\u201c2016 would be an unusually cold year if it occurred today,\u201d Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for payment processing giant Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, told me. \u201c1998 would be exceptionally cold.\u201d<\/p>\n
And yet in a strange twist, a 2026-2027 El Ni\u00f1o event might actually make Americans care less about climate change. Though many parts of the world are likely to get clobbered by El Ni\u00f1o\u2019s characteristic combination of hotter, drier weather, the phenomenon has the potential to alleviate some of the extreme weather we\u2019ve seen recently in the United States. <\/p>\n
For example, warmer, wetter conditions in the southern U.S., milder winters in the north, and increased wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane basin are all classic El Ni\u00f1o signatures in North America. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt may actually mean a better snow season for the Western U.S. and the mountains, hopefully recovering our snowpack<\/a> if it\u2019s not too warm,\u201d Hausfather said. \u201cWe might benefit from higher rainfall\u201d next winter, which could help lift widespread drought conditions in the southwest. High wind shear usually results in reduced hurricane activity in the Atlantic by depriving the storm systems of their heat engines<\/a> and causing them to be too lopsided to organize into a full-blown cyclone<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though the body of evidence for climate change remains incontrovertible<\/a>, the temporary reprieve in some of its more visible effects will almost certainly make some Americans less concerned. Blame it on evolutionary biology. Brett Pelham, a social psychologist at Montgomery College who researches egocentrism and biases, told me that humans are hardwired to pay attention to the conditions happening directly around them. \u201cThat\u2019s great if you\u2019re living 20,000 or 80,000 years ago,\u201d he said. \u201cBut today, we\u2019re pumping tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it\u2019s a recipe for disaster because people only care deeply about that problem if they feel the heat on a pretty chronic basis where they live.\u201d<\/p>\n People are generally less likely to believe the planet is warming on a snowy day in March than they are in the summer, and a lower average state temperature is about as reliable a predictor<\/a> of climate change skepticism as being a Republican, even when controlling for income, party affiliation, education, and age. Given that it is, in theory, easier to convince someone living in scorching hot Phoenix that greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere than someone living by a lake in Minnesota, if an El Ni\u00f1o mellows out some extreme weather trends in the U.S. this year and next, it could also mellow some of the sense of urgency to act. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a definite implication of my work that day-to-day variation, monthly variation, and geographical variation matter,\u201d Pelham said. <\/p>\n \u201cIf my data are true,\u201d he added, \u201cit\u2019s going to be true on average that in places that have an unseasonably cool summer or winter, there\u2019s going to be a temporary shift in the average attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n Such shifts affect the average by just a few points either way \u2014 \u201cthey\u2019re not night and day, like \u2018I believed in climate change and now I don\u2019t,\u2019\u201d Pelham stressed. But it\u2019s undoubtedly ironic \u2014 and concerning \u2014 that heading into what could be one of the hottest years on the planet in recent history, Americans may be predisposed to feeling relatively safe.<\/p>\n Other parts of the world won\u2019t have such luxury. Even a normal-strength El Ni\u00f1o, which looks all but certain<\/a> to form this year, could cause major damage, from wildfires in parched Indonesia<\/a> to catastrophic floods in East Africa t<\/a>o water rationing in South America<\/a>. In Peru and Ecuador, El Ni\u00f1o is already a \u201ccurrent event,\u201d \u00c1ngel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, told me. Warm coastal conditions off the continent \u2014 a known<\/a>, albeit not guaranteed, global El Ni\u00f1o precursor \u2014 are causing deluges, landslides, and heat waves in the upper northwest corner of South America. \u201cYou can see how the impacts start extending towards other parts of the world until it reaches us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n It is possible to combat local biases. Pelham told me other researchers have found<\/a> that images can break through our egocentrism. So \u201cif we see more pictures of melting glaciers or waters rising in our own backyards, we would start to say, \u2018Oh my goodness, we really have to do something about this global problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But to that end, coverage of climate change that might have this effect is becoming rarer. Stories about global warming have dropped about 38% since 2021<\/a>; even people working in climate-related industries have \u201ca kind of exhaustion with \u2018climate\u2019 as the right frame through which to understand the fractious mixture of electrification, pollution reduction, clean energy development, and other goals that people who care about climate change actually pursue,\u201d my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote based on the results of latest Heatmap Insiders Survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, there is no promise that the U.S. will skirt disaster because of El Ni\u00f1o. Increased rainfall means more floods and landslides; if the El Ni\u00f1o pushes temperatures up too high, snowpack will once again be an issue next winter. All it takes is one big hurricane forming and making landfall for it to be considered a bad storm year, which is as much a roll of the dice<\/a> as anything else. And because El Ni\u00f1o releases ocean heat into the atmosphere, the periods immediately following it are often about two-tenths of a degree Celsius warmer, increasing the severity of heat waves<\/a> and droughts. Compounded by climate change, that puts 2027 on track to be potentially the hottest year the planet has seen in human history<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe might be at 1.45 degrees Celsius [above preindustrial levels] next year from human activity, and we might end up at 1.65 degrees because there\u2019s a very strong El Ni\u00f1o,\u201d Hausfather said. But for context, \u201cwe are seeing that much warmth added to the climate system from human activity roughly every decade,\u201d he told me. That is, \u201c\u2014 we\u2019re adding a permanent super El Ni\u00f1o-worth of heat to the climate system\u201d via the continued burning of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n There couldn\u2019t be a worse time to let up on our collective sense of climate urgency, to put it mildly. But if El Ni\u00f1o makes conditions in the U.S. appear any better, then even if there\u2019s disaster elsewhere, \u201cyou\u2019re going to give a sigh of relief,\u201d Pelham predicted. \u201cYou\u2019re going to feel like [climate change is] not as bad as people have hyped it up to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201c2016 would be an unusually cold year if it occurred today,\u201d Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,121445,121444,92998,45884,120250,3604,120251,535],"class_list":{"0":"post-282766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-california-public-utility-commission","12":"tag-electricity-price-hub","13":"tag-electricity-prices","14":"tag-los-angeles-fires","15":"tag-net-metering","16":"tag-pge","17":"tag-rooftop-solar","18":"tag-wildfires"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}