I will try to make sure these are properly sourced. If you know any of them are dodgy, let me know.
“It’s hard to know if quotes on the Internet are real or made up” Abraham Lincoln.
“El Nino is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” Carl Skau, WFP’s acting executive director. (cited in Ali and Haddad, 2026, Sept 15).
“El Nino is being supersized before our eyes…. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a WMO statement.
“A few inches of extra ocean may not sound like much, but coastal flooding is a game of margins stacked on margins. The wave itself will not flood anything on its own — this is not a tsunami, and there will be no moment when it ‘hits.’ Instead, it quietly raises the baseline the tides ride on top of for weeks or months at a time,”
Macaday, S. 2026. El Niño-born ‘Kelvin waves’ are sneaking towards California. What to know. Sacramento Bee, September 14
https://www.sacbee.com/news/weather-news/article317211661.html
“We can’t just assume that this El Niño is going to be the same as the last because there are so many challenges that have been stacking on top of each other.”
“We have come to a stage where climate change is putting so much pressure on us – on our existing, already crumbling or structurally unsound, systems…. Nature will force us to have a reckoning.”
Elyssa Kaur Ludher, a climate and food security expert based in Singapore.
Holmes et a.l, 2026. ‘Forcing a reckoning’: How Asia is preparing for a ‘supersized’ El Niño. The Guardian, September 18
“I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts. A typical El Niño leads to an equatorial Pacific sea-surface temperature rise of between 1-2 degrees, with 2C being a really big event….This implies that if the forecast is accurate – and other forecast systems show similar extreme values – then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Niño and its worldwide climate influences.”
Professor Adam Scaife, head of long range forecasting at the Met Office (August 2026)
Think Global Health: What’s your reaction to the El Niño news, and what impact could extreme weather have on global food insecurity?
Sam Vigersky: I’m hesitant to say that this couldn’t come at a worse time—because something worse can always happen—but it’s arriving at a moment when the international humanitarian system has no shock absorbers left. The funding cuts ongoing since 2022 became truly catastrophic in 2025 after the Trump administration leveled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Krugman, A. 2026. A Food Security Expert on the Record-Breaking El Niño. Think Health Global, September 18
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/a-food-security-expert-on-the-record-breaking-el-nino
“Historical precedent can no longer serve as a reliable guide for ENSO teleconnections, as anthropogenic warming patterns intensify.”
NCAR senior scientist Clara Deser
“The last major El Niño was in 2024, and barely two years after that event, the projected scale and intensity of the heat wave that is currently headed our way is truly scary,”
Rohan Arthur, Marine Biologist with Nature Conservation Foundation.
“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system. So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security and water stress. El Niño comes and goes, but as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
Prof Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, quoted in Carrington, D. 2026, Sept 21
“To the environmental historian Julia Miller the naming of El Niño reflects the ‘hierarchical dualism’ of human society, whereby natural phenomena are split into two elements with those considered female assumed subservient to those considered male.29 Thus, El Niño is described as the dominant cycle, more powerful and active. La Niña is ‘nurturing’, conveying the life giving rains and subordinate to her ‘big brother’. Much is also made of the tendency of La Niña to follow El Niño, ‘clinging to the coat tails of her big brother’,30 ignoring the decades where La Niña has been the dominant of the two extremes or when one or other extreme has persisted for several years.”
Adamson, G. 2018 Ch 10: El Niño in the Public Imagination. P.206
29. Miller, J. “The Fall of an Angel; Demonising and Gendering El Nino.”
https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/4.3/miller2.html
30. Couper-Johnston, El Niño, pp. 27–28.
“Despite recent rainfall, the National Drought Group said groundwater storage and reservoir levels are continuing to decline, with England’s reservoir storage now 19.7% below average for the time of year and the majority of reservoirs classed as notably or exceptionally low.”
Jean-Philippe Gibert: If it’s too cold or too hot, there’s no life. El Niño moves huge amounts of heat around the globe, making some places unseasonably hot. That has giant effects on all organisms experiencing those conditions, including in the way they interact with one another.
To mention one example: predators have to deal with this new thermal stress, so some prey species are going to experience less predation, while others will experience more of it. Species experiencing less predation can become more abundant and outcompete others. That leads to these cascading, or knock-on, effects of temperature on food webs, and these effects can be quite unpredictable.