El Niño weather has begun – temperatures are expected

What many scientific institutions predicted, that El Niño global warming would return this year, has now happened. On Thursday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that El Niño has started now.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had earlier warned that this could lead to global warming of more than 1.5 degrees in the coming years.

Now next year, 2024, it could It became the warmest year on record. 2016 was the warmest year on record when El Niño prevailed.

The weather phenomenon will affect the weather globally, it could mean drought in Australia, weaker monsoons in India and more rain in parts of Africa and the USA.

As DN has written before, scientists were concerned about previous heat records set this year.

Among the most troubling are the exceptional heat records in the world’s oceans. In early April, a new record was set when the average surface water temperature was 21.1 degrees, a tenth higher than the previous record set in 2016, the warmest year on record. Surface water temperatures have continued to rise above previous years’ records since then.

These records were set before El Niño began. More heat records are now expected next year.

According to NOAA, this El Niño begins a month or two earlier than it normally would, giving it “room to grow.” There is a 56 percent chance that El Niño will be strong and a 25 percent chance that it will be “very strong,” NOAA climate scientist Michelle Laureux, tells the Associated Press.

The discovery that El Niño has begun comes at the same time as major wildfires are raging in Canada and smoke from the fires is causing severe air pollution in the United States. According to information in The Guardian newspaper, New York currently has the worst air quality of any major city in the world.

The World Meteorological Organization has a forecast I recently discovered that there is a 66 percent chance that the global average annual temperature in one of the years from 2023 to 2027 will be more than 1.5 degrees higher than in pre-industrial times.

In such cases, this would be the first time the temperature limit has been exceeded on an annual basis. In 2016 – the warmest year on record – the average temperature was 1.28 degrees above pre-industrial times.

But the fact that the 1.5C limit has been exceeded in one year does not mean that the Paris Agreement’s temperature target has been exceeded.

The Paris agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees describes a limit at which the global average annual temperature will be above that for a longer period of time, perhaps around 20 years.

Read more: High risk of 1.5°C warming within five years