Skip to footer

El Niño 2014: What it is, when it's coming, and what to expect

El Niño is stirring in the Pacific, although forecasters aren't ready to pronouncing it awake just yet.

It's warming effect on Earth's climate can lower winter heating bills in some regions and reduce the formation and growth of Atlantic hurricanes. But it also alters rainfall patterns in ways that increase the risk of floods in some areas and drought in others.

Here’s a look at what to expect this time:

5. What does ENSO tell us about climate change?

ENSO is part of a natural climate cycle, but it's one that can influence and be influenced by human-triggered climate change, researchers say. Some climate scientists have held that the dramatic slowdown in the observed rate of warming since 1998 has come as the tropical Pacific has soaked up the "missing" warmth. They are eying the looming El Niño to see how much of that heat gets released back into the atmosphere.

Since 1950, and particularly since the mid-1980s, El Niño and La Niña years have each shown warming trends, with La Niña years warming at a slightly faster pace, suggests data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. In a study published in Nature Climate Change in January, an international team of climate scientists published the results from modeling studies indicating that while the number of El Niños is likely to decrease slightly as the climate warms, the number of severe El Niños is likely to double.

The El Niños of 1982-'83 and '97-'98 are the benchmarks for "severe." The potential effects of global warming on the ENSO cycle remains an active area of research.

5 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.