Climate change

Study: El Niño Events in Recent Decades Are The Strongest in 1,000 Years

Are stronger El Niño events proof of human-caused climate change or simply the result of natural variability?

Published AUG 28

Study: El Niño Events in Recent Decades Are The Strongest in 1,000 Years

Story

Above: A red rock crab in Tortuga Bay at Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos archipelago, Ecuador, on June 26, 2023. Image credit: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images

The Facts

A study published in the journal Science on Thursday found that El Niño events over the past 40 years were stronger than at any point in the previous 1,000 years, with variability in the eastern Pacific now 36.5% greater than in the pre-industrial era.
Science
PHYS
The research, led by University of Michigan paleoclimatologist Julia Cole, analyzed living and fossil corals from the Galápagos Islands — said to be at the heart of El Niño activity — measuring strontium-to-calcium ratios and oxygen isotopes to reconstruct ocean temperatures spanning roughly 1,000 years.
The Conversation
Science
El Niño events in the past four decades were also about 16% stronger than those recorded during the 20th century, according to the study, with the authors associating the recent intensification with accelerated global warming driven by fossil-fuel emissions since the mid-19th century.
CNN
The Guardian
The Associated Press
To rule out natural causes, researchers used climate models accounting for volcanic eruptions and solar variability over the past millennium and found no natural explanation for the scale of El Niño intensification observed in the coral record.
PHYS
The Current
Some outside scientists raised questions about the findings, with University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann noting what he described as "a substantial decline in recent decades" in El Niño-related ocean temperature variations near the Galápagos during the period of greatest greenhouse gas warming.
The Associated Press
New Scientist
The study was released as a powerful El Niño was strengthening in the Pacific, with sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific reaching 2.7°C above average by mid-August. A 2023 study estimated that the strong El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 caused trillions of dollars in economic losses.
Inside Climate News
NBC

Sources Split

LEFT

CENTER

RIGHT

ESTAB
CRIT

CENTER

PRO
ESTAB

The Spin

Climate-concerned narrative

Coral records from the Galápagos make it clear — El Niño events are stronger now than at any point in the past 1,000 years, and human-caused warming is driving that shift. Stronger El Niños mean more devastating droughts, floods and economic losses, and the world needs to start preparing for that reality.

Science on X

Nature

The Conversation

Climate-skeptic narrative

The conflation of El Niño variability and climate alarmism is reaching absurd levels of discourse. There needs to be a much more vigorous challenging of climate activist science and "journalism" in the public arena.

Ryan Maue on X

Steve Milloy on X

Narrative C

The Galápagos coral study is interesting data, but the leap to blaming human warming is a stretch the evidence doesn't fully support. The IPCC itself concluded there is no consensus from models on a systematic change in El Niño sea surface temperature variability, and large model ensembles found no historical trends distinguishable from internal variability.