El Niño is officially back — and forecasters think it could be one of the strongest on record

Climate & Energy 4 min 80 sources

NOAA declared El Niño on Thursday, with a 63% chance it grows into a "super" event that pours extra heat onto an already-warmed planet — likely making next year the hottest ever measured. Plus: solar out-generates coal in the US for the first time, and a new study reads an ancient warning in the Gulf Stream.

Key takeaways

NOAA declared El Niño on Thursday, with a 63% chance it grows into a "super" event — likely making 2027 the hottest year on record because the extra heat lands on a planet already warmed 1.36°C.
El Niño redistributes weather rather than adding it everywhere: drought in Australia and India, floods in western South America, a possible break for the US Atlantic coast — and a food-price story that arrives over the year ahead.
Quieter but real: US solar out-generated coal for the first time in May, driven by cost rather than policy, even as Washington pushed coal.

The Pacific just tipped warm, and the whole planet will feel it

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — NOAA, the country’s weather and ocean agency — declared on Thursday that El Niño has officially begun [6][25]. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific have stayed more than 0.5°C above average for the past month, the threshold scientists use to call it [6][4]. Japan’s weather agency declared the same [4].

El Niño is a natural, recurring climate pattern, not a new disaster. Here is the mechanism. Normally, east-to-west trade winds push warm surface water toward the western Pacific, piling it up near Indonesia. Every few years those winds weaken, and the warm pool sloshes back east toward South America [4]. That broad smear of warm water dumps extra heat into the atmosphere, and the heat reshuffles weather worldwide.

What makes this one notable is its likely size. NOAA puts a 63% chance it becomes a “super” El Niño — sea temperatures more than 2°C above average — which would rank among the largest events since records began in 1950 [9][4]. Of 200 model runs, none show the Pacific cooling back to normal this year once it gets going; several point to 2.6°C, and one Canadian model to 3°C, which would beat the 2.5°C record set in 1982-83 [4]. The UK Met Office called it “perhaps one of the most intense on record” [4].

Why “on top of warming” is the whole story

El Niño doesn’t create heat out of nothing — it moves heat that’s already in the ocean up to the surface. The reason this matters now is the surface it lands on. The planet has already warmed about 1.36°C from burning fossil fuels [4]. El Niño’s extra push sits on that raised floor, which is why scientists expect 2027 to be the hottest year ever measured, with the peak this coming winter and the heat simmering well into that year [4][9]. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it “an urgent climate warning,” saying El Niño “will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world” [9].

A warmer atmosphere holds more energy and moisture, so it loads the dice toward extremes [4]. The effects split by region, and they don’t all point the same way. El Niño tends to quiet the Atlantic hurricane season but ramp up the Pacific’s, so the US East and Gulf coasts may catch a break while Hawaii faces more danger [9]. Western South America often gets heavy rain and floods — during the 1982-83 super El Niño, flooding killed an estimated 1,300 to 2,000 people in Peru [4]. India faces sharper heatwaves; Australia faces drought, fire and heat; north-eastern Africa may swing from drought to dangerous rains [9].

The angle for an ordinary person. This is mostly a food and price story before it’s a weather story. One investment researcher said conditions look favourable for grains and soybeans across 18 major US growing states, but mixed for dairy and cattle [9]. When a big El Niño scrambles harvests across several continents at once, the cost shows up later in what a grocery bill does — not next week, but over the year ahead.

Solar out-ran coal in America for the first time

A quieter milestone landed the same week: in May, solar supplied more US electricity than coal — 12.8% versus coal’s 12.2% — the first time that has ever happened [10]. The figures come from the energy think-tank Ember alongside the solar industry’s own group and the analytics firm Wood Mackenzie [10]. Coal hit an all-time monthly low in April and barely recovered [10]. Separately, the US Energy Information Administration says solar capacity is up 20% from last summer [21].

The detail that matters: this happened despite federal policy pushing the other way, with the Trump administration boosting coal over clean power [10]. One Ember analyst said it shows solar “has staying power” — the build-out is now driven by cost and demand more than by which way Washington leans [10]. US electricity demand is climbing again after two flat decades, pulled up by AI, manufacturing and electric heating and transport, and analysts expect solar to pass coal for a full year within a few years [10].

A new reading of an old warning in the Atlantic

One under-covered piece worth holding: a study in Nature Communications found that about 13,000 years ago, during an abrupt cold snap, the Gulf Stream — the warm current that carries tropical water up the eastern US and keeps north-west Europe mild — shifted hundreds of kilometres north, and deep ocean circulation changed with it [15]. It is the first direct evidence the current behaved that way during sudden climate change. The authors say it supports climate models predicting a similar shift if the broader Atlantic circulation, called the AMOC, weakens — a trend they note has probably already begun [15]. This is a study, not a forecast of imminent change; its value is as a measured data point about how the ocean’s heat-conveyor can move, not a prediction of when.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The wave didn't get bigger. The water under it rose.

El Niño is an old, regular swing — what changed is the level it now swings from, and a familiar wave on a higher floor breaks over lines it never used to reach.

A pattern older than the worry about it

El Niño is not a new thing. Fishermen off Peru named it generations ago, after the warm water that arrived near Christmas. It comes and goes every few years, as predictable in its rhythm as the seasons are loose in theirs. The trade winds slacken, the Pacific’s warm water sloshes east, the atmosphere takes on extra heat, and the world’s weather gets shoved around for a year or so. Then it fades. It has done this for as long as there has been a Pacific.

So when NOAA declares El Niño “officially here,” the honest reaction is not alarm at a new force. It is an old force, arriving on schedule. The thing worth understanding is why an old force is expected to do new damage.

The swing is the same size. The starting line moved.

Think of a tide coming up a beach. A spring tide — the high one — reaches a certain mark each month. That mark has been stable for years; the café behind it has never flooded. Now imagine the whole sea level creeps up, slowly, a little each year. The tide is exactly as big as it always was. The same moon, the same pull, the same swing. But it now starts from higher water. And one month the same ordinary high tide reaches the café door.

Nothing about the tide changed. What changed was the floor it swings from.

That is what is happening with El Niño. The planet has warmed about 1.36 degrees from burning fossil fuels. That is the new sea level — the raised floor. El Niño is the tide: a regular swing that lifts global temperature a notch, then drops it. The swing is roughly the size it has always been. But it now lifts off a hotter baseline. So scientists expect the same old swing to crest into the hottest year ever measured, likely in 2027.

The danger was never in the wave. It was in how much room was left between the wave and the line that matters.

Thresholds don’t care how you got there

A reef bleaches above a certain water temperature. A crop fails above a certain heat during the weeks it flowers. A river floods above a certain level; a power grid buckles above a certain demand on a hot afternoon. These lines are fixed and indifferent. They do not ask whether the heat came from a one-year El Niño or a century of carbon. They only register whether the line was crossed.

This is why “El Niño on top of warming” is the whole sentence, not half of it. On the old baseline, the swing crossed those lines rarely — a bad year now and then, survivable, forgotten. Raise the baseline a degree, and the same swing crosses them more often, and crosses ones it used to miss entirely. The 1982-83 El Niño was a similar size to this one. It flooded parts of Peru and killed well over a thousand people. It did that from a cooler starting line than the one we stand on now.

The same shape lives in your own year

This is not only a story about oceans. Most things that go wrong in a life are a normal swing meeting a quietly raised floor.

A household has always had an expensive month — a car repair, a holiday, a birthday. For years the swing was absorbed; there was room. Then the rent crept up, then the grocery bill, then the bills nobody watched. The expensive month is no bigger than it ever was. But now it lands on a tighter floor, and the same ordinary swing tips into an overdraft it never used to reach. The crisis feels sudden. The setup was slow.

We tend to brace for the dramatic swing — the shock, the bad year, the wave. We rarely watch the baseline, because it moves too slowly to feel like news. A degree over a century. A few pounds a month. Nothing on any given day. But the baseline is what decides whether the next ordinary swing is a story you forget or a line you cross.

What the whole looks like from here

The food this El Niño touches will scramble harvests on several continents at once — grain favoured in some US states, dairy and cattle mixed, floods in one place and drought in another. The cost of that does not stay in Peru or Australia. It travels, slowly, into the price of ordinary things an ocean away, over the year ahead, reaching people who will never connect their grocery bill to a warm patch of Pacific. You are one of them. So is the farmer, the shipper, the family bracing for an expensive month they think they can absorb.

None of them can see the whole of it from where they stand — which is the honest position to hold. The Pacific tide is rising on a floor we raised together, slowly, while watching the waves. Seeing that should not make anyone feel they have mastered the weather. It should make them hold their certainties about “a normal year” a little more loosely — because the thing that decides whether a normal year stays normal is the level we stopped watching.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Rising Floor

Raise the baseline under an unchanging wave and feel the same old swing start crossing a fixed line it used to miss.