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| Map of global sea surface temperatures as they compared to normal. This was October, 2020, during a peak in the recent long La Nina. Notice all the blue off the west coast of South America depicting cool water temperatures associated with La Nina. This same area would have warmer than normal water temperatures during an opposite phenomenon all El Nino. |
This isn't exactly great news.
La Nina tends to cool the world's climate a little bit. The disconcerting part of the latest La Nina is there was virtually no cooling during this three-year event. Global temperatures set new highs around 2016, and essentially flatlined since.
If a strong La Nina can't cool the world a little bit, what will its absence do?
On top of that, weather extremes associated with climate change continued apace despite the supposed cooling effects of La Nina.
The fear is, now that La Nina is gone, we are priming ourselves for a likely soon-to-arrive El Nino. El Nino a warming of the eastern Pacific and tends to push global temperatures up. This created its own set of big weather dramas.
We really don't need that.
As the Washington Post reports:
"The probable return of El Nino raises concerns about how it could accelerate global warming and crises of climate change. The last major El Nino episode in 2016 sent average global temperatures to record highs and contributed to devastating rainforest loss, coral bleaching, polar ice melt and wildfires."
That said, we don't know how strong the likely a looming El Nino would be. If it's not a big one and doesn't raise eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures all that much, then the effects would be somewhat muted.
That doesn't mean weather extremes would stop. Even if the eastern Pacific were in Goldilocks mode - not too hot, not too cold - big storms, floods and other calamities won't stop. Climate change is already priming the pump for that kind of thing. The weirdness will just shift around to different places and maybe take different forms.
Most forecasts say the current state of affairs should shift into El Nino as the year goes on. El Ninos tend to warm the world. Aside from possibly pushing the overall global temperature to new record heights, storminess, drought, heat waves and other big troubles could also ramp up.
After all, a hotter world is a more energized one. So the weather disasters could really start to pile up.
Especially in the next El Nino is a biggie. If so, watch out!
Here in the United States, La Nina in general tends to create colder, stormier conditions in the northern United States and warmer, drier stuff in the South. During the just-deceased La Nina, there was a fair share of chilly, stormy weather in the northern United States west of the Great Lakes, but it wasn't consistent. The Northeast generally stayed mostly on the warm side during this.
The south has been unusually warm most of the time in the past three years.
If we get an El Nino the southern United States would be slightly cooler and stormier in general, especially in the winter.
On the bright side an El Nino tends to lower the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. That would be welcome after the slew of powerfully destructive hurricanes between 2016 and 2021. That El Nino creates strong and veering winds aloft over swaths of the Atlantic Ocean. Those winds rip apart thunderstorms that are wannabe hurricanes.
El Nino also makes drought somewhat less likely in the prime crop growing regions in the middle of the U.S, so there are benefits,
Both La Nina and El Nino are naturally occurring cycles. Both change global weather patterns. It's something humanity has dealt with for probably thousands of years and managed to carry on. Both phenomena created winners and losers.
Now, though, climate change is enhancing the negative effects of La Nina and El Nino. Increasingly, both La Nina and El Nino create losers and losers.
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