El
Niño’s Disastrous Worldwide Consequences Are Just Getting Started
By Eric
Holthaus
7
March, 2016
As
far as El Niños go, the one we’re experiencing now is a doozy. In
fact, it’s probably the
strongest that’s ever been measured.
In the simplest terms, that means one thing: Get ready
for another year
of wild weather.
In
California, that wildness is on
full display this week.
On Monday, a line of thunderstorms rattled through
the Los Angeles metro region during
the morning commute,
bearing lightning,
hail, and wind gusts near
hurricane force.
Over the weekend, nearly
a foot of rain fell
in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and heavy snows near
Lake Tahoe and on
Mammoth Mountain measured
nearly 60 inches. The extreme weather was part of a series of
sprawling storm systems lined up to impact the West Coast—a classic
feature of strong El Niño winters.
Over
the past month or two, the ocean temperature in the tropical Pacific
has started
to decline,
but that doesn’t mean El Niño’s effects are waning. In fact, due
to an
atmospheric lag,
extreme weather will likely keep getting worse for several more
months. Though El Niño is typically the most powerful player among
the world’s constantly feuding meteorological morphologies, it
takes months for
its burst of heat to filter around the globe from the tropical
Pacific. Ocean temperatures in the El Niño regions of the Pacific
usually peak in November or December, but globally-averaged
temperatures don’t typically peak until between February and July
of the following year.
In
other words, it might be awhile before global weather starts to
return to a more normal state. That lag means weather patterns will
remain skewed throughout
much of 2016. It’s also how we know that, even though 2016 is still
just getting started, it's
already a shoo-in for
the warmest year we’ve ever experienced as a civilization—beating
2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2010, which beat 2005, which beat
1998, which beat … you get the idea.
Though
El Niño is the proximate cause of many of this year’s weather
records, its
effects are an upward wiggle on
top of the slow-rolling steamroller of climate change. Unofficial
data from February show
that it likely beat January’s record for the most unusually warm
month ever measured, and initial data from the first few days of
March are even
more alarming.
Expect global temperatures records to continue being shattered for
several more months.
In
the meantime, the consequences of this year’s El Niño are already
devastating, and growing worse. Nearly
100 million people worldwide
are facing food and water shortages this year due to drought and
floods linked to El Niño. Peru has dispatched
its army to
help flood-ravaged areas recover. In Argentina, persistent flooding
has washed a flotilla of poisonous snakes downstream, closing
beaches.
Across
southern Africa,
current conditions are the
driest in a generation.
In Ethiopia, crop yields have
fallen by half in
just a year’s time—spawning the nation’s worst food crisis in
decades.
Harsh droughts have also hit Central America, Southeast Asia, some
Pacific islands,
and Australia. In the Philippines, the fish catch isexpected
to fall by 20 percent.
El
Niño is also helping
to spread vector-borne diseases,
like Zika, malaria, and dengue fever. And all the crazy weather is
creating an uncertain
economic environment,
too.
Closer
to home, there have already been a few Florida tornado outbreaks this
winter—Miami’s rainiest
on record—and
the state can
expect more.
Further north, New York City has had one of its warmest and snowiest
winters on record—an odd combination to say the least, but exactly
what was predicted.
Out west, a wildflower “super
bloom”
is stunning visitors in Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth.
This
year’s exceptional warmth and weirdness will also have a lasting
impact on the climate, especially
in the Arctic.
Sea ice there is at record
low levels for
this time of year, and this winter’s temperatures may
be helping transition the world’s tundrafrom
a storage region of greenhouse gases to an emitting region.
This is
what weather chaos looks like. Thankfully, climate scientists
are using
this rare event to
learn as much as they can about what
the super El Niño might tell them about
future events and climate change—like in coral reefs, which are
especially threatened this year.
Though
it’s still too
early to say for sure,
longer-range models are beginning
to come into agreement that
this El Niño will transition to a La Niña—featuring an unusually
cool patch of tropical Pacific waters—by late this year. That means
a temporary breather when it comes to global temperatures, but a La
Niña would introduce a
whole new set of weather extremes,
from an above average Atlantic hurricane season to flooding in
Southeast Asia to renewed drought risk in California.
See also Kevin Trenberth on the el-Nino
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