This Year’s El Niño Is Huge and Already Changing the World

Collecting water from a well in a drought-afflicted village in Gujarat, India, in May.

The recurring climate phenomenon is expected to peak later this year, but it is already causing dry spells and crop failures on three continents.

El Niño is the planet’s naturally recurring chaos agent, scrambling weather patterns, spiking global temperatures and typically reaching full strength by December.

But this year’s El Niño, which is expected to be record-breaking, is already strong and having big effects, nudging up global temperatures and causing dry spells and crop failures on multiple continents.

Parts of Panama, normally one of the wettest countries on Earth, haven’t had a major storm since early May. Ethiopia’s fertile highlands are enduring one of their driest summer stretches in four decades. And India had its fifth-driest June since the country’s modern rain records began in 1901.

“This is a good sign that the El Niño response has really kicked in,” said Chris Funk, director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Funk termed it an “early onset El Niño.”

These on-the-ground consequences reflect the magnitude of the changes in the Pacific Ocean, where El Niños develop when unusually warm waters build up. These episodes occur every two to seven years and have contributed to planetary swings going back millenniums. But this year’s is on track to be the strongest in nearly 80 years of records.

Scientists are debating whether human-caused climate change is tilting the odds toward stronger and more frequent El Niño events. The El Niños of the past few decades have been comparably strong. But the variables that combine to create an El Niño are complex, and some experts argue the recent trend could just be a random signal.

What’s clear is that El Niño’s gyrations are adding to the stronger storms, drier dry spells and fiercer wildfires that global warming is already bringing about. El Niño will magnify those phenomena in some regions and could lift global temperatures to record levels next year, as the heat from the Pacific spreads around the world.

“What we’ll see in 2027 is a sneak peak of what the new normal will be in 2035,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization. “We’ll see things that have never happened before in our history in terms of temperature, drought conditions, extreme heat.”

Sun-scorched Richmond Park in southwest London this month.