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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Godzilla El Nino Predicted [1]

['View Profile', 'Thom Hartmann', 'News Corpse', 'Chitown Kev']

Date: 2026-05-07  

In a NYT Opinion piece The World Is About to Get a Preview of Life in 2035, David Wallace Wells contends:

A climate monster is growing right now in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. They now know the pattern quite well: A marine heat-wave in the Pacific Ocean scrambles global weather and produces in some places more intense droughts and in others more intense rainfall and flooding; disruptions to hurricane patterns and monsoon seasons, which can cause widespread crop failures; and much more punishing heat. The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts.”

“But some are already calling it a “Super Duper El Niño,” and others a “Godzilla El Niño,” and underlying warming has been accelerating in recent years, disconcertingly, raising the possibility that even a brief spike will push the planet into genuinely uncharted territory temperature-wise. In fact, it’s almost certain that this El Niño will make 2027 the hottest year on record by some margin, and there is a chance, the climate scientist James Hansen has suggested, that global average temperatures would jump to 1.7 degrees above the preindustrial average next year.”

“We are now in a different base line climate,” said Clara Deser, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. That means past El Niños don’t necessarily tell us how the El Niños of the future will look.

El Nino typical impacts on North America include wetter conditions in southern US while the northern region is dryer. But in 2023-24, the warm temperatures in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans muted El Nino’s effects, a pattern which was driven by rising GHG emissions and longer climate variations.

“Stronger El Niño events can only make certain outcomes more likely, but it does not ensure them,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a meteorologist who coordinates NOAA’s updates on El Niño and La Niña.

Note to readers: I tried five different ktkbp images from the photo library and was unable to get one to upload to a readable size. Is anyone else having this problem?

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/7/800034405/community/kitchen-table-kibitzing-powerful-el-nino-predicted/

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