The National Weather Service said Thursday that it is very likely that El Niño will fade in the coming months.
“A La Niña Watch has been issued by the Climate Prediction Center,” the NWS aid. “There is a 50-55% chance of La Niña conditions developing this fall and continuing through the winter.”
Were La Niña to arise, it would come with several benefits and multiple detriments. It could temporarily slow the pace of global warming that began some nine months ago, when El Niño took hold.
A major change would be that La Niña tends to subdue global temperatures. It can’t turn back time, but it can moderate the extreme levels of warming that were experienced in 2023, when sky-high record high temperatures were reported across the globe.
In addition, La Niña is known to encourage active and extremely destructive Atlantic hurricane seasons. In addition, it typically promotes dry conditions in the Southwest and in Southern California.
The Climate Prediction Center released a map of the typical effect La Niña has on the November-March temperatures in the United States. The map showed normal temperatures for the Northeast and portions of the Midwest including parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, and Colorado. This will also be the case, according to the map, for Florida, Nevada, Utah, as well as portions of Arizona and New Mexico.
Meanwhile, the South – from Texas to the Atlantic Coast – will see slightly elevated average temperatures, which translates to an increase from 0.5° F to 1.5° F. On the other hand, the rest of the Lower 48 will experience slightly lower average temperatures, with decreases ranging from -0.5° F to -2.5° F.
It should come as no surprise that last month was the planet Earth’s warmest January on record and this continued an eight-month streak where the planet saw a global temperature record. More frighteningly, January marked the end of a 12-month period during which Earth wandered into dangerous territory. The year-long warming, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed the year-long warming of 1.52° C above the 19th century benchmark.
Scientists, however have said that the world has not permanently breached the threshold that is outlined in the Paris climate agreement, is a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 counties who gathered at the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP21, in Paris in 2015, which is measured in decades, not years.
The treaty’s stated goal is stem “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Since the treaty was signed, world leaders have moved to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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