RE: Not Just Another “Super” El Niño Article
Clive Elsworth
For those short of time, I recommend you read these last 3 paragraphs of Tom Harris’s substack post on the upcoming El Nino:
Following that, 2027 will likely soar to between 1.7°C and 1.8°C for the calendar year average. It will certainly be hotter than whatever 2026 delivers, since the peak SAT [surface air] temperatures lag the ocean temperature extremes. When the system settles in 2028–2030, our new “cool” baseline will likely hover around 1.55°C to 1.7°C—leaving us perfectly positioned so that the subsequent El Niño introduces the first full calendar year at +2.0°C, depending on when it emerges. Permanently passing 2°C next decade now seems unavoidable.
The planetary impacts locked into the backend of this decade will be severe; there is simply too much thermal energy accumulated in the system for any other outcome. This places the planet squarely in the danger zone for a number of the great tipping elements including the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, Boreal Permafrost abrupt thawing, Ocean Current disruption, and Amazon collapse.
We can only hope that these upcoming systemic shocks finally jolt global leadership and the voting public into treating the crisis with the structural seriousness it demands.
Clive
From: Tom Harris from Climate Uncovered <drtom...@substack.com>
Sent: 17 June 2026 08:56
To: Cl...@endorphinsoftware.co.uk
Subject: Not Just Another “Super” El Niño Article
The world is bracing, quite rightly, for a newly confirmed and likely very strong El Niño event, but the real risks lay in what follows.
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Not Just Another “Super” El Niño ArticleThe world is bracing, quite rightly, for a newly confirmed and likely very strong El Niño event, but the real risks lay in what follows.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most impactful climate phenomena on Earth due to its capacity to alter global atmospheric circulation. This, in turn, dictates temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather patterns across the world. Following a barrage of forecasts and warnings from global meteorological services, the media has woken up to the looming threat, deploying terms like ‘super’ and even ‘Goliath’ El Niños as model predictions venture off the charts. They are right to do so. If you live in an area heavily influenced by these shifts—such as the Western US, Amazonia, Australasia, South America, the Western Pacific, or sub-Saharan Africa—preparations for the latter half of this year should be made with haste. However, it is 2027 and beyond that may require our most serious preparations. How bad are we talking?The forecasts for the strength of the upcoming El Niño have risen steadily over the last few months, as demonstrated by Professor Eliot Jacobson’s recent model animation on Bluesky.
Figure 1: El Niño prediction model outputs from the ECMWF, with peak values for 2016 and 2023 added for comparison. (Source: ECMWF) The latest plume plot from the ECMWF (Figure 1) is striking. I have overlaid the peaks reached by the 2015/16 (very strong) and 2023/24 (strong) events for comparison. As of June 11th, NOAA have declared the start of the El Niño event and are forecasting a >60% chance of it being ‘very strong’ from October through January.¹ Beyond the immediate global disruption these events cause, they leave permanent scars. The 2016 event helped to trigger a structural tipping point in Antarctic sea ice, which had been resiliently stable up to that juncture but has since suffered an accelerated decline.² Meanwhile, the 2023 event drove 2024 to become the first full calendar year to breach 1.5°C of global warming. Looking further back, an exceptionally strong El Niño in the early 1940s has been definitively linked to the initial unpinning and retreat of both the Thwaites (‘Doomsday’) Glacier and its neighbour, Pine Island Glacier, in West Antarctica.³ Long after the tropical atmosphere cooled down, the glaciers never re-advanced. The anomaly was temporary; the structural destabilisation was permanent. We are still tracking that continuing retreat via satellites today, in fact the final unpinning of the remaining floating ice sheet is imminent.⁴ Key takeaway: Situate these historical precedents on top of our current baseline of nearly 1.5°C of global warming, and a ‘super’ El Niño in 2026 transitions from an ecological crisis into a literal killer. The short window since the 2023 event might superficially suggest that the Pacific has less accumulated energy available to fuel a monster event so soon. Historically, very strong El Niños are preceded by prolonged neutral or cool La Niña phases, allowing heat to pool in the western Pacific. This time, however, the ocean is primed early. Rare and extreme ‘annular warming patterns’ emerged across the western, northeastern, and southeastern tropical Pacific in spring 2026, whilst subsurface equatorial heat content remains dangerously above average.⁵ Furthermore, global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline (~2.9 ZJ).⁶ To cap it all off, powerful Kelvin waves are currently charging eastward beneath the equatorial Pacific surface. They are preparing to breach the surface and release their thermal energy directly into the atmosphere, with subsurface temperature anomalies already exceeding 6°C, just 100m from the surface (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Subsurface temperature anomaly cross-section in the equatorial Pacific, June 2026. The top panel is a plan map view of the equatorial Pacific, the bottom larger planet shows the temperature anomaly by depth from the surface (Source: CyclonicWx) Immediate ImpactsNumerous commentators have outlined the immediate macroeconomic and humanitarian casualties of a super El Niño event—including a recent summary by The Guardian detailing the risks to the global economy. In a nutshell, we are looking at:
The Warming Ratchet: Phase 1 (2027)The primary thermodynamic consequence of an El Niño is that it allows the global ocean to exhale. The oceans absorb roughly 90% of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance, so when they release a fraction of that accumulated energy back into the sky, global mean Surface Air Temperatures (SAT) spike. The magnitude of this atmospheric boost scales with the strength of the ENSO event (Figure 3). By plotting the peak monthly SAT achieved after historical El Niños against the surrounding 18-month mean, the correlation becomes clear: the stronger the oceanic anomaly, the sharper the atmospheric temperature spike.
Figure 3: Peak monthly surface air temperature effect of historic El Niños stronger than 1.75°C relative to the surrounding 18-month baseline. If we take a linear fit of this historical data and project it out across the ECMWF model plumes from figure 1, we get a sobering look at 2027. By adding these projected monthly peaks to our current pre-event baseline (+1.47°C mean global SAT from January 2025 to May 2026), we can establish a conservative look at the upcoming 2027 temperature peak.
Table 1. Projected monthly peak temperature in 2027 The historical peak monthly anomaly occurred in February 2024 at +1.78°C. The coming event will eclipse this. If the upper-quadrant model projections materialise, 2027 could deliver the first individual month breaching +2.0°C above pre-industrial levels in human history. The full calendar year average for 2027 is highly likely to settle above 1.7°C, shattering 2024’s record by a wide margin. The Warming Ratchet: Phase 2 (2028–2030)We have witnessed record-breaking hot years before, but a terrifying systemic pattern has emerged: temperatures no longer drop back down to the pre-existing trend line after the event concludes. Instead, the climate system undergoes a step-change—a warming ratchet that locks in a higher baseline. Consider the data:
We watched this exact mechanism play out again after the 2023 event. The average global temperature from January 2025 to May 2026 sat at 1.47°C—more than a quarter of a degree warmer than the five-year average preceding the 2023 El Niño. That is not to say that El Niños warm the planet per se, but they release the temperature jumps required to step up global temperatures by the expected 0.2-0.35°C per decade. The looming danger is that the 2026/27 event will execute the exact same manoeuvre. If it does, 2025 will have been the final year in human history where global average temperatures remained below 1.5°C for a full calendar year. With 2026 already averaging 1.48°C prior to the onset of the El Niño heat dump, this year should comfortably top 1.5°C by December (aligning with my January prediction of 1.52°C). Interestingly James Hansen has just released a prediction stating that his physics based analysis shows that 2026 will overtake 2024’s record coming in at above 1.6°C for the full calendar year.⁷ It is most unwise to bet against Jim’s predictions. If he is right, and his logic seems sound, it is a very worrying situation we find ourselves in. To test his logic very crudely (figure 4) - if we superimpose the June through December 2023 temperature profile onto the 2026 January through May temperatures, then average the year, 2026 would be 1.64°C - indeed higher than 2024’s 1.60°C.
Figure 4. If the rest of 2026 follows the same temperature profile as 2023 (the last strong El Niño, 2026 could break the 2024 full calendar year temperature record. Following that, 2027 will likely soar to between 1.7°C and 1.8°C for the calendar year average. It will certainly be hotter than whatever 2026 delivers, since the peak SAT temperatures lag the ocean temperature extremes. When the system settles in 2028–2030, our new “cool” baseline will likely hover around 1.55°C to 1.7°C—leaving us perfectly positioned so that the subsequent El Niño introduces the first full calendar year at +2.0°C, depending on when it emerges. Permanently passing 2°C next decade now seems unavoidable. The planetary impacts locked into the backend of this decade will be severe; there is simply too much thermal energy accumulated in the system for any other outcome. This places the planet squarely in the danger zone for a number of the great tipping elements including the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, Boreal Permafrost abrupt thawing, Ocean Current disruption and Amazon collapse. We can only hope that these upcoming systemic shocks finally jolt global leadership and the voting public into treating the crisis with the structural seriousness it demands. Thanks for reading Climate Uncovered! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. If you found this article interesting or useful, please tick the ❤️ button as it helps the algorithm point more people in this direction and gives us feedback on what subjects are most useful. Thank you! 1 Official NOAA CPC ENSO Strength Probabilities Issued June 2026, https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso/roni/strengths/ 2 Ionita M (2024) Large-scale drivers of the exceptionally low winter Antarctic sea ice extent in 2023. Front. Earth Sci. 12:1333706. doi:10.3389/feart.2024.1333706 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2024.1333706/full 3 R.W. Clark et al., Synchronous retreat of Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers in response to external forcings in the presatellite era, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (11) e2211711120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2211711120 (2024). 4 New Scientist 18th May 2026, The ‘doomsday’ glacier’s giant ice shelf is about to break away, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526826-the-doomsday-glaciers-giant-ice-shelf-is-about-to-break-away/ 5 Tao Lian, Ruikun Hu, Jie Feng, Ting Liu, Youmin Tang, Dake Chen. Extreme Spring Pacific Annular Warming Elevates the 2026/27 El Niño. Ocean-Land-Atmos Res. 2026;5:0153. DOI:10.34133/olar.0153 https://spj.science.org/doi/10.34133/olar.0153 6 Pan, Y., Cheng, L., Abraham, J. et al. Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025. Adv. Atmos. Sci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-026-5876-0 7
James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Dylan Morgan and Jasen Vest… 5 days ago · 101 likes · 23 comments · James Hansen
© 2026 Tom Harris
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Tom Goreau
Excellent brief summary, Clive!
I’ve been tracking global sea surface temperatures since the satellites capable of mapping them went up in the early 1980s. Every major El Niño has been followed by a slight rise in the baseline for the next event. It’s more of a ratchet mechanism response than the smooth exponential most people mechanically insist on fitting to it!
We are headed for uncharted territory as more and more tipping point are crossed, and we won’t see normality again in our lifetimes until all the long-response non-linear hysteresis feedbacks play out, which could take millions of years.
Here in Pemuteran, Bali, where Biorock Indonesia is doing environmental DNA studies on the world’s most biodiverse coral restoration projects, Biorock Technology is helping us grow back coral reef biodiversity, while most coral ecosystems worldwide are collapsing from high temperature stress feedbacks, a small candle in the impenetrable darkness we face.
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Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change
No one can change the past, everybody can change the future
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