The arrival of El Niño could mean significant impacts worldwide, including a push toward levels of global warming that climate scientists have warned could be devastating.
, if greenhouse gas emissions continue rising dramatically, extreme El Niños could occur once a decade instead of about once every other decade. That could fuel more intense storms, droughts, heat waves and wildfires.El Niño has long been known to boost global temperatures. Against the backdrop of greenhouse gas-driven planetary warming, there are fears that El Niño’s influence could push Earth toward destabilizing climate change thresholds.
The warm Pacific waters and increased evaporation mean the ocean loses heat that is then trapped in the atmosphere. In addition, the increased cloud cover from that evaporation means more of the sun’s heat is absorbed into the atmosphere rather than the oceans.Scientists estimate that trend could contribute a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius of warming to average global temperatures.
Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth estimates that 2023 is on pace to be Earth’s second-, third- or fourth-warmest year on record, but as of mid-April the planet also had a 38 percent chance of setting a new record annual average temperature. “If El Niño develops, it is likely to moderately boost global average temperatures during the rest of 2023 and into 2024,”Such a ramp-up toward record global heat has been observed during previous transitions from La Niña to El Niño. After a lengthy period of La Niña in which the oceans absorbed large amounts of heat, a strong El Niño developed in 2015 and 2016 and contributed to the hottest average global temperatures ever observed in 2016.
“We’re likely going to see the same kind of sequence play out,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We’re going to see again this big ramp-up in global mean surface temperatures.”
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