Climate change will intensify El Nino

Yahoo (Australia): Australians can expect more intense droughts during El Nino years due to climate change. The Bureau of Meteorology has used new climate models from the IPCC to work out the first consistent projection of how El Nino will be affected by a warming climate.

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a warming of water that affects weather patterns across the Pacific Ocean. The BoM's Dr Scott Power says ENSO causes large changes in rainfall and severe weather, directly affecting agricultural production, ecosystems and the spread of disease.

He says there's been great uncertainty about the way global warming might change ENSO, but new models indicate rainfall will likely be affected. "This interference causes an intensification of El Nino-driven drying in the western Pacific and rainfall increases in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific," Dr Power said in a statement.

"The future of ENSO and the disruption it causes to the climate of the earth, its people and its ecosystems are clearer now than ever before."...

In the Wheatlands, West Australia, shot by Phillip Capper, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license