40℃ is not over yet! This summer may be hotter than ever before!

Audit expert: Zhan Mingjin

PhD, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences

Did you feel the high temperature in Beijing a while ago? Around the Dragon Boat Festival, Beijing experienced a high temperature of 40℃+, which has not been seen in many years. It is only mid-June, why is the weather so hot? These days, the editor who is afraid of heat is miserable and almost sleeps with the air conditioner.

Source: Internet pictures

By the way, do you guys feel that the summers have been getting hotter in recent years?

The bad news is: your feeling is true! Some time ago, experts from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service published a report stating that the past 2015 to 2022 were the eight warmest years in recorded global climate.

The worse news is that due to climate change and the El Niño phenomenon, the temperature in 2023 may be higher than in 2022, and the global average temperature may even hit a new high in 2023 or 2024.

This means that this year we may have the hottest summer on record!

Source: News Photo

There is also new news: On July 4, the World Meteorological Organization released a report confirming that El Niño conditions have formed in the tropical Pacific region for the first time in seven years , and El Niño has been confirmed to have occurred.

Source: Weibo screenshot/People's Daily

Why has the temperature been rising in recent years? What is the El Nino phenomenon? Is it the cause of global warming? Although the weather is too hot to bear, we still need to know about El Nino.

What is El Nino?

El Nino (Spanish: El Niño) refers to a periodic climate phenomenon in which the surface waters of the eastern and central Pacific Ocean near the equator warm abnormally every few years (0.5°C higher than the average for 6 consecutive months). "El Nino" means "little boy" or "holy child" in Spanish, and it is named because it mostly occurs around Christmas.

Under normal circumstances, the trade winds in the Pacific Ocean flow from America to Asia, keeping the western Pacific Ocean warm. When El Nino occurs, the warm water accumulated in the west flows back east, causing the eastern Pacific Ocean to rise in sea level and sea temperature to rise, while the western Pacific Ocean drops in sea level and water temperature to drop.

Changes in sea water have caused tremendous changes in the atmosphere over the entire central and eastern Pacific Ocean, which in turn affect other regions through global atmospheric circulation.

Source: Zhaoqing Meteorological Bureau, Guangdong Meteorological Observation Data Center

The El Niño phenomenon causes changes in weather and climate through convection between the ocean and the atmosphere. Its cycle can last 2 to 7 years (usually closer to 4 years), and each time can last 4 to 16 months.

The last El Niño phenomenon occurred in 2020. In the past two or three years, the global climate has been in the "La Niña phenomenon". The La Niña phenomenon (Spanish: La Nina means little girl/saint) is exactly the opposite of the El Niño phenomenon. It refers to the phenomenon that the temperature of the sea water in the Pacific region near the equator is lower than normal years (0.5℃ below the average for 6 consecutive months).

Since the beginning of this year, scientists have monitored the continuous rise in global sea temperatures, which indicates that the El Niño phenomenon may strike again. The World Meteorological Organization predicts that the probability of El Niño occurring globally from July to September this year will reach 80%.

Source: pixabay

So, what impact will the El Nino phenomenon have on humans? Its most important impact is to intensify global warming, and may even break the "1.5℃ target".

Will El Niño break the “1.5℃” target?

What is the “1.5℃ target”?

In order to respond to global climate change, 197 countries signed the Paris Agreement in Paris in 2015. The agreement mentioned that the average global temperature rise in this century should be controlled within 2°C above the pre-industrial level, and the temperature increase should be controlled within 1.5°C as much as possible.

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia

In addition, the United Nations Environment Programme has also formulated a special plan to "reduce global carbon emissions to zero by 2050" to control greenhouse gas emissions and make efforts to curb climate warming.

However, by 2022, global carbon emissions continued to rise. At the beginning of this year, the World Meteorological Organization issued a bulletin stating that since the beginning of industrialization in this century, the global average temperature has risen by 1.15℃, which is very close to the "1.5℃ target". The temperature rise brought about by the El Niño phenomenon this year will make this agreement target even less optimistic.

For human beings, various social activities will inevitably continue to emit greenhouse gases, which in turn will cause global temperatures to rise. From this perspective, it is indeed a huge challenge for us to stop the trend of global warming in the short term.

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia

In addition to the impact of warming, the El Niño phenomenon will also make the global climate system more unstable and complicated, causing disastrous weather, especially frequent high-temperature heat waves, which will harm the normal operation of human society.

Other impacts of El Niño

In addition to bringing high temperatures, the El Nino phenomenon can also cause extreme weather such as heavy rains, floods, and droughts . For example, the high temperatures in 2022 were impressive. In the same year, Pakistan also suffered a huge flood disaster. The glaciers in the Arctic continued to melt, and the altitude dropped to the lowest point in history...

For my country, the El Niño phenomenon will have different impacts in different regions. For example, low temperature and cold damage will occur in the Northeast in summer, high temperature and drought will occur in North China, and heavy rains and floods will occur in the south.

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia

In addition, too much rain and flooding will seriously affect agricultural food production, leading to rising prices of agricultural products, which will in turn cause global food supply tensions, affect people's normal lives, and even aggravate the continued growth of the number of hungry people in the world.

El Nino also affects the living environment of marine life , causing the degradation of coral reefs, and has an adverse impact on human fishing labor. In general, the impact of El Nino on the normal operation of human life is still very large.

With the development of science and technology, scientists have also mastered some more feasible methods, such as predicting the El Niño phenomenon based on entropy theory, and making preparations and preventions for the economic and social ecological systems in advance.

We often directly associate El Nino with global warming, as if it is the cause of global warming. But in fact, this is a common misunderstanding: El Nino does not cause global warming . It only causes the intensification of warming and the occurrence of some extreme high temperature events.

For the earth on which we depend for survival, the El Niño phenomenon is just a normal climate phenomenon. The real "culprit" of abnormally high temperatures and extreme climate is climate change.