When wars between nations threaten to erupt into the unimaginable, when an American strongman attacks democracy, and when artificial intelligence looks set to upend our daily lives, it’s all but impossible to focus on something like the changing climate.
It’s even harder when that same strongman, leading a global populist push, creates false narratives about climate change to discredit science and destroy counter-measures.
For all that, we’re now at the point where climate change is set to force itself into the global conversation in ways we have long secretly feared but always felt able to set aside to attend to other things.
It’s been a slow burn. Way back in 1997-98 a powerful El Niño had the world wondering whether the heat was on, but for more than a decade the ocean’s take-up of excess heat held air temperatures in check. The non-appearance of a new hottest-ever year after 1998 was fodder for the concocted 2009 scandal of “Climategate”.
Meanwhile the new century saw devastating weather events – multi-year droughts in Australia and Africa, multiple Northern Hemisphere heatwaves, Asian typhoons, Atlantic hurricanes, catastrophic rains. And wildfires burning in Australia, North America and in surprising places in Europe and Asia – in ways never before seen, even to the point of creating their own weather.
All the while in the background the world was warming. That’s what the science told us, but it was easy to overlook. Between the “hottest-ever” years were respite years that allowed people’s attention to move elsewhere, which wasn’t hard given the increasing distractions of other news.
Now the stars are aligning, and not in a good way. For a couple of years, two climate science heavyweights, IPCC lead author Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and the legendary James Hansen (formerly NASA, now Columbia University) have produced different interpretations of the state of the climate.
They continue to exchange jibes. Hansen, who unlike Hausfather asserts that a currently-moderate 2026 will turn out to be the warmest year on record, said earlier this year that “when the horse race comes down the stretch, in November and December of this year, we will be riding a thoroughbred, a strong young horse, and Zeke will be atop a fading old nag.”
“For the record,” said Hausfather last week, “I am the fading old nag in this metaphor. I have been called worse.” For his part, Hausfather maintains the two scientists are not so far apart, and now thinks Hansen may be right about 2026 being warmer than the current record year, 2024.
But the key message from both these leading scientists is that while 2026 is going to end up about as warm as the current record year, 2024, the odds are even stronger that next year will set a new record and that it will be by a big margin. With that combination, says Hausfather – a powerful El Niño and accelerating background warming – we’re in for a wild climate ride.
As Berkeley Earth’s June report found, this northern summer saw central Pacific temperatures already crossing the threshold for a “super” El Niño months ahead of the pattern of 1997 and 2015, when the two strongest events of the satellite era were forming. No prior event in the 45-year El Niño-La Niña record was this warm this early.
Long-range predictions involving weather patterns with a global reach like El Nino attract a lot of scepticism. Past predictions of big El Nino events, which involve the warming of surface waters of the eastern Pacific at intervals varying from two to seven years, have often come to little or nothing.
But the signals around a currently developing El Nino are exceptional, “outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed” in the words of leading US scientist Zeke Hausfather. Not known for extravagant language, Hausfather says that this El Nino could be “the strongest event since reliable records began… by a truly mind-blowing margin.”
The duelling between Hansen and Hausfather is science working as it should. As my go-to popular science commentator Dave Borlace puts it, “you make the best assessment you can from the evidence currently available, then when better evidence comes along, you update your conclusions – not because science has failed, but precisely because science is working.”
So the heat and fire of this northern summer – still far from over – stands a fair chance of happening again next year, just as it does here next summer. But the coming El Niño will not have a uniform impact, and a rising global mean temperature is just that – an average. So nothing is certain. My plan is to take each day as it comes, and keep on keeping on.