Arctic News: Dire State of Climate

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Dire State of Climate

El Niño may emerge early 2026

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate pattern that fluctuates from El Niño to La Niña conditions and back. El Niño raises temperatures, whereas La Niña suppresses temperatures. This year, there have been neutral to borderline La Niña conditions. Over the past few months, there's been a zigzag pattern of rises and falls around the mean sea surface temperature in Niño 3.4, an area in the Pacific (inset) that is critical to the development of El Niño, as illustrated by the image below.

[ image from earlier post ]

The image on the right, adapted from ECMWF, shows an ENSO forecast for developments in Niño3.4 through August 2026, indicating that the next El Niño may emerge early 2026 and grow in strength in the course of 2026.

Despite the current borderline La Niña conditions, extreme weather events have hit many areas around the world and temperatures have been high this year, while Arctic sea ice is in a dire state, as illustrated by the images below.

The combination image below shows in the left panel Arctic sea ice concentration on August 16, 2025, and in the right panel Arctic sea ice thickness on August 15, 2025.

In the panel on the right of the above image, melt pools may give the impression of zero thickness in areas close to the North Pole. Melt pools can indicate that rainfall and/or heavy melting is taking place. The image below shows a forecast of the precipitable water anomaly for August 14, 2025 18Z.

The image below shows that Arctic sea ice volume was at a record low for the day on August 17, 2025, as it has been for more than a year.

Absence of thick sea ice makes it prone to collapse, and this raises the question whether it could collapse soon, even this year. Storms could rapidly push the remaining pieces of thicker sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean. Such storms could also mix surface heat all the way down to the seafloor, especially in areas where seas are shallow. This could cause destabilization of sediments that contain vast amounts of methane, resulting in huge amounts of methane erupting from the seafloor and entering the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean, where there is very little hydroxyl in the air to break down the methane.

[ from earlier post ]

The temperature rise is accelerating and the rise could accelerate even more due to decreases in buffers (as described in earlier posts such as this one), due to strengthening feedbacks, especially during an El Niño, and due to further reduction of the aerosol masking effect, which are all developments that could rapidly speed up existing feedbacks and trigger new feedbacks.

Climate Emergency Declaration

The situation is dire and the precautionary principle calls for rapid, comprehensive and effective 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.