El Niño–Southern Oscillation

Welcome to Water Talk.

For today's episode, we are talking about El Niño, the different types of El Niños, this year's historic super El Niño, and the relationship between El Niño and climate change with Daniel Vaiman.

Daniel is a professor and department chair in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His research group focuses on three major themes, the mechanisms of climate variability and change, interactions between weather and climate, and global and regional impacts of climate change.

And they realized that every few years there was this warm current that occurred off the coast.

And it showed up around the time in the tradition of the area around Christmas time.

And so they referred to it as the coming of the child, El Niño.

So this is how it got its name,

Good morning.

Give us a reminder, what is an El Niño?

El Niño is a mode of climate variability naturally occurring every three to five years.

that takes place in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

So hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers away from Canada.

And when those temperatures on average over a period of three months exceed a certain threshold, then we denote that to be an El Nino.

And so the threshold for a sort of weak El Nino is kind of half a degree Celsius or a degree Celsius higher.

and then a strong El Niño, and then a very strong El Niño is when it gets above two degrees.

Let's be very clear.

The El Niños do happen, but this one is particularly severe, and El Niño is called when the Pacific Ocean warms by 0.8 degrees, and it's currently more than 2 degrees.

Now, we don't know exactly how that will play out in the coming months, but we do know it will be severe and serious.

We're already seeing it.

How do these big global phenomena affect Houston?

Well, but first, begin by explaining the difference between El Niño, what that is, and El Niño.

La Niña.

La Niña, yeah.

So right now, and we'll talk about El Niño because it's going to be affecting our weather for the next few months here in Houston.

But basically, there's a belt of water that extends over the Pacific from the coast of South America westward.

And scientists have discovered that this zone of water goes through cycles between warmer and cooler, and it affects the weather over the entire world.

So that, you know, anything happening anywhere can affect everywhere.

And there's concern about this sort of this El Nino, the super El Nino, whatever, however it's been described differently, having implications for rice production.

And that's one of the main drivers for this sort of recent increase of prices.

However, the rice commodity price now isn't the highest it's ever been.

So it's not unprecedented.

It's definitely high, but it's not unprecedentedly high.

So, but yeah, I think one of the certainly the drivers at the moment is climate and this El Nino event, as well as obviously what's going on in the Gulf and the input costs and transport costs also playing into the cost of commodities generally and race in this story in particular.

Kellogg's have admitted that the iconic sound, the snap, crackle and pop, that the cereal will be quieter because they've changed the recipe so much.

Perhaps the most relevant one for the world is one that's driving energy prices high, which is the war in the Middle East.

And The El Nino that is raising temperatures around the world and making already worse climate impacts even worse.

With that background, do you see countries more willing to make compromises to come to a more ambitious outcome at this COP?

Well, I think certainly the energy crisis has focused people's minds and has given us more scope to make progress.

So I agree with that.

And El Nino, as you said, is also in the background.

El Nino is climate change.

I mean, we have El Ninos regularly, but this is a super El Nino and it will magnify the impacts of climate change and it is climate change in action.

We're likely to see more intense heat and drought in different parts of the world because of this El Nino.

But indirectly, if this El Nino lines up with a negative North Atlantic oscillation, then we're likely to see potentially a change to the jet stream, the fast-moving hybrid body of air that drives a lot of the UK weather across this autumn and winter and actually there's also new evidence quite new from 2024 that showed that the effects of this El Nino for the UK and Europe could be felt up to a year after the peak and so the peak is likely to be felt later this year, and this El Niño is forecasted to end in about February next year.

But the effects of that on weather in UK and Europe could be felt in a year's time from now, so December next year as well, which is quite new.

But it makes sense because, as you said, it's in a different part of the world, and therefore the effects of it to be fully felt here in the UK would take a long time to get through that system fully.

Now, in your conversation article, you say, quote, there is little evidence yet about whether human-induced climate change is causing more intense or more frequent El Ninos.

And I have to say that's not what I heard from Radio EcoShot guests Malte Stöcker, and just a few weeks ago from Noah's Michael McFadden.

So earlier research from Wenkai and others in Pinas and Nature did find more and more intense El Niños in a warming world.

Why are you doubtful, Chloe?