90 percent chance.
That’s the number floating around lately. Zeke Hausfather says there’s a 90% probability this coming 2026–2027 event will be the biggest El Niño ever measured. Not just big. The biggest.
Hausfather works for Berkeley Earth. He helped write the IPCC’s latest assessment report. So when he points to dynamical models predicting Pacific Ocean temperatures soaring to 3.6°C above average, you pay attention. Or you should.
Some people think we’re jumping the gun. Too early. Data still trickling in. True, we won’t know for sure until the peak hits later this year. But the consensus is tightening. It’s narrowing.
The World Meteorological Organization declared the current cycle live in June. Now the NOAA Climate Prediction Center sees better than an 80% shot of very strong conditions by year’s end. That puts it in the heavy hitters’ club historically.
“These are striking forecasts,” says Emily Black at the University of Reading. “El Niño predictions usually come with caveats. The models agree too much right now for comfort. The tropical Pacific is already heating up.”
It’s not just a weather quirk. It’s a multiplier.
Heat with a side of chaos
El Niño is natural. It happens. Warm water piles up in the east equatorial Pacific. The jet stream drags itself south. In the US, the Northeast gets hot and dry while the Southeast and Gulf Coast drown in flood risk.
But here is the twist. We aren’t dealing with nature in isolation.
The planet is already cooking from human-made greenhouse gases. A strong El Niño dumps more heat and energy into an atmosphere that is already full of it. They don’t just add up. They interact.
Think of El Niño as loading the dice. It biases the outcome toward drought in one place, flooding in another. Climate change loads them further. It makes the heat extremes harder to bear and the rain harder to catch.
“The important point is that this shifts the odds,” Black noted. Especially in the Global South. Livelihoods are on the line there. Not abstract metrics.
The International Rescue Committee sees disaster signs in East Africa and Asia. Floods. Drought. Hitting the poorest hardest. Al Jazeera picked this up recently.
Is this the worst it can be?
Breaking the record books?
Let’s look at the numbers again. Hausfather’s latest post in The Climate Brink Substack broke down 667 computer model runs across 14 systems.
The result?
It looks like this isn’t just strong. It might obliterate the old record. The 2015–2016 El Niyo is the current benchmark. Hausfather projects this one will beat it by 0.8°C. A mind-blowing margin if accurate.
Traditional indices might even push it past 4°C anomaly.
Black pushes back. Just a bit. She likes data too. But she likes context more.
“I’d be cautious treating probability as certainty,” she said. “It hasn’t peaked. Also, ‘strongest’ depends on which thermometer you use and what baseline you pick.”
Fair.
But records are boring unless they kill people. And the history books aren’t exactly kind here.
Impacts > Stats
The 1877–1878 El Niño wasn’t logged by satellite. Nobody measured it. But it caused a famine. One that killed 50 million people across the globe.
Was it just weather? No. Colonial agricultural policies played a role. Extractive, brutal ones. But the drought was the trigger. The weather created the vacuum. Politics filled it with corpses.
Now?
Food insecurity isn’t a poor country problem anymore. It’s global. Systems are stressed. The El Niño-Southern oscillation swings between hot El Niño and cold La Niña every few years. We’re in the hot phase now. Carbon Brief predicts 2026 will be the second-warmest ever. 2027 might break all time.
Does strength equal damage? Not always. Sometimes a medium storm hits the wrong spot. But a “very strong” rating increases the certainty of bad outcomes.
Black’s final take sums it up without the fluff.
“Records are compelling, but impacts matter. Even if we don’t break a record, the consequences will be serious.”
We have months to prepare. Maybe.
The models say go. The oceans are rising. The heat is coming. What happens when it peaks? We’ll know. Probably too late for some.
