We Should Be More Worried About El Niño

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Transcript:

You’re probably familiar with the weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which, of course, is Spanish for “The Niño.” But what you might not know is that this is an El Niño year, and experts are concerned that we might need to rename it to El Hombre. Maybe El Godzilla.

That’s not even a joke, actually: back in 2015, “Godzilla” was the image used to invoke the possibility that that year’s El Niño might be truly devastating. Luckily, it didn’t end up being as bad as it could’ve been that year. This year, experts say that it’s looking even worse than a decade ago, and recently The Climate Prediction Center has announced there’s a 90% chance it will be “very strong,” and the chance that this will be a historic strongest El Nino in recorded history is 69%. Ha ha. Um. “Nice.” 

El Niño is a natural, cyclical event in which a blob of ocean water off the coast of Peru gets significantly warmer: usually it’s around half a degree Celsius, or almost a degree Fahrenheit above average. This year, it’s already 3 degrees Celsius higher. That’s…really bad.

Because even when it’s only half a degree higher, this patch of warm ocean water has global effects thanks to disrupting wind patterns. It generally peaks from October to December, and during that time places around the world experience record high temperatures. And depending upon where you are, it can cause increased droughts or historic rainfall. Here in the Bay Area, we sit right in between the “definitely more drought” and “definitely more rainfall” sections of the country, so it’s always a delightful surprise to see what we get. Like a Christmas present! From someone who hates you.

El Niño also tends to increase the chance for hurricanes to form in the Pacific while decreasing the chance for them to form in the Atlantic.

At this point, you might be wondering what the big deal is with an El Niño that is more than three times worse than usual: sure, temperatures are a little higher, some places have more rain, some have less, who cares? Well! Most of the people living in California need to care, as do all the people who eat the food that is grown in California, which probably means you, if you’re in the US. Because there’s a serious chance that a significant portion of our state will be underwater.

That may be surprising if you’re accustomed to hearing about California’s drought and wildfire issues, but over the past few decades, more and more data is suggesting that floods may be our biggest foe.

Back in 2010, the US Geological Survey assembled an Avengers-like team of 117 scientists and other experts to use historical data to model what could happen if two large winter storms hit the US West Coast one after the other in a scenario they labeled “Atmospheric River 1,000-year Storm,” or ARkStorm. It’s a fitting nickname because the results were scary enough to convince a reasonable person to start figuring out what the fuck a cubit is.

They found that 6,000 square miles of the Central Valley, which grows more than $50 billion in food for the US, would be overwhelmed and submerged. Coastal cities like San Diego, LA, and the Bay Area would flood. Millions of people would need to be evacuated. 125 mile per hour winds would be common. Restoration of basic utilities could take months and the entire thing would end up costing a trillion dollars.

Trillion! With a “T”.

But there was a major flaw with that study: it didn’t take into account climate change.

So, in 2022 researchers took another swing at it while considering everything that’s happened in the past 15 years and what is likely to happen in the next few decades. And this probably won’t shock you, but yeah, ARkStorm 2.0 is actually way worse! As our atmosphere warms, it acts like a growing sponge that can absorb and hold more water. The total amount of rainfall remains the same, but some places experience severe droughts while others experience atmospheric rivers and other superstorms like the ones considered in the ARkStorm.

That’s just one way that climate change affects the numbers. In short, it means that an ARkStorm will not only be way more deadly and damaging than previously thought, but also DOUBLED the odds that we’ll experience this some time soon. It could happen in 50 years, or it could happen this winter. No one knows.

None of that takes into account a historic El Niño. Warmer water expands and takes up more space, which leads to higher tides and therefore a higher chance of coastal flooding. We have king tides coming in November, December, and January which will make those tides even higher. If this El Niño also results in more rainy storms, well, “The Perfect Storm” starts to seem a little downplayed.

The good news is that the experts are still doing this research and sounding the alarm, despite our fascist government cutting funding everywhere they can. Mitigation efforts are already underway. In a recent BBC Science Focus piece, Tom Howarth describes how researchers at the Desert Research Institute responded to the first ARkStorm study by running a “war games” simulation centered on Lake Tahoe. According to one of DRI’s researchers, this exercise led to “improved preparedness and responses, including helping agencies pre-position equipment, staff, fuel and supplies to ensure they could continue operating during power outages,” which helped during flooding in 2017. If they can find the funding for it, DRI could do a similar exercise based on ARkStorm 2.0.

So, yeah, El Godzilla might be a serious problem. There’s always the chance that we avoid the worst of it, but the odds are not in our favor. Obviously I’ve focused a lot on California in this video, and if you’re here on the West Coast I highly recommend you follow Daniel Swain, aka Weather West, who recently put out this helpful El Niño fact sheet. But as I said, this is an event that will have global impacts: according to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Australia and Indonesia will likely get dry conditions that could lead to wildfires, and if El Niño grows in strength then the Pacific coast of South America will get hit with heavy rainfall by the time their autumn rolls around (North American Spring) and then China and Japan could finally see heavy flooding themselves. I highly recommend you befriend your local meteorologist and stay up to date on what you might expect. Stay safe, but don’t bother trying to build a giant boat. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to have success convincing your government to fund this research and build better infrastructure to keep us all safe.

We Should Be More Worried About El Niño (YouTube)