El Niño Is Returning With Another Stark Warning
Past El Niños have led to floods, droughts and more.
Photographer: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images
A science-fiction trope is the time traveler who visits the present day with a dire warning about the future only to be tragically ignored. It resonates because it’s so believable. In fact, Earth had just such a visitor recently, and we dismissed it completely.
Three years ago, scientists warned that an approaching El Niño in the Pacific Ocean could temporarily boost global temperatures past 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, offering a taste of what the world would be like if we breached that long-term limit set by the Paris accords in 2015. Naive climate columnists wondered whether this would be enough to scare people into doing more to avoid that future.