With COP31 taking place next week, the Royal Meteorological Society has led the development of a new media briefing to support journalists, media organisations and others in communicating accurately about El Niño. The briefing brings together scientific understanding and evidence-based messaging, highlighting the importance of reporting on El Niño in the context of human-caused climate change. It aims to help ensure that coverage of this major climate phenomenon reflects the wider picture of a warming planet.

We would like to thank Ella Gilbert, Paul Behrens, Liz Bentley, Matthew Collins, Hayley Fowler, Sreevathsa Golla, Penny Holliday, Frankie Oliver and Fredi Otto for their valuable contributions to the development of this briefing.

Key points

• A powerful El Niño on a hotter planet means greater risks. The current El Niño is the strongest in the modern observational record. It will influence weather around the world, but its impacts are unfolding against a background of unprecedented human-induced warming, meaning extreme weather can now have more damaging consequences.
• El Niño may push global temperatures towards new records, but fossil fuels are driving the long-term warming. The impact of climate change on global temperatures is more than ten times the short-term boost associated with a typical El Niño event. Climate change is already affecting extreme weather risk, the cost of living, and food systems and supply chains in the UK. This year’s El Niño could temporarily push temperatures to 1.6 -1.8°C, a long-term level of heating we will reach within 10-15 years at current emission rates.  
• A warmer world can amplify El Niño’s disruption. El Niño shifts rainfall and atmospheric circulation, increasing heatwaves and droughts in some regions, and extreme rainfall and floods in others. The warmer atmosphere from climate change intensifies heat and rainfall extremes, worsening the consequences for people, agriculture, water supplies, and infrastructure. However, impacts vary considerably between regions and individual events.
• The UK is not insulated from the consequences. El Niño can influence North Atlantic weather patterns, potentially affecting winter storms and rainfall, although its effects on UK weather are less predictable than in the tropics. The UK is also exposed through global food production, commodity prices, supply chains and economic disruption. Climate change is already increasing the UK’s exposure to extreme heat and intense rainfall. 
• We cannot stop El Niño, but we can limit the warming that makes its impacts more dangerous. There is growing evidence that climate change increases the severity of El Niño events and amplifies its impacts, and there is high confidence that continued warming will intensify extreme heat and rainfall. Rapidly cutting fossil fuel emissions and investing in climate resilience are essential to limiting future risks.

Dr Ella Gilbert, who led the briefing, said: 

“Climate change is turbocharging extreme weather, and when we add an off-the-charts El Niño into the mix, we can expect some serious impacts this year and next. It’s vital that the public understands that fossil fuel-driven climate change is having a much larger and longer-lasting effect on food prices, energy costs and global trade than El Niño, and the media has a crucial role to play in communicating that.”

View the full briefing note