The phenomenon is hidden beneath the surface – what awaits then?

Jonathan Jeppsson

This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are the writer's. 

Published 21.52

For now, it is hidden beneath the surface – all the accumulated heat that will well up when El Niño takes off in earnest.

But it will only be really interesting after the coming years.

What may linger is an atmospheric noise.

On July 27th, it happened: Two climate scientists who are sometimes very far apart suddenly agreed.

The more adventurous James Hansen, the so-called climate godfather, and the much more cautious Zeke Hausfather, more faithful to the restrained IPCC line, had come to the same conclusion.

Next year, 2027, will be the warmest ever.

And by a wide margin.

Both climate scientists believed that the average temperature in 2027 will end up at 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial times.

The explanation is not surprisingly spelled El Niño. In other words, the basically completely natural weather phenomenon fueled by global warming is now on the verge of growing into a “Super-El Niño” or even a “Godzilla-El Niño”.

The real heat is still simmering a bit further down in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, but will well up to where it is suffering.

The forecast curves for how powerful it will be have been so high that they have spread outside the charts themselves. This has led some climate scientists to humorously share memes from the movie Jaws about how we “need a bigger y-axis”.

The fires in southern Europe, the heat records being broken in France, the US, South Korea and the Middle East, the major rivers drying up; all of these could be the first signs of the El Niño we are already in. It only unfolds in full force in late autumn and winter, with a string of different weather phenomena as a result. How extensive they will be can simply be left to the imagination.

The UN climate panel IPCC's reports inevitably lag behind the latest research, and their conclusions are also often carefully formulated, partly to avoid alarmism.

But in reality the IPCC may have underestimated the speed and extent of climate change. What we already know is that the consequences of climate change have so far come earlier than many thought, that the acceleration we are now seeing is more serious than many scientists predicted.

This could mean that the climate is considerably more sensitive than we thought. It is usually measured in how much warming would increase if carbon dioxide levels doubled: the IPCC has an average value that we would then have a three degree warmer climate. But James Hansen, the adventurous one, dismisses this completely. He believes that climate sensitivity is instead between four and five degrees – largely because the IPCC failed to predict how much the reduction in aerosols, i.e. small sulfur particles, in the atmosphere plays a role.

(They are decreasing due to cleaner ship fuel, among other things, and thus do not reflect as much sunlight. That can happen with good intentions.)

And it is what happens in the years after 2027 that will be most interesting.

Zeke Hausfather, the moderate, writes: “I am not sure if people have realized how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – due to the consequences of a record El Niño.”

The question is how long the effects will linger. Normally, temperatures fall back and often turn into their opposite, La Nina.

Perhaps we will settle on a new plateau, slightly higher than the one we are on today.

But a 2026 study shows that atmospheric noise could leave enough heat in the ocean for El Niño to continue for another year – a multi-year El Niño, which is considered very unusual.

What this would entail in terms of economic repercussions, marine heat waves, altered fish stocks and cloud formation, no one really knows.

We are in uncharted territory now.