From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

Media outlets such as The Independent and Reuters are reporting in advance that a much anticipated strong El Niño will cause record high temperature and bad weather. Reuters claims the El Niño’s effect will be so bad because it comes on top of and is exacerbated by human caused climate change. This framing is highly misleading. It conflates a naturally recurring ocean cycle with long-term climate change, amplifies climate model speculation, and, contrary to science, treats short-term variability as proof of an accelerating long-term climate crisis.

In response to a recent World Meteorological Organization report, Reuters writes in an article titled  “A strong El Niño may be imminent. Climate change will make its effects worse” that the developing El Niño will combine with human-caused warming to supercharge extreme weather and potentially make 2027 the hottest year on record.

El Niño is not new. It is not caused by carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. It is a naturally occurring ocean-atmosphere oscillation that develops every two to seven years when Pacific trade winds weaken, allowing warmer surface waters to shift eastward. The phenomenon has been documented for centuries. It raises global average temperatures temporarily and alters rainfall patterns worldwide. That is what El Niño does.

The World Meteorological Organization projects an 80 percent chance of development and warns of a possible strong event defined by Pacific sea surface temperatures at least 1.5°C above average. But the same page notes uncertainty, with some models predicting a strong event and others not. That is not predictive certainty. It is probabilistic modeling, because climate models are not data.

Reuters acknowledges that El Niño naturally occurs on this cycle, yet the article quickly makes an unjustified leap that climate change will “supercharge” its effects.

The article leans heavily on projections that 2027 could become the hottest year on record due to the combined effect of El Niño and rising greenhouse gases. But short-term temperature spikes during El Niño years have occurred repeatedly throughout the instrumental record. The strong 1997–98 El Niño temporarily boosted global temperatures. So did 2015–16. Those peaks were driven largely by ocean heat redistribution, not by abrupt new forcing.

The Independent has already amplified this same narrative, warning of a looming “summer heatwave” driven by El Niño, a claim Reuters echoes. The common thread is flawed attribution.

The WMO release that served as the basis for this coverage projects probabilities based on model ensembles. But as Climate at a Glance documents in its discussion of model performance, climate models have a history of running warmer than temperature measurements from satellite and weather balloons, the latter recording real observed data. Treating ensemble outputs as near-term inevitabilities ignores the difference between model outputs and real-world data. In science, you are supposed to follow the data not what a model or theory says should be happening.

Similarly, Climate at a Glance’s review of U.S. heatwaves shows that extreme heat in the United States was more frequent in the 1930s than in recent decades. That is National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, not computer model speculation. The Dust Bowl heatwaves occurred before modern CO2 concentrations. Heat extremes are not novel; they are part of normal climatic variability.

Reuters quotes scientists claiming that climate change “supercharges the effects of El Niño,” making heatwaves, droughts, and heavy rains more intense. That assertion is not scientifically plausible as a hypothesis. There has been no empirical demonstration linking long-term climate change to worsening El Niños or worsening heat waves, droughts, or heavy rains causing flooding. Attributing a specific disaster to a global signal is done using counterfactual modeling, as was done in this flawed report, Rio Grande do Sul floods in 2024 are cited as strengthened by both climate change and El Niño. Weather is not climate, and as has been discussed repeatedly at Climate Realism. Attribution studies are exercises in circular reasoning, flawed as a matter or logic and science.

Weather events occur because of atmospheric blocking patterns, jet stream configurations, soil moisture feedbacks, and ocean oscillations. Those processes operate independent of human emissions. El Niño modifies global oceanic and atmospheric circulation in identifiable ways, and it is driven by coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific. It has never required nor depended upon greenhouse gas amplification to produce weather extremes.

The Reuters article even admits that “each El Niño is different” and that its regional impacts are hard to predict. That variability alone should temper alarmist forecasting. Instead, we are told that this El Niño may offer a “window into the future.” That is rhetoric, not a sober scientific assessment based on real-world data.

Global temperature is highly variable on interannual scales. Volcanic eruptions can cool the planet. Solar variability plays a role. ENSO cycles redistribute heat within the ocean-atmosphere system. A temporary global temperature spike during an El Niño does not prove accelerating climate change. It demonstrates internal variability layered atop a gradual background trend. This graph image below demonstrates that clearly.

There is also an implicit sleight of hand in the media highlighting record warmth during El Niño years. When natural variability pushes temperatures higher, it is framed as evidence of worsening climate change. When La Niña temporarily suppresses global averages, that variability is rarely used to argue that warming has slowed. The asymmetry reveals the narrative.

The coming El Niño may indeed elevate global temperatures for a year or two. That would be consistent with every previous strong El Niño. It would not represent a new physical regime. It would not constitute proof that climate change is amplifying every impact beyond historical precedent.

El Niño is natural, heatwaves are natural, and resultant floods and droughts have naturally occurred under their influence. The Pacific oscillates. Global temperature fluctuates upward, and media headlines predictably spike in unison. Blending natural variability with model-based projections and presenting the combination as accelerating catastrophe is woefully misleading “reporting.” Readers of Reuters, The Independent, and other media outlets connecting El Niño events to climate change deserve better; they deserve at least a semblance of the truth based on physical science rather than climate model informed attribution outputs.