen, but that will just become part of the insane ramblings that come out of his mouth. I think The lukewarmists, yeah, it will just become, as you said, part of their arsenal. As we don’t need to, we don’t need to worry about this because… you know, there’s always something we don’t need to worry about this because. and El Niño is, it’s there.
My parents live in France in the summer, and it was really hot in France this summer. Like you know, it was really hot in the UK, it was even hotter. And they said they would speak to people, and not necessarily Le Pen voters, just you know, ordinary people who would say, “oh yeah, but it’s this El Nino that’s causing this”, so yeah, it’s there. It’s floating around in the discourse.
Marc Hudson
I want to say El Niñoallows you to do is to not talk about or think about climate change because climate change is so painful. Because, you and I and anyone older than us has been warned about this for three, four decades now. And to admit that we’re now living with the consequences of having ignored previous warnings is quite painful. And so, El Niñowill be a useful, almost willed distraction, where everyone can worry about it so that they don’t have to think about the underlying press disturbance. And with El Niñois just the pulse disturbance. But it’ll be useful to individuals in that way. Okay, that’s worth thinking about.
George Adamson
I absolutely agree with you, and I think it’s always worth keeping in mind that we can focus on deniers, you know, and there clearly are people out there who just like to disagree with what things that people like me and you talk about just because they don’t like us for whatever reason. But everybody does it to an extent, you know, and because, as you said, it’s like climate change is hard. It’s so hard. I’ve been working- I started my PhD in 2009. I started my undergraduate degree in 2001 – So, to a greater or lesser extent, I’ve been working in this area for 25 years. And it’s not just the fact we haven’t dealt with it that makes it clear how hard it is. It’s just the more that I look into it, the more I realise how hard it is to deal with. So yeah, I mean I can see the temptation of saying, “Oh, but there’s a there’s a natural event which is going to come and cause…” you know it’s almost like a relief for a little bit.
Marc Hudson
And also that word “natural. Even when people concede that you know cobra venom is natural and that hurricanes are natural, natural still comes with this assumption of benevolence or beneficence, or at least inevitability. “Well, you can’t do anything; it’s just natural.” Yeah,
George Adamson
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that entirely.
Marc Hudson
Besides your own work on El Niño, which I would recommend to other people, having read bits of it, and thank you for the 2023 article you sent – I haven’t read beyond the abstract yet – Who else should people be reading on El Niño, either the science or the sociology or whatever. Who would you give a shout out to?
There is a really good paper if you’re interested in the power of discourse by someone called Marika Sturken. She’s a cultural theorist, I suppose you’d say, called “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the media, and California identity”, which was published in 2001, and it was all about how the Weather Channel and the way that it presented El Niño and how that spoke to California’s view of itself, and particularly Californian men in the late ’90s post Cold War era, that one is absolutely fascinating.
Let me think of more recent stuff. Well, anything by Mickey Glantz is worth reading. …. he was working on El Niño before it was El Niño. Yes, his original work was on Peruvian fishery. Yes, back in the 70s, so he was there when El Niño started to materialise, and he’s a great person to talk to. He’s a great person to read his work because he’s always worked in El Niño, but he’s also been a slight outsider. He’s an engineer by training who’s become a social scientist or sociologist of science. He has worked with all of the big El Niño scientists without being one, so he’s always had a bit of a been a bit of a commentator on what’s happening, so reading any of his stuff and actually just following the stuff he said about El Niño from the 70s through to today, that’s an interesting story on its own.
Final question is always “anything else you’d like to say?”
George Adamson
Just to reiterate, no one should ignore what’s happening in the Pacific. You know, there is a phenomenon that takes place in the Pacific which is related to the movement of warm water, and that affects global weather patterns. And this year, it looks like it’s going to be very strong. It will be the strongest we’ve ever recorded. Whether it’s the strongest ever, I don’t know. I mean, when you see people say, “Oh, the tree ring records suggest there’s been nothing that strong” I mean, there’s so much uncertainty in the tree ring record. I would take that with a bit of a pinch of salt. It is significant. People should be taking the forecast of El Niño seriously, particularly if you’re responsible for agriculture or disaster management on either side of the Pacific, or in fact almost anywhere in the tropics. You know, you should really be taking this seriously. However, as a consumer of the media, particularly in the UK, read everything you read about El Niño with a critical lens.
Fourteen years ago, on this day, September 30th, 2012,
Barry Commoner, a pioneering environmental scientist and activist, died Sunday at age 95.
Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the “Paul Revere of ecology,” Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America’s most prominent modern environmentalist. He viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities, and the misuse of technology undermined “the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 394ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was Barry Commoner had been a very important figure in global environmental awareness, especially around Project Sunshine and Fallout, and his book Science and Survival in 1966 really was important for sensitising people to the build up of carbon dioxide. There’s a direct line to the 1967 documentary by Roy Battersby, and Commoner had stood for president in 1980
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What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
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If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Every Sunday, at least until at least the end of October – I am doing a weekly “El Nino” digest (first onehere) – forreasons. Some of the stuff I encounter just has to be blogged, so every Wednesday I will put up something, usually based on something I’ve encountered while looking at stuff that does or doesn’t go in the digest. Below is the first.
Whatever does and doesn’t happen in the course of 2027, whether the physical/political/economic impacts are beyond belief or merely really bad, I think that 2027 will spell the end of an illusion some of us have been Labor/Labouring under – that sooner or later we will return to the “good old days” of stable economic growth – a chicken in every pot and some sunny uplands.
As someone said, (it may have been Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on the Chris Hayes podcast, or maybe it was someone on the American Prestige podcast, idk – there was a time that the fash would promise their followers good things, material things – things that they’d looted from, say, the Jews, or there would the promise of farming land that had been stolen from the Slavs. But now, not so much – it’s just straight displaced hate and “owning the libs”.
FWIW, IMO, they don’t need to promise anything else, because organised labour big enough to force them into those promises? (As per Anton Jager, the subject of a perceptive book review in the early September Private Eye, are they really fascists, if you define fascism as a response to a credible threat of socialism?)
Meanwhile, as far as UK readers are concerned, it might be the end of mangoes on Christmas Day (2). In an Observer article, the hack interviews a couple of people in a position to know about supply chains for discretionary food spending in the UK.
Julian Marks, the chief executive of Barfoots, which supplies retailers with vegetables ranging from sweetcorn to aubergines, said: “We run relay races around the world to ensure consistent availability and quality of produce.” Yields of asparagus from Peru are now down 25%, Marks said, and the vegetables are of poorer quality. “They have less shelf life because the plants are more stressed.”
and
Marks said: “The sense of abundance that we have as consumers today… the removal of seasonality from people’s minds, the idea that you can have a mango on New Year’s Day – that’s something that could disappear.”
And
Christian Jaccarini, economist at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, said “The inflationary pressures are still there, but much of it is being absorbed upstream for now, meaning this wave of inflation has likely been delayed rather than avoided.”
What this put me in mind of was Joanna Blythman’s (not Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall!)’s concept of Permanent Global Summertime. You have to be my age or older to remember when seasons were reflected on supermarket shelves (nd I only just remember it, and that’s probably because I lived in the end of a supply chain – Adelaide. If I’d been in the metropole, maybe I’d need to be a few years older still.)
Anyway, the point is that we “conquered” the seasons, or rather, we gave ourselves the illusion of having conquered the seasons. How did we do it? We used congealed sunlight from millions of years ago. We fed that into the tanks of metal birds of our own invention and flew farm produce around the world. There aren’t many songs about this, strangely, but I am fond of T. V. Smith’s effort his song “Free World” from his impossibly good album “March of the Giants” –
“you can force it drug it and exhaust it, pick the fruit of the rape of the land”
It is going to become implausible, impossible to sustain Permanent Global Summertime quite soon (3).
Re law 2 (“Everything must go somewhere”) clock this –
from a January 1963 Popular Science, sent to me by a good friend.
It really captures the assumptions of the 60s that you could just dispose of your waste, however, and the earth was so big that it would absorb whatever you did to it.
And the first successful push against that was Rachel Carson in 1962 with her Silent Spring, and of course she was denounced as a communist and a lesbian and hysterical and all of the above.
The Malthusian “resources will run out and we will starve” fears gave way, in the 1970s and 1980s, to the “we will overwhelm the capacity of the planet to act as a garbage dump.” – Ozone, Climate, and here we are.
Fifty five years ago, on this day, September 19th, 1971, a review of Angus Martin’s book “Pollution and Conservation in Australia”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 326ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that concern about Australian environmental degradation had been building through the 1960s and had properly taken off in 1969-70 and so books were starting to appear. Here is a review of Angus Martin’s book. The book mentions carbon dioxide build-up, but the review does not. What’s interesting in the review is it says that there is “still time”.
What I think we can learn from this is that it’s now well over half a century since the great civil society of the democratic societies began to be informed about the trouble ahead, and yet civil society was never capable of getting off its ass and challenging the power of the state and the corporates, and here we are.
What happened next Angus Martin was still around as of 2023. Our hopes for a habitable planet died really in 1992.
In 1975 Angus Martin had a follow-up book – the Last Generation. In it he referenced Conservation and Pollution.
“I am myself guilty of contributing to the flow of verbiage, in a book published in Australia in 1971. In it I said things like: ‘the use of DDT has had unexpected and far-reaching consequences’, and ‘our great hopes of food from the sea are largely wishful thinking’, and ‘coercion will have to be applied to limit the number of children a couple can have’. The reviewers said ‘alarming picture of global genocide’, and ‘this frightening book’, and ‘the terrible fate ahead’, and ‘see the danger and heed the warning’. (They also said ‘this is a pleasant-looking book’ and ‘some of the illustrations are excellent’.) I suppose that for one infinitesimal moment a minute fraction of the population of Australia paused in its tracks. And then it went on and drank more beer, and kicked more footballs, and watched more television, and shot more kangaroos, and had more babies.”
Martin, 1975. The Last Generation. p15-6
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
By Sybrand Frietema de Vries, expert in collective local energy solutions based in Fryslân. First published in Dutch newspaper Friesch Dagblad, December 11, 2020.
November was a delightful month in the Netherlands. Remarkably warm, with few storms and considerably drier than usual.
Newspapers published photos of people out for a walk, enjoying the chance to escape the confinement of staying indoors. Accompanying articles discussed—with undisguised delight—a number of temperature records. A November month had never been quite so pleasant before.
It seems as though meteorologists have taken on a new daily task: reporting yet another new weather record. And not just this past November, and not just in the Netherlands.
This year, rainfall records were set in several countries simultaneously over short periods. The number and intensity of storms in the Atlantic Ocean reached unprecedented levels this hurricane season. Entire continents were plagued by unprecedented drought or extreme heat—or both.
Every year, we revel in records. This is what we want to hear, read, and see in competitions. Records align with our own local expectations and easily transcend borders and cultures. Their measurability is convenient and universally understood; sometimes the numbers alone speak volumes: Inzell, 14:55.9. (And for those to whom that doesn’t resonate: in 1971, Ard Schenk was the first to skate the ten-kilometer race in under fifteen minutes. On an outdoor track.)
But there is one type of record we must unfortunately bid farewell to: the weather record. The trend line tracing the highest temperatures keeps rising. The number of severe storms and downpours is steadily increasing. The area of forest lost to fire grows consistently larger each year. We are forced to conclude: there are so many weather records that, effectively, they no longer exist.
After all, you don’t note on a weekly basis that your growing teenage son has set a new ‘height record.’ No, he is simply growing..
The climate crisis has triggered irreversible weather trends. Our planet is warming up. As a result, we are facing extreme weather phenomena that are largely unfamiliar or poorly understood. When we measure these and compare them with past centuries, the picture doesn’t fit. Our brains try to frame them using familiar concepts—like averages or maximums—but that doesn’t work.
It is a bitter pill, but we must stop thinking in terms of “normal” and “records.” We need to learn to recognize new weather trends and adapt our surroundings to unfamiliar extremes.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy beautiful autumn or winter weather. We certainly should.
All rights reserved, published with permission of the author.
Fifty six years ago, on this day, July 25th, 1972, Australian journalist Peter Hastings ponders ‘how big is the sink?’
25 July 1972 How Big is the Sink Sydney Morning Herald article abt world resources
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 326ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was questions of how much you could exploit fragile eco-systems before they bit your ass were hardly new in Australia.
The specific context was from the late 1960s those questions had been global ones. 1972 had seen the release of Blueprint for Survival and the Limits to Growth, as well as the Stockholm conference. Questions of environmental ‘sustainability’ were still live (though would fade markedly).
What I think we can learn from this – Carbon dioxide was in the mix!!
What happened next – the issue faded by 1973 (fatigue and then the Oil embargo/Price increases).
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
