Will climate change affect El Niño?

Nikolas Kozloff in Latin America News Dispatch: …Could global warming have something to do with the recent natural disaster? El Niño is a natural phenomenon, but some are worried that climate change could now be altering the cycle in fundamental ways. Despite technological advances, some experts still say it’s difficult to forecast the relative severity of future El Niños because the existing climate models don’t simulate the dramatic weather phenomenon very well.

Other scientists, however, warn that we are playing with fire. Recently, an international team warned that El Niño will become more intense and imperil sensitive ecosystems like the Amazon. The experts have become so alarmed that they have called for an early warning system to monitor such fragile ecosystems.

Meanwhile there’s been a growing scientific agreement about the increasing frequency of El Niños. The organization that sets the bar for scientific research on climate change is the United Nations Environment Program’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But some scientists, such as Dr. Philip Fearnside of Brazil’s National Institute for Research in the Amazon, say that the group has been very conservative in the way that it ratifies reports.

Fearnside, himself an IPCC collaborator, says that the organization’s second report in 1995 didn’t address increasing frequency of El Niño events that had become statistically significant. The IPCC, however, finally came around: in a report in 2007 the group concluded that “El Niño-like conditions,” meaning warm water in the Pacific, will become more frequent with continued global warming.

“If El Niño can be compared to a giant gun firing off climatic chaos,” a reporter for the Los Angeles Times has remarked, “Peru has the geographic misfortune of being at point-blank range.” When Peruvians hear that El Niño might become increasingly volatile and destructive in the future it strikes fear in their midst….

Sibinacocha lake (alt. 5000m), Peru, Ausangate mountains, shot by Gvillemin, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license