‘Super El Niño’ set to make next year hottest on record
A powerful “super El Niño” weather pattern is set to drive up temperatures around the world in the coming months and will probably make 2027 the hottest on record, scientists have said.
The weather pattern could bring the return of 40C heat to Britain, a temperature only before experienced in 2022, as well as an increase in the price of tropical crops, such as coffee and sugar.
Caused by the release of heat from the Pacific Ocean, El Niño occurs about three times a decade, exposing some parts of the world to floods, others to droughts, and raising global temperatures from one autumn into the following summer.
There is now an 82 per cent chance of a “very strong” El Niño forming this year, according to the average of four weather forecasters, including the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
“It’s fair to call this a super El Niño” said Mark Maslin, a professor of earth system science at University College London, adding that it may be the most severe ever recorded.
Previous El Niños have significantly affected food production, helping to cut Russia’s 2010 wheat harvest by a third, ravaging coffee crops in southern Brazil in 1982 and perhaps prompting the bread riots that began the French Revolution in 1789.
While the Met Office has predicted a 40 per cent chance that this summer will be “hot” like that of 2022, this is not thought to be because of El Niño, which will begin to affect Britain’s weather in the autumn.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, which monitors global temperature, has estimated a 73 per cent chance that next year will be the hottest on record, thanks to the combination of El Niño and humanity’s planet-warming carbon emissions.
The past three years’ global average temperature was 1.48C hotter than the pre-industrial average and next year’s temperature is likely to surpass the 1.5C limit to which countries pledged to limit global warming when they signed the Paris agreement in 2015.
The El Niño is likely to bring drier-than-normal weather to the Amazon, Australia, Africa and India, and wetter conditions in North America and China. While Britain is less exposed to the weather pattern, it is still likely to experience a warm, wet winter, followed by hotter weather next year.
“Any especially hot weather we have this summer will be just normal climate change” Maslin said. “El Niño will really start to bite in the autumn. We could see a return of record-breaking 40C weather next summer.”
When temperatures in Britain peaked at 40C in the summer of 2022, an extra 2,800 over-65s died and a wildfire in Wennington, east London, burnt down 19 houses. Last year the Climate Change Committee said Britain was unprepared for future heatwaves, which are expected to buckle railway lines and overheat homes designed for cooler temperatures.
While Britain is less affected by El Niño than other countries, it imports about two fifths of its food from abroad. “We could see drought in coffee-growing regions, such as Brazil,” said Emily Black, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, adding that crops of rice, palm oil and sugar could also be disrupted.
Maslin said that the weather pattern’s recurrence every few years meant that climate change was likely to progress in “jumps”, with temperatures rising during El Niño years then levelling off for a few years.
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The last El Niño contributed to 2024 being the warmest year on record, with global temperatures reaching 1.5C above the pre-industrial average for the first time.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said the weather phenomenon was like “pushing the turbo button” on warming wrought by the burning of fossil fuels. She likened the Earth’s already warmed atmosphere to an exhausted person with a weakened immune system. El Niño, she said, was like someone coughing directly in your face.
“It affects food, it affects the economy, it affects water. Who is not connected these days? We are all connected in ways that we never imagined,” she said.