-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
El Niño is coming! El Niño is coming!
Unless “El Niño” is a defenseless child who can be violently separated from his family and thrown into a detention center, President Trump doesn’t want to hear about it.
We’re being treated to a “super” El Niño this year, creating a statewide emergency in California as declared by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday. The “super” isn’t just a fun superlative but an actual scientific distinction. OK, the technical term is the less-fun “very strong El Niño,” and it indicates that sea surfaces in portions of the Pacific Ocean have risen by 2° Celsius (this one’s projected to go up to 3ºC above).
There have been but five super El Niños in recorded history — and No. 6 is shaping up to be the biggest one yet.
I’m sure most of you have had enough of these “once in a lifetime” ordeals (COVID-19, storm surges, solar storms …), but being sick of something awful won’t make it go away. Just look at who’s still in the White House.
Now, I’m not blaming this super El Niño on Trump; even he can’t muck things up that bad. I mention him to point out that the federal government should be doing a lot more to prepare for what’s coming. Waiting to see if it actually happens and hoping it doesn’t has its problems. For one, the weather typically doesn’t respond to Trump’s medley of negotiation tactics (coming up with little nicknames, posting AI slop on social media, Sharpies or his favorite: frivolous lawsuits). And two, disasters tend to be significantly worse when you’re caught unprepared.
Shocking, I know.
Anyone remember 1997’s El Niño? It was one of the five recorded super El Niño events and caused 17 storm-related deaths and more than $500 million in damage just in California. Worldwide, it led to around 23,000 deaths and an estimated $5.7 trillion in global income losses.
How about the El Niño in 1982? That one caused an estimated $4.1 trillion in global income losses and was bad enough to get people thinking, “We should really come up with a system to predict these things so we don’t get caught with our pants down.” Well, they came up with the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean array, a buoy monitoring system that gave scientists a six-month warning that something wicked this way came. And it worked great! Until DOGE unilaterally decided that a heads-up on cataclysm was a royal waste of dough.
The strongest of the five super El Niño events was in 1877, and it was a doozy. It was one of the biggest natural disasters in recorded history, lasted about 16 months and led directly to catastrophic worldwide droughts, harvest collapse and famine. It’s estimated that up to 50 million people died as a result, roughly 3% of everybody on Earth at that point. That would be comparable to about 249 million deaths based on today’s population.
Trump has made it crystal clear he has no intention of helping blue states that didn’t vote for him. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in helping red states that voted for him, either — especially if the area in question has many people of color. Look no further than Gary, Ind., where majority-Black neighborhoods were without power for 17 days until Trump finally approved a major disaster declaration and power was restored.
Need I mention Puerto Rico, a United States territory with around 3.5 million American citizens? Nine years after Hurricane Maria, they’re still struggling with power outages and shortages of food, water and gasoline.
Can’t you just picture El Niño driving everybody out of Puerto Rico and the Trump family building a bunch of hotels and other monuments to themselves? I sure can.
You can forget about Trump helping other countries if they aren’t run by his preferred authoritarians.
Events like El Niño are bigger than politics and demand an immediate humanitarian response. Because the federal government is not already taking action, people are likely to die in the United States and across the globe in numbers that could reach the millions. And for those who gleefully lack introspection, empathy or a shred of humanity, here’s another way of looking at it: The damage could cost trillions of dollars.
A few trillion may not sound like much next to our $40 trillion of national debt, but trust me, it’s a lot of money.
El Niño is coming.
Wouldn’t it be nice if el niño in the White House started behaving like el adulto in the room? Then maybe he could do his job to help all Americans — not just the ones who donate to his ballroom.
And if he doesn’t, members of Congress need to do their jobs and hold the president accountable.
Since both are unlikely to happen, it’s up to us to do our jobs as United States citizens and vote in the upcoming midterms with all the explosive fury of a super El Niño.
Ivan Ehlers is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the Nation and L.A. Taco. Instagram: @ivan_ehlers
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that the developing “super” El Niño poses an unusually serious threat, citing NOAA’s forecast of more than a 90% chance of a very strong event and a 75% chance that the October–December period will exceed the strength of El Niños recorded since 1950.[5]
It contends that federal officials should act before the forecast’s consequences become certain, because El Niño can contribute to severe storms, flooding, landslides, drought, food insecurity and major economic losses. The concern is consistent with California’s official emergency proclamation, which anticipates strong storms, coastal flooding, debris flows and related hazards.[7]
The piece presents the Trump administration’s alleged political favoritism and reductions in scientific capacity as evidence that disaster preparation has been weakened. In particular, it criticizes cuts affecting the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean buoy system, which NOAA identifies as essential to monitoring and predicting El Niño and La Niña.[8]
The article uses the 1982–83, 1997–98 and 1877–78 events to argue that inadequate preparation can carry enormous human and financial costs. Official historical assessments confirm that the 1997–98 event caused 17 storm-related deaths and at least $550 million in California damage.[1]
It concludes that climate hazards require a humanitarian response beyond partisan politics and calls on Congress to hold the president accountable. The piece ultimately urges voters to respond through the 2026 midterm elections.
Different views on the topic
NOAA’s forecast supports concern about an exceptionally strong El Niño, but it does not establish that California will experience a statewide catastrophe or that millions will die. Federal drought guidance emphasizes that stronger El Niño conditions increase the likelihood of characteristic impacts without guaranteeing them.[6]
A contrasting perspective is that preparation is already occurring at the state and federal levels. California has ordered agencies to stage pumps, sandbags and other equipment and has prepared the National Guard for flood response, search-and-rescue and logistics operations.[7] Federal emergency officials also report that FEMA has pre-positioned food, water, generators and other supplies for major events.[9]
The claim that the United States is simply abandoning El Niño monitoring is disputed by NOAA’s account of the TAO system. The agency says the array’s recapitalization was completed with Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, while further upgrades and buoy deployments are scheduled through 2027.[8]
Historical assessments also provide a more qualified account of El Niño’s effects. A peer-reviewed review estimated that U.S. weather events associated with the 1997–98 episode caused about 189 deaths and $4.2 billion to $4.5 billion in losses, while also noting that some regions experienced fewer winter deaths and that not every damaging event could be attributed solely to El Niño.[2]
The article treats the 1877–78 famine as a direct and highly precise measure of El Niño’s death toll, whereas historical research stresses that mortality estimates are uncertain and that famine outcomes were shaped by drought, disease, government policies and regional vulnerability. One scholarly assessment places deaths in India and northern China at roughly 15 million to 25 million, rather than affirming a single global figure.[3]
Finally, the record of the 1997–98 event suggests that advance mitigation can reduce losses. A scholarly summary reports that California’s preparation efforts helped produce substantially lower losses than during 1982–83, indicating that early action matters but that outcomes depend on infrastructure, local conditions and the specific weather impacts that materialize.[4]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
Greenline Housing Foundation has become something of a “first aid kit” for Eaton fire survivors, offering financial services that range from temporary housing grants to land banking that have helped some families fund their paths back home.
California once bet big on offshore wind to help power its clean-energy future, but the Trump administration is now paying developers billions to walk away from their projects. As California’s remaining offshore-wind leases hang in the balance, the state is fighting back in court.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
