Next El Niño could be tipping point for a hotter climate

It’s getting hot in here Next El Niño could be tipping point for a hotter climate Pacific heat pulse is temporary, but scientists warn that its climate impacts are not. Inside Climate News – Apr 27, 2026 10:12 am | 34 The 2024 El Niño in the Tropical Pacific, combined with human-caused warming, dried out vast tracts of the Amazon region, crushing livelihoods and displacing people, and also flipped some forests to release more carbon dioxide than they absorb and store, a “regime shift” in the Amazon carbon cycle. Credit: Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images The 2024 El Niño in the Tropical Pacific, combined with human-caused warming, dried out vast tracts of the Amazon region, crushing livelihoods and displacing people, and also flipped some forests to release more carbon dioxide than they absorb and store, a “regime shift” in the Amazon carbon cycle. Credit: Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries, and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over. Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts. In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts. Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called “climate regime shifts,” meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns. El Niño is one of the planet’s biggest natural release valves for ocean heat. The venting starts with periodic shifts of swirling ocean currents and winds over the Pacific. That causes huge stores of tropical ocean heat to surge eastward from the Western Pacific Warm Pool, roughly between Australia and Indonesia, northward to Japan. Those tropical seas are by far the warmest ocean region on Earth and span an area four times as large as the continental United States. When that ocean heat spreads across the equatorial Pacific, it spills into the atmosphere in pulses that tilt weather patterns, reroute powerful high-elevation winds, raise global temperatures, bleach coral reefs, and disrupt fisheries and ocean ecosystems. The effects hit continents as well, intensifying rainstorms and flooding in some regions, while amplifying extreme heat, drought and wildfires in others. In 2015, heat from the tropical Pacific helped raise the global annual average temperature irreversibly past 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. And in 2024, Earth experienced the hottest year recorded in human history, aided by another El Niño boost. Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades. Hot El Niño cycles in…

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