Hold on to your butts, comrades. We're about to get a preview of 2050. I just checked the live data, and the area off the coast of South America that is the index water for ENSO is 9° F above average in places. This is going to be a wild year.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Not in general, no. ENSO has complicated impacts that vary by region: some places should expect more snow this winter, and some much less. It pushes the major atmospheric circulation patterns--including the Pacific jet stream--off their usual tracks. What that does depends on where you are. Here's the map for expected US impacts, based on standard El Niño effects:
On a more global scale, a strong El Niño is associated with hotter than average temperatures. Very strong El Niño years (e.g. 1997, 2016, and to a lesser extent 2023) are usually when we see global temperature records really breaking hard. See here:
Each of these is amplified by the increasing amount of extra warming already baked into the system; El Niño and climate change compound one another. The graph I posted originally can be thought of as a distribution of "El Niño strength" over the years. You can see that we're way, way above even the strongest signal in recent memory, so we should expect extreme statistial outliers. It will take the atmosphere some time to catch up to the ocean, since ENSO is a phenomenon that originates in ocean currents. You can think of it as kind of like turning on a lava lamp: it takes some time for the heat to propagate and start creating interesting flows in the fluid medium. You'll start getting strong atmsopheric impacts in November or so. I'd expect 2027 to absolutely shatter global temperature records.