Nature
PUBLISHED
Climate experts are cautioning that global temperatures may reach record highs later this year if there is another El Niño event. However, there is still uncertainty over whether that will happen.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Over the past few years, El Niño, a complex naturally occurring climate pattern, has significantly boosted global temperatures, especially in 2023 and 2024. This happens alongside human-caused climate change, which produces the long-term upward trend in global temperature, with El Niño adding temporary but impactful spikes in the climb.
El Niño, which means “little boy” in Spanish, involves surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean becoming unusually warm. This causes a shift in where heat and moisture from the ocean enter the atmosphere, disrupting global weather patterns. As well as contributing to global temperature increases, it also leads to more floods in South America, East Africa, and the Southern US, as well as droughts across South-East Asia, Australia, Southern Africa, and northern South America.
These shifting conditions have a range of additional impacts. For one thing, El Niño can destabilize food security for global commodities like rice, sugar, coffee, and cocoa, while also damaging specific environments and habitats.
Because El Niños can have such a large impact on global conditions, their potential development is closely monitored by organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Since September 2025, a weak La Niña event, the opposite of El Niño, has been in place. La Niña (Spanish for “little girl”) is characterized by unusually cool surface waters in the equatorial Pacific. It has contributed to heavier rainfall in certain parts of the world, including the Amazon basis, which has actually helped offset sea level rise. However, this event is likely to be short lived.
According to the WMO’s Global Producing Centres forecasts, there is a 60 percent chance of what is called ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) neutral conditions – neither El Niño nor La Niña – developing during March to May 2026.
The chance of this neutral condition rises further to 70 percent during April and June. After this, however, the chances of El Niño steadily rise to around 40 percent.
Of course, this is based on long range forecasting, which becomes increasingly uncertain the further into the future you look. Predictions at this time of year are also generally less reliable due to the "boreal spring predictability barrier", which is known to impact predictions related to ENSO.
“The WMO community will be carefully monitoring conditions in the coming months to inform decision-making. The most recent El Niño, in 2023-24, was one of the five strongest on record and it played a role in the record global temperatures we saw in 2024,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained in a statement.
“Seasonal forecasts for El Niño and La Niña help us avert millions of dollars in economic losses and are essential planning tools for climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water management. They are also a key part of the climate intelligence provided by WMO to support humanitarian operations and disaster risk management, and thus save lives”.
