What the Super El Niño means?
Scientists are warning the next Super El Niño could become one of the defining climate shocks of the decade — colliding with global instability, food insecurity and fertiliser disruptions in ways that could trigger cascading humanitarian disasters worldwide.
We are facing a unique climate event that could be the harbinger of much more catastrophic heat events as the reality of climate change becomes more apparent by the passing month.
A Super El Niño.
What we learned after a super El Niño wiped out millions of people in 1877
The climatic phenomenon is expected to return this year, but a lot has changed since what might have been the worst environmental disaster in human history.
As chances rise for one of the strongest El Niño events on record later this year, the potential for dangerous conditions has prompted comparisons to 1877, when such an event drove catastrophe around the globe.
El Niño is a warming of ocean waters in the east-central tropical Pacific that develops every few years. This year, ocean temperatures there could surge 3ºC above average and break records.
The last Super El Niño triggered one of history’s worst famines
The climatic shift devastated crops nearly 150 years ago, raising the question of whether a similar disruption could threaten global food security yet again. The strongest El Niño on record from 1877 to 1878 fuelled conditions that led to a global famine which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere. That was 3% to 4% of the estimated global population at the time, equal to at least 250 million people if it happened today.
“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity,” researchers have written about the event.
This disaster took years to unfold. Drought began spreading across the tropics and subtropics in 1875. In the years that followed, a combination of strong climate forces in the Indian and Atlantic oceans formed alongside the record-breaking El Niño, amplifying and prolonging the drought.
Climate shocks and food shortages could collide catastrophically
Compounding the coming drought is the reality that if the fertiliser doesn’t reach farmers in time for the growing season this year, we will lose 10 billion meals per week!
Billions of meals at risk due to Iran war, says fertiliser boss
The interruption to supplies of fertiliser and its key ingredients due to the war in Iran could cost up to 10 billion meals a week globally and will hit poorest countries hardest, according to the boss of one of the world’s biggest fertiliser producers.
So a catastrophic Super El Niño combined with the loss of 10 billion meals a week could easily lead to a cascading famine.
We have breached tipping points from which they can be no return to ‘normal’.
We are in the age of consequences now with climate change and the shockwave it generates will shatter the current political spectrum in New Zealand.
This Super El Niño is just the beginning.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!”
At this point, I’m just wanting the meteor to stop dilly-dallying and get on with smiting us out of existence completely. Kids these days must think about the future and see nothing other than a yawning, lightless abyss of misery. “Thanks previous generations for fucking everything up and leaving us to pick up the pieces. Cheers for that.”
Meanwhile, Shane ‘Pornography’ Jones is still “weary of shrill voices on climate change” because we all know it’s a hysterical fiction dreamed up by the Green Party… right kids?
No doubt the climate change deniers will quietly shut their closed minds and loose mouths as more of these events/catastrophes hit us. May pay to give your rabbit holes a miss this year! No party leader should be encouraging his enablers to adhere to this belief. Do go back and read about the 1877 super El Nino that led to a global famine wiping out 50 million people. A huge wake-up call coming.