But if the super El Niño will offer a kind of brief preview of future warming, it will also offer a test of how well prepared and adapted the world is to that future. If droughts intensify across parts of Africa, how much worse will the world’s hunger crisis — already twice as bad as 2019, according to the World Food Program — become? Will the likely wildfires in Australia do as much human damage as the Black Summer of 2019-20, which destroyed thousands of homes, killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of others into military evacuations from beaches encircled by flame? (Not to mention blanketing Sydney in such thick smoke that the ferries couldn’t navigate the harbor and fire alarms in office buildings were routinely triggered by the ambient smoke.)
In even a weak El Niño a few years back, flooding displaced a half-million people in just one Brazilian state, so what will an intense one bring? Will adaptation and acclimatization mean that extreme heat — in the United States and elsewhere — prove less deadly than in recent memory? Last month, the climate scientist Andrew Dessler calculated that global warming is responsible for about 1.7 percent of summertime deaths in his home state of Texas. According to the imperfect-but-still-illuminating EM-DAT international disaster database, between 2022 and 2024 an average of more than 59,000 people died worldwide from extreme temperatures — about 20 times as high as the previous decade’s average.
It will also offer several other tests, perhaps no less consequential. The first concerns the science of warming, given long-running debates about just how much the temperature rise is accelerating — and why. Over the last decade or so, a high-profile group of alarm-raisers led by Hansen has published a series of papers and commentary suggesting that the scientific community has significantly underestimated the rate of warming, which, they argued, has been accelerating faster than the broader community has acknowledged. And that the fact that it is accelerating so quickly is a sign, they believe, that many conventional predictive models are calibrated wrong, that we are heading for much worse warming in the decades ahead than almost anyone appreciates. Over the last few months, Hansen has proposed that this El Niño will offer an explicit test of the thesis. In the next year or two, he expects, we’ll know for sure.
Another test concerns public response and public opinion. A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom among those most focused on climate change that more extreme weather and cascading climate disasters would inevitably elevate public concern and with it, ideally, the need for collective action. Today, as unprecedented fires burn through the Southern forests downed by Hurricane Helene, a new conventional wisdom prevails — that the public has moved on from climate anxiety, burned out from the alarmism of the Greta Thunberg years and fixated now on a series of successor panics, many of them no less apocalyptic: first about Covid and then about A.I., about smartphones and fertility rates and income inequality and the crisis of American democracy (to name just a few).
In politics and media, it’s true, climate worries have receded, replaced in headlines by affordability debates, stories about the electricity demands of data centers, and a kind of simplistic energy triumphalism. But public opinion has proved surprisingly resilient, with nearly as many Americans saying they “worry a great deal” about warming as they did at previous peaks in 2017, right after Donald Trump was inaugurated the first time, and 2020, right before the pandemic hit. The share ishigher than any year in the presidencies of Joe Biden, with its major climate legislation and Los Angeles wildfire disaster; Barack Obama, with Hurricane Sandy and the Paris agreement; or George W. Bush, with Hurricane Katrina and “An Inconvenient Truth.” And though those survey responses can seem a bit hollow, given how few people truly orient their politics around climate action, it’s not clear that climate has fallen that much as a liberal political priority either: In a Pew poll conducted in August 2020, after “Green New Deal” debates throughout the Democratic primaries, climate ranked fifth among 12 issues among Biden supporters; in one conducted in fall 2024, when it had almost entirely disappeared from the campaign trail, climate ranked fifth of 10.
