El Niño ‘adding fuel to a planet already on fire’, warns UN chief
A strengthening El Niño is pushing the world toward catastrophic new temperature records, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned Friday, calling the climate-intensifying weather pattern a crisis layered on top of a crisis.
Speaking at UN headquarters in New York, Guterres didn’t mince words. “El Niño is adding fuel to a planet already on fire,” he said, warning that the combination of the naturally occurring climate phenomenon and human-caused global warming could make the next five years the hottest ever recorded in human history.
What El Niño actually does
El Niño is a periodic warming of surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It typically disrupts weather patterns across the globe — bringing drought to some regions, catastrophic flooding to others. But this one’s different. It’s arriving at a moment when the baseline temperature of the planet is already alarmingly elevated after years of record-breaking heat.
Scientists at the World Meteorological Organization confirmed Thursday that El Niño officially developed in June 2023. There’s a 90 percent probability it will persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter, they said. And there’s a strong chance it will be one of the five most intense El Niño events on record since 1950.
A warning about records that won’t hold
July 2023 was already confirmed as the hottest month ever recorded globally, with average temperatures hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for individual days — the symbolic threshold world leaders agreed to avoid breaching under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Guterres called it a moment that should be a “red alert” for governments.
The era of global warming is over, he said. The era of global boiling has arrived.
A senior climate policy official familiar with the UN briefings put it plainly: “We’ve been warning about these compounding effects for years. El Niño doesn’t cause climate change, but right now it’s like throwing gasoline on an already burning house.”
Where the damage will be felt hardest
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America are expected to bear the worst of it. Reduced rainfall could devastate harvests across eastern and southern Africa, where food insecurity is already severe. Meanwhile, countries in the central Pacific are bracing for intensified storm seasons and rising sea levels that threaten low-lying island communities.
The economic toll could be staggering. Research published earlier this year estimated that the 1997–1998 El Niño — considered one of the strongest on record — cost the global economy around $5.7 trillion over the following five years in reduced growth.
What comes next
Guterres used Friday’s warning to renew pressure on wealthy nations to accelerate climate finance commitments and phase out fossil fuels faster than current pledges require. A major climate summit, COP28, is scheduled for late November in Dubai — and expectations are mounting that El Niño’s arrival will sharpen the urgency of those negotiations considerably. Whether governments will actually respond differently this time remains the central, unanswered question.
