Climate change, not El Niño, is the real story behind today’s extreme weather, scientists tell journalists at 350.org briefing
As a strong El Niño develops on top of already record global temperatures, leading climate scientists and policy experts warned today that media coverage attributing extreme weather primarily to El Niño is missing the real story, and that the mounting cost of climate disasters is falling hardest on the people least responsible for causing them.
Speaking at “Fuel on Fire: Reporting El Niño and the True Costs of Climate Change,” a journalist and communications briefing hosted by 350.org, climate physicist Davide Faranda, meteorologist Shel Winkley, ECIU’s Gareth Redmond-King and 350.org’s Amira Odeh Quiñones set out the latest attribution science and its human cost, across the globe
Davide Faranda, Research Director at CNRS and coordinator of the ClimaMeter attribution initiative, said the world has already warmed by 1.4°C due to greenhouse gas emissions, with El Niño set to add up to a further 0.25°C at the global scale on top of that baseline. He said attribution science has moved past the question of whether extreme weather is being intensified by climate change, and is now focused on precisely how much.
“The question for attribution science is no longer whether weather extreme events are enhanced or intensified by climate change, but how much,” Faranda said, pointing to ClimaMeter research showing a recent June heatwave in Western Europe was up to 2.5°C warmer because of climate change.
Shel Winkley, senior engagement specialist and chief meteorologist at Climate Central, illustrated the relationship between the two forces with a simple image: “Climate change is the cake and El Niño is essentially the frosting on top.” He said Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index shows many ocean basins are experiencing warmth made significantly more likely by climate change, with sea surface temperatures in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean now up to 500 times more likely because of it. He also warned that nighttime temperatures are warming almost twice as fast as daytime ones, reducing the body’s ability to recover from daytime heat stress.
Amira Odeh Quiñones, of 350.org’s Caribbean team, described the crisis as already a humanitarian emergency in the region. She said 82% of Puerto Rico is currently experiencing drought, with water rationing underway in some communities, daily temperatures above 38°C across the Greater Antilles, and growing risk of dengue, Zika and chikungunya outbreaks linked to drought and heat. Unusually warm seas are also driving larger sargassum blooms that are damaging tourism, fisheries and coastal livelihoods.
“While we have experienced El Niño many times before in the Caribbean, it is very visible in the most recent years how the climate crisis is making this phenomenon feel more intense in the region. We are feeling extreme heat and drought and we are paying the consequences with threats to our health and effects on the household income of many struggling families”
Gareth Redmond-King, Head of International Programme at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), set out the economic scale of the crisis, citing analysis suggesting current climate trajectories could cut global GDP in half later this century, and noting that African countries are already losing 2-5% of GDP annually to climate impacts, while spending up to 9% of national budgets responding to climate disasters. In the UK, he said climate change added an estimated £360 to the average household’s food bill in 2022 and 2023 alone.
“Climate change is absolutely at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis, climate disasters kill people, destroy crops, and damage infrastructure in the short term. In the medium term, they’re building bigger risks into our global food system.”
All four speakers agreed that while nothing can be done about El Niño itself, the response to the broader crisis is clear.
Gareth Redmond-King “We know we can do nothing about El Niño, but we know we have only one scientific solution to halting climate change, which is to cut our emissions to net zero,”
The briefing forms part of 350.org’s ongoing push to connect the science of climate attribution with the economics of who bears the cost, as the fossil fuel system continues to be subsidised to the tune of $12 trillion a year globally, while ordinary people pay three times over: through their taxes, their energy bills, and the escalating cost of climate disasters.
A recording of the full briefing and slides from the presentations are available on request for journalists and communicators who could not attend live.
