A climate monster is growing right now in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. They now know the pattern quite well: A marine heat-wave in the Pacific Ocean scrambles global weather and produces in some places more intense droughts and in others more intense rainfall and flooding; disruptions to hurricane patterns and monsoon seasons, which can cause widespread crop failures; and much more punishing heat.
The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts.”
The subtitle of Davis’s 2001 book is “El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World,” but his argument is not that climatic disasters were singularly responsible for mass suffering, even in the 19th century. Across decades of work of freelance scholarship and left-wing activism, Davis frequently struck notes of environmental alarm, but remained far too committed a radical to fall victim to ecological determinism. Instead, he argued, environmental disaster punishes those who have been made most vulnerable, with 19th-century El Niños a test for global political economy as much as a parable of ecological frailty. Almost certainly, the upcoming El Niño will be the same for us. Even a monster El Niño isn’t going to produce nearly as much human suffering as the one of 150 years ago. But we are going to learn an awful lot about how much climate disruption we can manage at the moment — and, presumably, how much we cannot.
Punishing El Niños didn’t arise for the first time in the late 19th century. The basic rhythm had been known to Peruvian fishermen for many hundreds of years by that point, and in more recent years historians have connected the dots with the collapse of ancient Egyptian dynasties and civilizations in Peru, and perhaps with the French Revolution, which began with bread riots and coincided almost perfectly with what is sometimes called the “Great El Niño” of 1789-93.
But for sheer intensity, most scientists agree, the climatological event which began in Pacific waters in 1877 — which the coming El Niño may equal or surpass, remember — stands above the rest. To illustrate its globe-wrapping, genuinely world-historical impact, Davis tags along on the grand tour which Ulysses Grant embarked on as he exited the presidency in 1877 — first to Egypt, where thousands were dying of famine and riots were widespread; then to India, where more than five million had officially died of famine in the previous three years; and then to China, where recent drought and famine had killed between eight million and 20 million people. The numbers can be numbing, but these were not normal events, in the 19th or any other century. “It was almost as if the Americans were inadvertently following in the footprints of a monster whose colossal trail of destruction extended from the Nile to the Yellow Sea,” Davis writes.
The monster was El Niño, and it also produced punishing drought and famine in the Philippines, Korea, Brazil, and throughout Africa, among other parts of the world. Similar years followed several times over the following decade, and in total this short series of intense El Niños resulted in tens of millions of deaths, Davis estimates — between 31.7 million and 61.3 million just in India, China and Brazil, and at least 10 million in India alone. Epidemics followed in famine-weakened populations — malaria, plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera — and in the very same half-century, Davis writes, in which real hunger and famine were fast disappearing from Western Europe.
And the El Niño famines of the late 19th century were not only compounded by autocratic incompetence and colonialist cruelty, they also perhaps exacerbated those problems, Davis shows, enabling a last-dash European scramble to establish and extend imperial control over populations disempowered by hunger and illness in the global South. “What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the 19th century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.”
How much will burn in the 18 months to come? It is still too early to say with confidence, since though the models are flashing red, we are still early enough in the season that scientists tend to be cautious in their projections. But some are already calling it a “Super Duper El Niño,” and others a “Godzilla El Niño,” and underlying warming has been accelerating in recent years, disconcertingly, raising the possibility that even a brief spike will push the planet into genuinely uncharted territory temperature-wise. In fact, it’s almost certain that this El Niño will make 2027 the hottest year on record by some margin, and there is a chance, the climate scientist James Hansen has suggested, that global average temperatures would jump to 1.7 degrees above the preindustrial average next year.
Scientists tend to talk about warming thresholds in terms of long-term averages rather than single-year bursts, but a monster El Niño will give us at least a brief preview of a hotter and more chaotic world — a 2027 like we might’ve expected to see in 2035, and which not that long ago didn’t seem likely before 2050. “Prepare for bedlam,” the environmental writer Bill McKibben wrote earlier this year in anticipation.
But if the super El Niño will offer a kind of brief preview of future warming, it will also offer a test of how well prepared and adapted the world is to that future. If droughts intensify across parts of Africa, how much worse will the world’s hunger crisis — already twice as bad as 2019, according to the World Food Program — become? Will the likely wildfires in Australia do as much human damage as the Black Summer of 2019-20, which destroyed thousands of homes, killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of others into military evacuations from beaches encircled by flame? (Not to mention blanketing Sydney in such thick smoke that the ferries couldn’t navigate the harbor and fire alarms in office buildings were routinely triggered by the ambient smoke.)
In even a weak El Niño a few years back, flooding displaced a half-million people in just one Brazilian state, so what will an intense one bring? Will adaptation and acclimatization mean that extreme heat — in the United States and elsewhere — prove less deadly than in recent memory? Last month, the climate scientist Andrew Dessler calculated that global warming is responsible for about 1.7 percent of summertime deaths in his home state of Texas. According to the imperfect-but-still-illuminating EM-DAT international disaster database, between 2022 and 2024 an average of more than 59,000 people died worldwide from extreme temperatures — about 20 times as high as the previous decade’s average.
It will also offer several other tests, perhaps no less consequential. The first concerns the science of warming, given long-running debates about just how much the temperature rise is accelerating — and why. Over the last decade or so, a high-profile group of alarm-raisers led by Hansen has published a series of papers and commentary suggesting that the scientific community has significantly underestimated the rate of warming, which, they argued, has been accelerating faster than the broader community has acknowledged. And that the fact that it is accelerating so quickly is a sign, they believe, that many conventional predictive models are calibrated wrong, that we are heading for much worse warming in the decades ahead than almost anyone appreciates. Over the last few months, Hansen has proposed that this El Niño will offer an explicit test of the thesis. In the next year or two, he expects, we’ll know for sure.
Another test concerns public response and public opinion. A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom among those most focused on climate change that more extreme weather and cascading climate disasters would inevitably elevate public concern and with it, ideally, the need for collective action. Today, as unprecedented fires burn through the Southern forests downed by Hurricane Helene, a new conventional wisdom prevails — that the public has moved on from climate anxiety, burned out from the alarmism of the Greta Thunberg years and fixated now on a series of successor panics, many of them no less apocalyptic: first about Covid and then about A.I., about smartphones and fertility rates and income inequality and the crisis of American democracy (to name just a few).
In politics and media, it’s true, climate worries have receded, replaced in headlines by affordability debates, stories about the electricity demands of data centers, and a kind of simplistic energy triumphalism. But public opinion has proved surprisingly resilient, with nearly as many Americans saying they “worry a great deal” about warming as they did at previous peaks in 2017, right after Donald Trump was inaugurated the first time, and 2020, right before the pandemic hit. The share ishigher than any year in the presidencies of Joe Biden, with its major climate legislation and Los Angeles wildfire disaster; Barack Obama, with Hurricane Sandy and the Paris agreement; or George W. Bush, with Hurricane Katrina and “An Inconvenient Truth.” And though those survey responses can seem a bit hollow, given how few people truly orient their politics around climate action, it’s not clear that climate has fallen that much as a liberal political priority either: In a Pew poll conducted in August 2020, after “Green New Deal” debates throughout the Democratic primaries, climate ranked fifth among 12 issues among Biden supporters; in one conducted in fall 2024, when it had almost entirely disappeared from the campaign trail, climate ranked fifth of 10.
What will a super El Niño do to the effective settlement that has prevailed since the end of the climate protests and the doomed passage of the Inflation Reduction Act? On his Substack, McKibben predicts it will quickly bring an end to the idea that “global warming is over,” as Americans grow more concerned about how fast the world is racing toward irreversible tipping points — in the Arctic, in the Amazon, in the Atlantic. In the climate and energy publication Heatmap, Jeva Lange argued it would instead be “bad news for climate politics,” particularly in America, where many of the El Niño effects might look to disengaged observers to be pretty salutary — more rain rather than less, for instance, bringing an end to the record drought now gripping so much of the U.S. and perhaps limiting the wildfire damage as a result (among other effects). And then there is the eternal objection that El Niños long predate global warming, are not, strictly speaking, a phenomenon of warming, and that they did far more human damage in the past than they will today.
And me? An awful lot depends on the actual size of El Niño and the particular scale and distribution of suffering it might unleash. In general, I tend to think climate people overestimate the political impact of discrete disasters — and that we process even mind-bending catastrophes largely by normalizing them, as we’ve done in recent years with wildfires in Los Angeles and Maui, mass heat deaths in the Pacific Northwest and on the Hajj, and flooding events in places like Spain and Brazil beyond what has been observed, in those places, for decades. But coming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency. What comes next, as ever, would be as much a matter of political economy as climate.
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