Arctic News: El Nino in 2025?

Saturday, March 15, 2025

El Nino in 2025?

The trends on the image below indicate that temperatures keep rising and that the rise may accelerate soon.

Will a new El Niño emerge in the course of 2025?

The probabilities of El Niño conditions are expected to rise in the course of 2025. Moving from the bottom of a La Niña to the peak of a strong El Niño can make a difference of more than 0.5°C, as illustrated by the image below.

[ Temperature rise due to El Niño from earlier post ]

The image below, adapted from NOAA, shows monthly temperature anomalies colored by ENSO values.

[ temperature anomalies through February 2025 colored by ENSO values, click to enlarge ]

Will a new El Niño emerge in the course of 2025? The image below shows NOAA ENSO probabilities issued March 13, 2025.

The image below shows that the temperature has been rising strongly recently in the Niño 3.4 area (inset).

The potential for a huge temperature rise within a few months time

Earth's temperature imbalance is growing, as emissions and temperatures keep rising. In a cataclysmic alignment, the upcoming El Niño threatens to develop while sunspots are higher than expected. Sunspots are predicted to peak in July 2025. The temperature difference between maximum versus minimum sunspots could be as much as 0.25°C.

There are further mechanisms that could accelerate the temperature rise, such as reductions in aerosols that are currently masking global warming.

[ Arctic sea ice volume, click to enlarge ]

The temperature rise comes with numerous feedbacks such as loss of sea ice, loss of lower clouds, more water vapor in the atmosphere and changes in wind patterns and ocean currents that could cause extreme weather events such as forest fires and flooding to increase in frequency, intensity, duration, ubiquity and area covered, and oceans to take up less heat, with more heat instead remaining in the atmosphere.

The self-reinforcing nature of many of these feedbacks could cause the temperature rise to accelerate strongly and rapidly within a few months time.

Furthermore, the impact of one mechanism can trigger stronger activity in other mechanisms. Low Arctic sea ice volume (above image on the right) can trigger destabilization of hydrates at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane that in turn speeds up thawing of permafrost.

Climate Emergency Declaration

The situation is dire and the precautionary principle calls for rapid, comprehensive and effective climate action to reduce the damage and to improve the situation, as described in this 2022 post, where needed in combination with a Climate Emergency Declaration, as discussed at this group.