The winds that hold the Arctic's cold up over the pole fell to 12 miles an hour in a week when they should be at 57, and what did it is thousands of miles away in the Pacific. The UN has called it a wrecking ball. NOAA puts it at 83% that it passes every El Niño since 1950, and it hasn't peaked.
We followed it from Peru's empty nets to the Panama Canal, your food bill, the winter of 1998, and the dates already set for the California coast. Then what is actually forming out there, and why the forecasts have never been tested on anything like it.
On November 2nd, the winds that hold the Arctic's cold up over
the pole should have been blowing at 57 miles an hour.
They were down to 12.
Nothing up there did that.
Something forming in the Pacific did,
thousands of miles away, and it's still growing.
Scientists have now issued a warning about what it does next,
to your winter, your coast, and what you pay for food.
It hasn't even peaked.
In records going back to the late 70s,
the lowest anyone had seen on that date was 31.
Those winds are the polar vortex.
While they hold, the cold stays put.
When they weaken, in the words
of the US government's own satellite service,
some of the cold arctic air can break off and migrate south.
Warm air did it, rising off that patch of Pacific
and hitting those winds in waves
that mostly come in January and February.
Judah Cohen studies these winds,
and when the forecast showed it coming,
he called it one of the most,
if not the most surprising things he's ever seen from them.
The forecasts for next week are worse.
Between the 9th and the 11th of November,
those winds are expected to stop altogether,
turn around and blow the wrong way. On the list going
back to the 1950s, that's more than two weeks ahead
of the earliest one. For weather and climate
records, Cohen said of a jump like that, that is really unheard of.
American forecasters say
the effects can last up to two months.
That takes you past Christmas and into January.
What's sitting in that patch of Pacific has
a name you've already heard, El Niño,
and that name is the least useful thing about it, because you've
been hearing it all year and it stopped meaning anything around June.
On September 21st, that stretch of ocean broke its single-day record,
two months ahead of the old one from 2015, and it kept going.
In the last week of October,
NOAA's weekly file read 3.4 degrees Celsius above normal.
The same week in 2015 it read 2.5, and in 1997, 1.9.
That file goes back 45 years,
and the six hottest weeks in it are the last six.
Right off Peru the reading is 5.4, past the old high from 1983.
NOAA itself puts it at 83% that this passes every
El Niño since 1950 before the year is out.
You can see what's coming for you by looking at who it reached first.
In Peru, pelicans started turning up in ports
and towns, looking for food.
The anchovy had gone deeper to get away from the heat,
and the fleet all but stopped going out.
In July of last year, that fleet landed 292,148 tons.
This July, it landed 2,496.
For every hundred fish, about one.
The minister in charge said the stock was under a certain stress,
and that's one way of putting it.
When the water moved east,
the rain went with it and left the other side of the ocean dry.
In August, a reservoir in Java that feeds
a city of 42 million dropped so far
that a drowned village started coming back up, Somang.
The ruins of its buildings were out in the open again,
three years after they'd flooded it to fill that lake,
one of 11 villages that lake swallowed.
A ferryman who moved for that lake told reporters,
I would have rather not moved.
The lake kept dropping, and the people drinking from it are
still there. When that catch went, the reading was about two.
When that lake went, about two and a
half. It's at 3.4 now, and all of that was still
a long way from your house. It didn't stay a long
way. About 5% of all the world's sea trade goes through
the Panama Canal, and the canal lives on
From July 3rd, as that lake dropped,
the canal started cutting how deep a ship can sit in the
water, and by the end of August it had cut four times.
A ship that sits higher carries less.
With low water on one side
and a war sending more bidders to it on the other,
ships started piling up. In August there were 105 of them waiting,
more than six days in the queue,
and the price of getting through went crazy.
Normally two or three ships bid on a slot. Now it was up to 18.
One slot sold at auction for 5.3 million dollars,
and the record the week before was 4.6.
Before the war, a slot went for about 140,000 dollars.
We do not set prices, the canals man said. The market sets the price.
You can guess who's at the far end of that market. It's you,
if you buy what was on the ship.
Then it started reaching the food itself.
By October 14th at a cattle market in El Salvador,
cows with their ribs showing were going for half
price because their owners would rather sell than watch them starve.
Imagine how thin this
little animal is, is how one rancher put it.
They cheer every shower now. A dealer told reporters,
the hope is that it keeps raining
and the forecast for the coming months is not good.
Five days later, Peru refused to open its second anchovy season at all,
and that fish is more than half the world's fish oil.
Goldman Sachs has put a number on where this goes.
Food commodity prices could rise 15.8%,
and the full effect might not land until the second half of 2028.
The World Bank sees food up 18% between last year and next,
with the war in there as well,
and one big European bank says rice, palm oil,
sugar, and coffee could go up 50 to 100% or more.
If palm oil sounds like somebody else's problem,
it's in cookies, it's in toothpaste,
and it's in your laundry detergent. Go look.
There was one piece of good news in all this, for the Atlantic side.
The hurricanes didn't come.
June went by, then July, August, and September,
and the season hadn't produced one.
An average year has five by then.
Since 1851, only three seasons have made it to October 7th with none.
For a while, that looked like a gift
from the same thing that was doing all the rest.
Then, on the night of October 7th,
Isaias became a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico,
where that protection is weaker,
over water at about 87 degrees.
Alabama declared an emergency across 40 counties
and Florida across 25,
with evacuations in parts of seven Florida counties.
The governor of Florida stood up the day before it hit
and said of the ground there,
we are saturated.
It came ashore near Destin at 105 miles an hour,
the first hurricane of the whole season,
and the first big one.
That was with El Niño holding something back on your coast.
The winter of 1997 is what an El Niño does when it isn't,
and you don't have to have lived in
Florida to have been in that one.
It was called the biggest on record at the time. NOAA's same
file has it topping out at 2.3,
over a full degree under where this one is today.
A record early snowstorm hit the high plains that October.
It was just the start. January 1998
brought ice storms to the northeast that killed 28 people,
and they didn't stop at the border.
At the peak, about 4 million had no power,
and some sat in the dark for weeks.
Canada sent in 16,000 troops,
its biggest deployment since the Korean War.
And on the night of February 22nd, in central Florida,
seven tornadoes came down after dark.
The first of the three big ones hit just before midnight,
the next about half an hour later,
and the last about 10 minutes before 1 in the morning.
That last one went through Osceola
County and tore through an RV park in Kissimmee,
and it carried the debris about 4 miles. That one
tornado killed 25 people. The one before it killed 13.
By morning, there were 42 dead and about 260
hurt, and the weather service office
that covered it called the whole thing unprecedented.
That was one night.
In California, floods and landslides cost close to a billion dollars.
The insurance industry calls anything
over 25 million dollars a catastrophe,
and it counted 15 in eight months.
By April, there had been 18 presidentially
declared disasters across the country,
every one of them partly put down to that El Nino.
All that rain grew underbrush across Florida,
and in June of that year, Florida caught fire.
One that topped out at 2.3 did all of that.
This one's at 3.4.
And on October 21st,
two senior UN officials sat down at one table in Geneva.
The woman who runs the UN's weather agency said this one could be
literally off the monitoring charts they've used
for the past four decades.
We are already witnessing extreme weather events, she said,
and expect this to multiply and cascade.
Then Tom Fletcher, the UN's emergency aid chief, said it out loud.
This El Nino is a behemoth.
It is a wrecking ball.
He said 50 million people could face increased hunger
and that the humanitarian system cannot alone cope
with a threat on this scale.
And he didn't stop it at the poor countries.
It will create economic shocks for the global economy, he said,
and drive conflict, displacement and migration.
Your side of the world is in that sentence too.
He'd released 50 million dollars to help 11 countries get ready,
about 10 tickets through the Panama Canal.
He called the next two weeks the critical window to act.
Two weeks from October 21st was November 4th.
That window's closed now.
What are they telling you? Where you live?
NOAA's winter map came out on October 15th.
It shows the whole south wet,
from the southwest to Florida and up the east coast.
The head of the National Weather Service said,
too much precipitation
on dry soil can fuel destructive flash floods and mudslides.
This winter, his forecasters will put one phrase
on the worst ice storm warnings,
particularly dangerous situation.
In Britain, the Met Office calls this El Niño unprecedented
and says the odds lean toward a wetter, stormier start to winter.
Back in the US, the head of the weather service said,
now is the time for communities and individuals to plan ahead.
Plan for what though? That same map shows the north warm.
The American forecasters say El Nino stays in charge.
Cohen says that if those winds keep breaking down
and the cold keeps getting steered toward
the northeast, it will be much colder than
with just El Nino fully in charge.
Two pictures of one winter,
and the water under both of them is still climbing.
NOAA's next look at it comes on November 19th.
One state didn't wait to find out.
On September 21st, the same day that single-day record fell,
Governor Newsom declared
a statewide emergency months ahead of the winter storms.
He got the National Guard ready
for flood response and search and rescue,
had sandbags and pumps moved into place,
and had road closure
and snow equipment staged on the highways most at risk.
His line was, California is strongest when we look out for one another.
And the same day, he ended 34 old emergencies from 2023 and 2024,
clearing the desk.
If you don't live in California,
NOAA runs that same wet across the south to Florida,
where those tornadoes came down in 1998.
By the middle of October, the California
coast had already started to go.
Water there was running one to two feet above what
the tide tables said it should be.
Nearly all of the Balboa Peninsula went under as much as two
to three feet and homes on the Los Angeles County coast were destroyed.
One of the forecasters who follows this closest puts the odds of a dry
California winter at five to ten percent
and the odds of a record wet one at about twenty times normal.
He says the worst of the coastal flooding comes on the highest tides,
and those have dates.
November 24th to 26th, December 22nd to 25th, January 20th to 23rd.
You could put them on a calendar,
and if it's a stretch of coast you know, you probably should.
Every one of those warnings leans on what the big ones did before.
1982, 1997, 2015. This one isn't any of them.
The latest run of 656 forecasts
from 14 different models has it peaking in December at around 4
degrees, more than a degree above anything on record.
It also isn't sitting where those old
ones sat. The middle of it is further east than any El Niño on record,
by about 900 miles,
and the rain and the storms go where that goes.
And the forecasts themselves have never been
tested on something like it.
Zeke Housefather tracks those runs, and he put it this way.
No ensemble has ever forecast and then verified against
a 3.6 degree El Niño because one has never happened.
The ocean, he said, is already in uncharted waters.
Those maps come from smaller El Niños, in a different place,
and the one deciding your winter has no track record at all.
The forecast odds of it still being there through spring,
right into tornado season, are 100%.
And the year it hands us next has a 96% chance
of being the hottest ever measured.
The peak is forecast for December.
