Short Wave - 'Super' El Niño is coming. What should you expect?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

The world is bracing for the worst effects of a Super El Niño. Or a Godzilla El Niño. But what does that really even mean?For millennia El Niño has shaped weather across the globe, fueling flooding in parts of the U.S., droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia, and disrupting fisheries across the Pacific.Scientists have long wondered if human activities — chiefly the burning of fossil fuels — are making El Niños stronger. Now, on the eve of the strongest El Niño on record, a team of researchers think they have an answer.Interested in more science behind the weather? Email us your question at [e-mail] public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. By now, you've probably heard or seen the headlines. Buckle up, there is some extreme weather coming our way global. Because we're in the midst of not just any old El Nino. The world meteorological organization says that it's, quote, literally off the charts. Sometimes scientists have nicknamed this a super or even Godzilla event. This year, we're really seeing an El Nino for the record books. Look, as a Godzilla stand, I love any reference to the King of the Monsters.

But even I'm like, what does that actually mean? That's the question we put to Julia Cole, the last person you just heard. She's a climate scientist and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. This El Nino is stronger at this point in time than any other El Nino that we have good data for. And she says it's still strengthening. Normally El Nino's reached their strongest point around November, December, January. So yeah, in Julia's opinion, we're virtually guaranteed to get a record-breaking El Nino in the coming year.

Now, you might hear that and think, so what? El Nino happens every two to seven years. It's just weather, right? But this weather really packs a punch. Stronger El Nino's lead to stronger impact, so we can expect more intense floods, droughts, temperature changes. We also are already seeing tropical storms coming in striking Hawaii. drought in Indonesia, which is really extreme and leading to wildfires and terrible air quality across that region. Something like a quarter million acres or more have burned as a consequence of the drought in Indonesia. So whether you live in the U.S. or abroad, there's a good chance you're going

to feel this El Nino. You might already be, which is why we at Shortwave want to spend some time talking through the science of this natural climate phenomena, starting with a big question that scientists have had about El Nino for a long time. We, humans, making it worse. It's been very hard to determine the human fingerprint on El Nino and L'Avinia because there's a lot of what we call internal variability in them. Only now, Julia thinks she's found an answer, buried in coral. So today on the show, how climate change is impacting El Nino and what that means for all of us living on land. I'm Nate Rot. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Okay, so before the break, I said something that I think needs a little more. explanation, which is that El Nino-Laninia, this cycle, is a natural phenomenon, where in El Nino, the Pacific Ocean along the equator warms. That warmer water warms the atmosphere above it. Imagine holding your hand above a hot bath, right? Warm air rises. And at the same time, that rising air is a disturbance in the upper atmosphere that rearranges how the atmosphere circulates over the Pacific and outside the Pacific. So that's how anomalies or climate extremes get exported from the tropical Pacific into North America, South America, and even further beyond. So in a past life, Julia, I was a climate reporter here at NPR. And whenever I covered in El Nino,

I always asked researchers the same question I'd ask after a major wildfire or a hurricane, which is climate change. You know, are our actions as humans making this thing worse? And I feel like I always heard some version of probably maybe. Can you explain why this has been such a hard question to answer? Well, El Nino originates in a place with very few human inhabitants, and so it's been very hard to suss out long-term trends. Over the last 40, 50 years, we've seen a series of quite strong El Ninos. And what we haven't known, I guess, is whether that period of strong El Nino's is really unusual in the context of El Nino's natural long-term variability, or whether that is just what El Nino does.

We have strong years, we have weak years. We also don't have a lot of data going back very far in time. The best data that we have on El Nino and L'Anna, come from the satellite-based ocean temperature records. And those have only been going on since early 1982, something like that, late 1981. But this new study you published claims to finally have answers to whether there are human fingerprints on El Nino.

And I kind of want to hold the answer to build a little bit of suspense. But can you tell me how you feel? figured this out? So what we were able to do is to use a different source of information on those trends, which is the geochemical record of temperature that's preserved in the geochemistry of these long, live corals sitting in the Galapagos Islands. I mean, that's a tough place to work, too. I've heard, you know, the Galapagos are... Oh, yeah. Oh, terrible. Love it. I love working in the Galapagos. And the Galapagos really is an ideal place to study El Nino because the eastern Pacific side of El Nino has a really strong impact there.

It's where the biggest El Nino events have their strongest impact on the ocean's temperature. And so if you could figure out how to get a past record of ocean temperature from the Galapagos, you'd be in good shape to understand the history of El Nino. So how do you go about getting these records from corals? We look at two different kinds of coral in the Galapagos. We look at living coral that grow in a kind of a mound shape. So we go down on scuba, we take a core, and we bring the core back to the lab and sample it millimeter by millimeter to extract powders that we then analyze for the chemistry. The chemistry of the powders that we sample tell us about the temperature in which the coral grew, and we measure two aspects of the chemistry.

And together, those give us histories of the ocean temperature at Galapagos. We also find corals that have been tossed up on the beach by large waves, maybe tsunami. We're able to date them using radiometric methods and understand how old they are. And then we're able to get these months by month records back in time that tell us the monthly temperature history in which that coral grew. So we can see Al-Nino because those are the warm years. It reminds me so much of like dendrochronology, like using tree ring data to determine drought or wildfire. Very similar. So we're always trying to figure out how to learn about the past.

And corals preserve a record of that just as trees do, just as ice cores or cave deposits do or even sediments in oceans and lakes. Okay, so you do this analysis of these coral in the Galapagos, and you found what? When we looked at the history of ocean temperatures in Galapagos, we found the variability that is the range from high to low was much higher in the last 40 to 50 years than it was in the pre-industrial period, 36% higher. We found that that was due to an increase in the intensity of warm events, not cold events, telling us that El Nino's are getting stronger. So I think there are some human fingerprints on El Nino. So it basically says, yeah, climate change is probably playing a role in the intensity of El Nino's. Well, we started running more data and analyzing more cores, and we put it up against the plot of global temperature. And in fact, it looks like a hockey stick.

It parallels the rise in global temperature very strongly. And it all kind of fell out in this pattern that was remarkably distinct, that really said that the pre-industrial is very different from, today. Were you surprised at all by this? I was surprised, to be honest. I thought it would be really interesting if it happened, but I also know that El Nino has tremendous amount of internal variability, and I kind of expected that we would see at least a few intervals in the past where El Nino and L'anino were as strong as today, and we just don't see that, you know? Yeah. What kind of feedback are you hearing from other people that studied this? Because, I mean, this is like a huge question that scientists have been asking for a long time, and here you are

saying, like, hey, I think we've got an answer. I'm hearing mostly positive things, right, that this is a really important data set and it adds to our sense that El Niño is getting stronger. This is a really clear demonstration that at this particular site that seems to be happening, right? I'm also hearing why doesn't it seem to be accelerating as temperature is accelerating? That's a good question. And I think the reason that we don't see the variability accelerating as temperature accelerates upward is that we know El Nino has a lot of internal variability. And that doesn't go away just because you put a warming curve underneath it, right? So you still have some are strong and some are weak.

So we're not saying that global warming has taken over control of El Nino and every event from now on is going to be stronger than the last. That is not at all what we're predicting. So tell me if this is accurate then. I mean, like my gut takeaway would be, hey, El Nino's are going to be more intense into the future. But you're saying that that's probably true, but we don't know. Yeah, I guess that's where I land on that because the coral data that we have don't tell us about the future. But they do say that the trend we're seeing is real and happening. And that's new.

We know now that at the moment they are intensifying with global warming. Okay. What are the implications of that? Like if El Niño are going to be more severe, more intense, what kind of weather changes, impacts are we going to be talking about that? This is the biggest source of climate risks and extremes right now on the planet. planet. And we're juicing that up in a warming world, and that's not good news. Another thing we hear a lot about right now with this big El Nino, we expect it to supercharge global temperatures as well. We expect to see record global temperatures as a consequence of the

Sun Nino, possibly in 2026 and almost certainly in 2027. So we've got a warming world, and then we've got a more variable world. And together, these are adding layers of climate risks and hazards to our daily lives all around the world, what we think of as a strong event will be more frequent. If those strong events are imposing climate hardships on people or on ecological systems, those events are going to come at a faster pace. Yeah, like usually you might have like a couple of moderate events or weak events, which would give you more time for an ecosystem to recover or for a community or a country to economically recover. That's exactly right. So like for example, in the case of coral bleaching, We know the big, strong El Nino years are when we see the biggest, strongest global coral bleaching events.

If you're hitting a coral reef with a strong bleaching event every 30 years, maybe we can have some recovery there. If you're hitting it with a major bleaching event every two or five or three years, that's a really different story. And it's much harder to come back from that. In a year like this where we're pretty much guaranteed to get the supercharge El Nino, what would be your advice for people to prepare right now? Well, I think adaptation takes local forms everywhere, and so people have to look in their own communities to say, what are the things that we would need if a typical El Nino impact is actually going to come our way this year, right? So if that were to be a flood, for example, you might want to make sure that culverts are cleared out, make it easy for water to drain. Similarly, if you're looking at an area that's going to get hot and dry and you're thinking about wildfire, well, fire hardening your home and perhaps put burning restrictions in place. So every community would have a different response. I don't think it's something that we can completely adapt our way out of. But by understanding the risks involved, maybe we do a better job at addressing the root cause, right? This is just

one more way that human activities, the burning of fossil fuels, is walloping us in terms of climate change, climate variability, climate risks and hazards. And incredibly devastating impacts to people, to ecosystems, to places where we've invested a lot in building homes and infrastructure and all those things. Julia, thank you so much for bringing this to us and for doing this research. You're welcome. It's my pleasure. And thank you for your attention to it.

This episode was produced by Arru Nair, and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. I'm Nate Rott. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.