Deutsche Welle (DW) claims in “How climate change is teaming up with ‘Super El Nino” that a developing “Super El Niño,” combined with climate change, could make 2026 one of the hottest years on record while increasing the risks of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and marine heat waves around the world. This is highly misleading. El Niño are long-recognized naturally recurring ocean-atmosphere cycles that have operated for thousands of years and strong El Niño events have occurred periodically throughout history, long before industrial greenhouse gas emission began to increase.
The first red flag appears in the headline itself. There is no official meteorological definition of a “Super El Niño.”
Neither the World Meteorological Organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, nor the American Meteorological Society recognizes “Super El Niño” as a formal scientific classification. Meteorologists describe El Niño events by measuring sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific. They may characterize an event as weak, moderate, strong, or very strong, but “Super El Niño” is largely a media invention designed to make a naturally occurring climate pattern sound unprecedented.
That alone should make readers skeptical.
El Niño is not a new phenomenon, nor is it evidence of climate change. Long before automobiles, coal-fired power plants, or industrial emissions existed, El Niño events periodically warmed the tropical Pacific Ocean, temporarily altering normal weather patterns around the globe. Paleoclimate records from corals, lake sediments, and other shell middens, and other proxy data show that El Niño events have repeatedly occurred for thousands of years.
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