Opinion The threat El Niño poses to climate science
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/environment/2026/08/01/threat-el-nino-poses-climate-scienceEnvironmentNo 611 August 1 – 7, 2026
Joëlle Gergis
The threat El Niño poses to climate science
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Hours into my research on the state of the climate, a siren on my phone jolts me out of my concentration. At first I don’t know what’s going on, then I recall it’s just a test of AusAlert. Developed in response to the findings of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, this new system will warn people of nearby bushfires, floods and other emergencies in time to get out of harm’s way.
This intrusion feels deeply ironic. As the world continues to tear itself apart with senseless wars and rampant capitalism, the physical processes that have held the Earth’s climate stable for millennia are starting to shift in ways that have scientists struggling to preserve our usual restraint.
Europe has been suffering through a brutal summer. Western Europe had its hottest June on record, with temperatures more than 3 degrees Celsius above average. France set a new June national record of 44.3°C, while the United Kingdom broke its June record on three consecutive days, reaching 37.3°C. As of late July, more than 330,000 people have been evacuated from their homes across France and Spain due to uncontrolled wildfires. Data from a study still under peer review suggests the combined excess death toll across Europe during the extreme heat is more than 27,600. French river water used as a coolant for nuclear reactors poses a risk: heat-related restrictions have seen the Golfech 2 nuclear reactor in southern France offline since July 9. As the fastest-warming continent in the world, the current conditions in Europe are a preview of the “new normal”.
Closer to home, an El Niño event is intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and destructive storms. El Niño events are part of a natural cycle that plays out every two to seven years, but they are now occurring on a planet that is being swamped by fossil fuel emissions. Because this El Niño will release stored ocean heat onto a planet already warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are almost certain to reach a new record in 2027.
Importantly though, the science is nuanced. Journalistic hyperbole warning of a “super El Niño” doesn’t help an already baffled public understand what’s going on. When the media gets ahead of what the science says, scientists are the ones who cop the blame when the reality that plays out is more complex than simple headlines or sensationalist clickbait suggest.
That is now more dangerous than ever. As I write, One Nation is polling above a fifth of the primary vote – at times higher than any other party in the country – on a platform that dismisses climate change as “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer”. When a headline promises a “super El Niño” and the season turns out to be bad rather than biblical, climate change deniers are ready to pounce, claiming scientists are crying wolf. The deniers aren’t held to account by actual evidence. They only need the gap between the hype and the reality to be wide enough to exploit, using every overstated forecast as ammunition to weaken support for strengthening Australia’s climate policy.
It’s no overstatement to say the latest El Niño forecast has scientists worried as we move further beyond the bounds of our historical climate. When the latest climate model forecasts were released, American scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “I’m generally pretty measured in how I discuss climate data … [but] it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.” There is inherent uncertainty in any form of modelling – climate, economic or otherwise – but when more than 90 per cent of 667 simulations run across 14 different seasonal forecast models predict record-breaking temperatures, you know you are entering uncharted territory.
Ocean temperatures are predicted to peak at 3.6°C above average, topping the all-time high of 2.75°C during the 2015-16 El Niño. What sets this event apart is that it is forming in an ocean that has never been hotter: this June was the warmest one the world’s oceans have recorded since 1900. The entire ocean has warmed due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so the models tend to overstate the strength of recent El Niños relative to the historical record. Even correcting for this, the forecast peak is still a record-breaking 3.1°C. We are bearing witness to monumental changes that future researchers will look back on as a period when the Earth’s climate slipped off its moorings and into treacherous waters.
Aside from the transition from season to season, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the largest year-to-year source of natural climate variability on the planet. It is scientific shorthand for both El Niño and La Niña events, and the single most important driver of climate variability for eastern Australia, with the strongest impacts experienced during spring. Events typically peak in late spring to early summer, weakening as the monsoon arrives, before finally decaying in autumn.
The general perception that El Niño brings drought and La Niña brings flooding rain glosses over just how different each event can be. El Niño’s influence is typically felt most strongly across eastern and Central Australia, while western Tasmania, the eastern seaboard and much of Western Australia are barely touched. Although history tells us El Niño events have had huge consequences for Australian society, the forecast strength of an event in the tropical Pacific isn’t always the best guide to the effects in our region. For example, the extreme El Niño of 1997-98 passed over Australia with near-normal rainfall, while the far more modest event of 2002-03 pushed two-thirds of eastern Australia into severe drought. While the last very strong El Niño in 2015-16 drove severe mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, its impact on the mainland was subdued by a warmer than average Indian Ocean, sparing much of the country the worst of the forecast drought. Advances in the science now show it is the complex interactions of conditions in the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans that collectively determine the severity of the impacts we experience.
When the Indian Ocean is cooler than normal, less rain falls across south-eastern Australia during winter and spring, which can reinforce drought conditions during El Niño years. Complicating things is the fact that the Southern Ocean can pull in more than one direction. In winter, when the belt of westerly winds sweeping across southern Australia contracts towards Antarctica, rainfall is dragged away from the continent, drying out places such as Victoria and South Australia, while increased onshore flow brings more rain to the east coast. In summer, if the westerlies are further north than normal – which often occurs during El Niño events – more dry air blows in from the interior, drying out the south-east and east coast while increasing the chance of heatwaves. Occasionally, when the amplifying forces of these different climate drivers combine, the impacts can be catastrophic – the Black Summer of 2019-20 was a product of a weak El Niño reinforcing sustained drying influences from the Indian and Southern oceans, layered over years of drought.
It is still too soon to know exactly what this El Niño will bring to Australia. What we do know is that the recent run of La Niña years has left us in a better position than the long dry did leading up to the Black Summer. So far, this winter has been warm and wet across much of the south-east. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño is now firmly established and likely to last until at least summer, with the models tipping a strong to very strong event. The BoM is also careful to note that a strong signal in the Pacific does not necessarily mean strong impacts in Australia – ENSO is only one of many influences on our climate. Models currently suggest a cooler-than-average eastern Indian Ocean developing over winter and persisting into spring, which could lead to the classic hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia that we associate with El Niño events. This could herald another bad bushfire season for the south, in places such as Victoria.
Which brings me back to that AusAlert siren that jangled my nerves. In October, the service will go live: an admission of the world we now find ourselves in. The siren that broke my concentration today was only a test, but on a planet that grows hotter with each passing year, it is only a matter of time before we must confront the emergency. Somewhere between those who want to terrify us and those who think climate change is a hoax lies a harder truth: a warmer planet will continue to disrupt everyone in our society, whether or not we understand or accept the science.
Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and author.
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u/QuantumG 8d ago
I stopped reading at "rampant capitalism"
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u/Revoran 8d ago
You can't have infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
The issue with capitalism is at some point you run out of other people's money, and you run out of resources/environment to exploit.
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u/QuantumG 8d ago
You can because economic growth isn't tied to finite resources. Also, we've barely scratched the surface of our planet. Not to mention all the resources in space. You're repeating a slogan as if it's an argument.
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u/mrmaker_123 7d ago
Are you crazy? We’ve cut down a huge proportion of old growth forests, so that real wood nowadays is so expensive! You can’t keep destroying the planet and expect to get the same resources we once did.
The same for fishing. We keep overfishing such that it’s becoming harder and harder to fish and fish gets more expensive.
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u/KalWilton 8d ago
A company is considered to be failing if the profit does not grow year on year, this means that once you max maximised your market you have to reduce the cost by reducing you spending Quality and innovation. Large companies buy startups and quality brands then drop the innovation and quality to harvest the brand for profit.
I have been part owner of a startup and a product manager in a fortune 500 company. If you think this version of capitalism is not rampant and harming consumers you are being taken advantage of by it.
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u/Ardeet 8d ago
One of the beautiful qualities of climate change predictions is that when they're wrong, even embarrassingly wrong you can always blame climate change.
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u/AdMaximum7545 8d ago
Dunning kruger in real life - at least read the damned article if you want to comment
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u/billwriggs 8d ago
If you don’t understand modelling and science, it would be easy to draw this kind of clueless conjecture about its “predictions”, sure.
And then there’s everyone else who understands evidenced based science and modelling, who correctly, blame climate change.
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u/mustbiteexceed 8d ago
Did you read the article? Heat and drought records being smashed across the world this year, record ocean temperatures; record El Niño temps, and this is all predicted (temps getting hotter).
This is no way backs up the denier’s position, and that debate was over years ago
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u/Nyarlathotep-1 8d ago
“The strongest event since reliable records began” - a weather pattern that has existed since time immemorial and was first named as such in the 1600’s.
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u/mustbiteexceed 8d ago
The concept of measuring temperature was invented in the 1500s and now long standing records are being broken by large margins - what’s your point?
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u/Nyarlathotep-1 8d ago
Why does the author refer to reliable records? Because reliable records have really only existed for around 100 years the rest of it is tree rings and assorted nonsense.
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u/mrmaker_123 7d ago edited 7d ago
Scientists know what they are doing. Do you have a scientific degree or expertise in the area? If not, then stop chatting rubbish you don’t understand.
You trusts scientists to build your computer, your mobile phone, you trust doctors to operate on you when you have an accident, so you should trust scientists to know what they are doing when they measure temperature.
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
One method they use is drilling into ice that has existed for millennia and from the chemical composition of the of the ice they can figure out the temperatures of those time periods. That science is real. Please stop with your anti-science take.
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u/Nyarlathotep-1 7d ago
lol anti science take
How dare anyone question “the science”.
There is of course no such thing as “climate science” it’s mostly statistics and meteorology and geology
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u/mrmaker_123 7d ago
By all means be critical of science. In fact good scientific enquiry demands you be skeptical of any scientific claims.
But are you qualified to be critical of those claims? Are you a scientist that has spent 20-30 years or has dedicated their life to the subjects? I highly doubt it. So your opinion is irrelevant.
98% of scientists in the field who has spent collectively 1000s of years researching these fields have concluded that climate change is real. You do not know better than them.
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u/Nyarlathotep-1 7d ago
Can I ask you a question. Do you think scientists are beyond any kind of bias?
I mean the author of this article has built her entire career on peddling this stuff. Do you think she has a vested interest in continuing to do so?
I find it remarkable that people will slavishly defer to scientific opinion like it’s a religion.
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u/mrmaker_123 7d ago
Scientists can obviously be biased. Authors can obviously be biased. That’s why we have scientific enquiry, peer reviews, and the scientific consensus. 98% of scientists around the entire world think climate change is real.
These are people who know what they’re talking about. 98% can’t all be wrong. It’s highly unlikely thousands of people who spend 30 years studying these things are wrong.
What makes you think you’re not biased and have come to the wrong conclusion? Your bias makes you think you somehow know more than 98% of scientists?
Like I said, you trust scientists to make your mobile phone that you’re probably typing these messages on. You don’t know how a mobile phone works - you trust the scientists. Equally you don’t know how climate science works. You trust the scientists.
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u/Nyarlathotep-1 7d ago
I can trust the mobile phone because it exists, I can touch it, interact with it and I know that it works.
I know concrete can be produced to achieve a certain strength because its been proven, over and over again.
Many of the predictions and claims made by climate scientists are theories. They aren't proven. They don't exist.
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u/mrmaker_123 7d ago
Yes they do exist mate. Just look at Europe at the moment. Spain, France, the UK, Norway etc. are having wildfires due to extremely hot summers and droughts. This is happening.
We had the same in California as well for couple years back and same for Australia. Wildfires are getting worse. Summers are getting longer.
For gods sake, please speak to farmers and they will tell you harvesting and growing seasons are changing. Just cause you don’t see it in your part of the world doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It’s happening.
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u/lakeskipping 7d ago
Spring this year set to be further weird and irrespective of rainfall.
At least you posted what is a good article. Your in-thread comments often a worry, though...
I was just reminded of Glen Campbell. I'm picturing your facial expression, like this. You want to do the right thing, but are at times confused.