Claims

Water scarcity is a complex, difficult problem being affected by climate change, which introduces growing uncertainty about future water availability and supply

Global South development matters more for global emissions than developed nation unilateral policies because the Global South's energy demand is growing rapidly as populations increase incomes and consumption, and their policy choices will dominate future emissions.

Wildfires across France and Spain demonstrate climate change is having dramatic real-world effects on people's lives and policy needs to respond, requiring balance between climate action and other policy goals.

Forest management, not only climate change, contributes to wildfire severity; US policy changes around 1990 reduced controlled burning and forest management, leading California governor Jerry Brown to acknowledge forests had turned into 'carbon bombs' from poor management.

England's emissions represent only 3% of China's total emissions, making any unilateral UK climate policy unable to move the global emissions needle, yet England claims to want to 'set an example' through policy.

Climate change is now inflicting billion-plus dollars in annual damages through floods, droughts, and fires, occurring so frequently that they may be reducing global GDP growth by approximately 0.5% per annum, with damages expected to worsen over time.

Volcanic winter from major volcanic eruptions (like Krakatoa) can create multi-year crop failures, and climate change is far more complex than government climate activists portray.

Western asceticism around climate (giving up internal combustion engines, eating less meat, installing solar cells) is self-defeating because the manufacturing of electric vehicles and solar cells in China creates more coal burning there than would be saved by Western emission reductions

Germany shut down nuclear power plants and started burning lignite coal in the name of green energy, exemplifying how focus on asceticism rather than rational problem-solving produces perverse outcomes

Climate change knocked half a point off global GDP growth last year due to floods and fires, affects grain productivity and fertility, and is an inflationary force that reduces growth; combined with resource scarcity and population decline, long-term factors are now biting simultaneously for the first time

In the energy sector, if humans captured just one part in 10,000 of the solar radiation falling on Earth, it would meet all of humanity's energy needs; currently, humans are creating more energy through solar and wind than through oil and gas annually, and this is following an exponential curve that will enable meeting all energy needs through renewable sources by the 2030s.

Climate change is definitely a big issue, but predicting it on a zip-code basis is unrealistic because our math isn't good enough yet. The real problem is not having the tools to deal with it yet. Making solar panels requires seven times more energy than making aluminum, and we're probably going to lose most polysilicon production capacity when China breaks down, creating an industrial production bottleneck.

Climate change is a solvable problem that we are better positioned to solve today with current technology than 20-30 years ago.

The Atlantic hurricane season is frequently suppressed during El Niño because El Niño increases vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, making it more difficult for hurricanes to develop.

Global temperature lags ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation) by around three to five months, meaning most of this El Niño event's warming will probably be seen next year.

According to recent modeling, 2027 could become the warmest year on record by some margin due to the delayed warming response from the current strong El Niño event.

In parts of eastern Africa, seasonal rainfall patterns often become more intense during El Niño events.

When the previous video was made, ensemble forecasts showed a wide spread of possible outcomes ranging from moderate to strong El Niño with some outliers hinting at something exceptional, and this range was largely due to the spring predictability barrier.

One striking feature of current El Niño development is not only how warm the tropical Pacific is becoming, but how quickly it's warming, with current forecasts suggesting a remarkably rapid transition from La Niña conditions earlier this year to a potentially very strong El Niño by the end of 2026.

The latest data about El Niño are telling something completely unprecedented in the historical record and 'not in a good way'.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has earned a reputation as one of the more cautious interpreters of climate data who frequently urges journalists and sometimes fellow scientists not to jump to conclusions before evidence is sufficiently robust.

Zeke Hausfather is a Lead Author for the IPCC's Seventh Assessment Report currently in preparation and has contributed to successive IPCC assessment reports.

Over the past month, forecasters obtained another month's worth of ocean temperature measurements, atmospheric observations, and satellite data, which instead of causing the various models to diverge further, has caused them to converge towards the same conclusion that El Niño could be stronger than record El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.

If current projections are correct, the world is about to witness something that modern climate science has never previously observed: an El Niño potentially stronger than all three record El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.

During normal years, persistent trade winds blow from east to west across the tropical Pacific, piling warm surface water around Indonesia and northern Australia, which allows colder, nutrient-rich water to rise from the deep ocean along the coast of South America through upwelling, resulting in a Pacific Ocean tilted with warm water in the west and cool water in the east.

Every few years the balance between trade winds and ocean temperature breaks down as trade winds weaken and sometimes reverse, allowing the enormous reservoir of heat built beneath the western Pacific to move back towards South America via equatorial Kelvin waves.

As equatorial Kelvin waves move across the Pacific, they deepen the thermocline, which is the boundary separating warm surface water from the colder ocean beneath, suppressing normal upwelling of cool water along the equator and allowing sea surface temperatures to rise.

Once the Bjerknes Feedback reaches a certain level of intensity, the entire Pacific climate system can reorganize itself surprisingly quickly, which appears to be what has happened over the past few weeks.

Trade winds across parts of the equatorial Pacific have weakened substantially, several powerful downwelling Kelvin waves have propagated eastwards beneath the surface, subsurface heat content across the central and eastern Pacific has increased dramatically, and the multi-model median for peak sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region currently stands at 3.6 degrees Celsius.

The multi-model median for the current El Niño's peak sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region is 3.6 degrees Celsius, which is 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter than the previous record of 2.75 degrees Celsius set in 2015-2016.

The 1997-1998 El Niño became the benchmark against which all subsequent events have been measured, causing global coral bleaching at unprecedented levels, huge forest fires in Indonesia that blanketed Southeast Asia in smoke, severe flooding in East Africa, and devastating storms and landslides in Central America, while global average temperatures reached record highs for that time.

Researchers have proposed multiple contributing factors to recent spikes in sea-surface and atmospheric temperatures, including reductions in shipping sulphur emissions, unusually warm oceans across multiple basins, changes in cloud cover, and other feedbacks that scientists are still actively investigating, with no single explanation yet emerged as definitive.

Whatever causes the recent temperature spike, the fact is that the temperature has spiked dramatically in the last two or three years, and that's the baseline from which this El Niño has developed.

Strong El Niño events don't necessarily mean every weather event around the world will suddenly become worse, but they certainly improve the chances, with exactly how changes unfold depending on how El Niño interacts with dozens of other atmospheric and oceanic oscillations, many of which are only predictable weeks or months ahead.

During strong El Niño events, Indonesia and parts of northern Australia typically see increased risk of drought and wildfire.

Along the west coast of South America, warmer ocean waters during El Niño can bring exceptionally heavy rainfall and flooding.

The temporary possibility of reaching 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times makes the Paris Agreement's lower 1.5 degree Celsius target look even more obsolete than it already was.

The probability of a warmer outcome from the current El Niño now appears substantially higher than previously estimated, and the coming year may provide one of the most important tests yet of how the Earth's climate behaves in a world already warmed to levels our species has never previously experienced.

Six weeks prior to this video, headlines predicting record-breaking El Niño were getting ahead of the science because forecasters were still wrestling with the spring predictability barrier, which meant there wasn't enough evidence to definitively say a super El Niño was coming.

Once surface waters begin warming during El Niño, they heat the atmosphere above them, which weakens the trade winds even further, allowing more warm water to move east and weaken the winds more, creating a classic positive feedback loop known as the Bjerknes Feedback, named after Norwegian meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes.

Some models suggest that global temperatures could briefly exceed two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times at some point next year, though this would not constitute a breach of the Paris Agreement's long-term two-degree threshold but would just be a temporary monthly spike.

Fourteen of the world's leading seasonal prediction systems have collectively generated six hundred and sixty-seven individual ensemble simulations of how tropical Pacific conditions are likely to evolve over the coming months.

Forecast models are very good, reliable predictors in normal circumstances, but no ensemble has ever forecast and then verified against a 3.6 degree Celsius El Niño because such an event has never happened before, and there are still uncertainties that cut both ways—upwards and downwards—and forecasts are never a guarantee of future meteorological events.

The 2015-2016 El Niño helped push global temperatures to another record, triggered one of the worst global coral bleaching events ever observed on the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere, and contributed to droughts, floods and crop failures affecting millions of people around the world.

Previous El Niños developed in a climate that was substantially cooler than today, but in the last decade or so, the Earth's average temperature has increased by several tenths of a degree, the oceans have continued absorbing enormous amounts of excess heat, marine heatwaves have become more widespread, and global sea surface temperatures have repeatedly broken records.

Bill Gates is being positioned as discussing climate strategy ahead of COP 30 through a new essay he has published.

Bill Gates is suggesting that the climate community should shift its strategy from focusing on temperature and emission targets to focusing on the impact on human lives.

About one-third of global GDP growth in the last 20 years was devoted to either correcting or avoiding natural disasters, and this proportion will 'get bigger and bigger until it's 130%' — meaning growth is already being cannibalized by climate adaptation, leaving only contraction for real economic expansion.

Carbon dioxide has risen from 280 ppm to 430 ppm and with continued semi-committed efforts will reach 550 ppm, resulting in approximately 3°C warming from current 1.5°C baseline, with each degree of warming causing more destabilization than previous models predicted.

Insurance becoming more expensive and unavailable due to climate risk is the core economic lever through which climate change will directly impact everyone's behavior and incentives, as insurance is hardwired into capitalism.