About this episode

The episode discusses the current El Niño phenomenon and its potential catastrophic effects on ecosystems and societies.

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño. El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal year, it can trigger extreme weather around the world. Forecasters are worried that the current El Niño — which just began a few weeks ago — is going to be anything but normal. Models suggest that we could soon see the hottest El Niño ever measured, with unpredictable and catastrophic effects for ecosystems and societies around the world. What does that mean? And why does this El Niño look so bad? On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. They discuss what forecast models are saying about this El Niño, why it gives us a glance at the future, and whether climate change itself is accelerating. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News. You can find a full transcript of the episode here . Mentioned: NOAA’s El Niño page and the relative El Niño index An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence , the 2020 paper…

People in this episode

Host: Robinson Meyer

Guest: Zeke Hausfather

Topics covered

• El Niño
• climate change
• weather patterns
• ecosystems
• forecast models

Keywords

• El Niño
• climate change
• weather
• ecosystems
• forecast models
• Zeke Hausfather
• Robinson Meyer

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stripe, Berkeley Earth, NOAA, Watershed, Heatmap

Books & works: An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence, A New Guesstimate for Corporate AI Emissions

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