The world has officially entered an El Niño event, the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday, with leading climate scientists warning the periodic weather pattern could strengthen to one of the most intense recorded since 1950 by the end of 2023, amplifying already record-breaking global warming fueled by fossil fuel emissions.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate cycle defined by above-average surface water temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. This shift reshapes global wind and precipitation patterns, often triggering widespread erratic and extreme weather that ripples across every inhabited continent. The cycle emerges roughly every two to seven years, and most events persist between nine and 12 months, peaking in the final months of a calendar year.
In NOAA’s latest official advisory, agency scientists calculated there is a 62 percent probability that El Niño will grow into a “very strong” event during the November-to-January period, a strength that would place it among the most powerful El Niño events documented in observational records stretching back to 1950. “El Niño is here, and it could be one for the history books,” NOAA meteorologist Haley Thiem explained in a public explainer video from the agency.
Unlike many routine weather events, strong El Niño carries compounding risks for a planet already gripped by long-term warming from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists warn that the additional ocean heat released by El Niño will push global average temperatures even higher, supercharging a wide range of extreme weather events from droughts to catastrophic flooding.
Global climate experts warn the combined pressure of long-term climate change and a record-strength El Niño could push global temperatures to unprecedented new levels. “The combination of fossil fuel-caused climate change and a potential super El Niño event makes a terrible team,” noted Marc Alessi, a representative for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It could easily push global temperatures to record levels.” Alessi added that growing research links anthropogenic climate change to increasingly intense El Niño events, even though the pattern itself is naturally occurring.
For vulnerable communities across the globe, the arrival of a strong El Niño is far more than a routine climate forecast—it is an urgent warning of impending humanitarian crisis. “It’s not just another weather forecast, it’s a deadly siren to be feared,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based climate think tank Power Shift Africa. “It means failed rains, dying crops, rising food prices, and families pushed to the edge yet again.”
Governments across Central America’s arid “Dry Corridor,” a region spanning parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, have already raised national alert levels in preparation for the event. The region has repeatedly faced devastating drought linked to past El Niño events, and authorities are already bracing for potential famine-level food insecurity. The Guatemalan government has already pre-positioned 1.1 million food rations to distribute in the event of a declared food security emergency. In East Africa, Adow added, extreme weather from El Niño will hit communities already reeling from back-to-back years of overlapping drought and flooding.
International climate agencies outside the U.S. echo NOAA’s grim forecast. “The odds are strongly in favor of a moderate to strong, or probably strong to record-breaking, event at this stage,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told Agence France-Presse.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has already urged global leaders to treat the forecast intense El Niño as the urgent climate wake-up call it represents. “El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” Guterres said earlier this month. “The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis — ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all.”