The World Meteorological Organisation says there is an 80 percent chance a significant El Niño event will develop this summer, and United Nations leadership is already using the forecast to demand governments abandon fossil fuels and accelerate a transition to renewables.
WMO scientists report that sea-surface temperatures in the central-eastern Equatorial Pacific approached El Niño thresholds from late April to mid-May, with subsurface water temperatures running roughly 6°C above average. The agency puts the odds of the event continuing through at least November at 90 percent.
None of that is new. El Niño is a natural climate cycle that has repeated every two to seven years for hundreds of thousands of years. What is new, and worth watching, is how quickly UN officials converted a weather forecast into a policy ultimatum.
El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. During El Niño, warm water builds in the Pacific and spreads outward. Heat escapes into the atmosphere. Surface winds along the equator weaken or reverse direction. Rainfall patterns shift, wetter in some regions, drier in others. Climate.gov describes it as a recurring phenomenon that "triggers predictable disruptions of temperature, winds and precipitation."
Predictable. That word matters.
El Niño typically brings increased rainfall to parts of southern South America, the southern United States, the Horn of Africa, and central Asia. It typically brings drier conditions to Central America, northern South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Indonesia, and parts of southern Asia. These patterns have played out across centuries of recorded observation. They are not evidence of a new crisis. They are evidence of an old cycle.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo acknowledged the pattern's history while framing it as cause for alarm. She told reporters:
"We need to prepare for a potentially strong El Niño event, which will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heatwaves both on land and in the ocean."
Saulo also noted that the 2023, 24 El Niño, one of the five strongest on record, she said, "played a role in the record global temperatures we saw in 2024." That is a reasonable observation. But the leap from "El Niño contributed to higher temperatures" to "the only answer is ending fossil fuels" is not science. It is politics.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres wasted no time converting the WMO forecast into a climate-policy demand. His language was blunt:
"The science is clear: El Niño is arriving on our doorstep in the coming months with 90% certainty. The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is."
He went further, declaring that "El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world" and that impacts "will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed."
Then came the policy prescription, the part that always follows the alarm. Guterres called for "climate action equal to the crisis, ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all."
Set aside for a moment whether any of those policy goals would alter the trajectory of a weather pattern that has been cycling through the Pacific for hundreds of thousands of years. The more immediate question is whether the UN's framing matches the underlying science, or whether officials are once again inflating a natural event to justify a pre-existing agenda.
As scientists have previously warned, strong El Niño events can produce severe consequences, including drought, famine, and displacement. Those risks are real and worth preparing for. But preparation is not the same thing as a global energy overhaul.
Some coverage has described the forecast event as a "Super El Niño." That term is not a formal scientific classification. It is a framing choice, one that carries obvious rhetorical weight. The WMO's own statements use the phrase "potentially strong El Niño event," which is more measured.
Meteorologists have compared the likely intensity to the 1997, 98 El Niño, one of the strongest in the modern record. During that event, the UK experienced an exceptionally hot, sunny, and humid August. At Heathrow, the average maximum temperature that month was 25.8°C (78.4°F), with a peak of 31.5°C (88.7°F). Those are warm numbers, not apocalyptic ones.
The comparison is instructive. The 1997, 98 El Niño came and went. The world adapted. Crops were affected in some regions. Rainfall patterns shifted. And then the cycle moved on, as it always does.
That does not mean the coming event should be ignored. Growing odds of a strong El Niño warrant serious monitoring and practical readiness, especially for agriculture, water management, and communities in vulnerable regions. Saulo herself made that point clearly:
"Advance seasonal forecasts and early warnings are vital to save lives and cushion the impact on our economies and our communities."
That is a sensible statement. It is also a very different message from "end the addiction to fossil fuels."
The WMO's core claim is straightforward: an 80 percent probability of El Niño conditions during June through August 2026, rising to a 90 percent chance the event persists through at least November. The agency says unusually warm subsurface water in the tropical Pacific provides what it calls a "substantial reservoir" of heat feeding increasing surface temperatures.
Those are legitimate meteorological observations. They describe conditions in the Pacific Ocean. They do not, on their own, tell you what energy policy the United States or any other sovereign nation should adopt.
The forecast also carries the inherent uncertainty of any probabilistic projection months into the future. An 80 percent probability means a one-in-five chance it does not materialize as predicted. A 90 percent continuation probability still leaves room for the event to weaken or shift. Forecasting is not prophecy.
Meanwhile, American communities are already dealing with the practical realities of extreme weather right now. An omega block pattern recently locked record heat over the central United States while storms pounded both coasts. Severe weather outbreaks have already targeted Texas and the Plains with damaging hail and tornadoes.
Those events demand practical responses: better infrastructure, stronger emergency management, and resilient energy grids. They do not demand the wholesale dismantling of the energy systems that keep the lights on and the economy running.
The UN's response to this El Niño forecast follows a well-worn template. A natural weather event is identified. Its risks are described in urgent, sometimes inflated language. And then the prescription arrives, always the same prescription, regardless of the specific event: end fossil fuels, shift to renewables, transfer resources to developing nations.
Guterres has used this playbook before. The language barely changes from one climate event to the next. The policy demands never change at all.
What does change is the cost. Energy prices affect every household in America. The price of groceries, gasoline, heating, and cooling all trace back to energy costs. When UN officials call for "ending the addiction to fossil fuels," they are calling for policies that would raise those costs, often dramatically, for the very people they claim to be protecting.
Even rare severe weather events in the Pacific Northwest remind us that weather has always been variable, sometimes dangerous, and never fully controllable. The question is whether we respond with practical resilience or with ideological mandates that punish working families.
El Niño is real. Its effects are real. The WMO's monitoring work serves a legitimate purpose, and Saulo's call for early warning systems and informed decision-making is entirely reasonable.
But there is a wide gap between responsible weather forecasting and leveraging a natural climate cycle to advance a political agenda that would restructure the global energy economy. Guterres and the UN bureaucracy have landed squarely on the political side of that gap, again.
Americans who heat their homes, fuel their trucks, and feed their families deserve better than having a centuries-old weather pattern dressed up as a reason to make their energy more expensive and their economy less competitive.
El Niño has been coming and going since long before the United Nations existed. It will keep coming and going long after the current crop of officials has moved on. The cycle does not need a political agenda. It needs practical preparation, and leaders honest enough to know the difference.
