The Next El Niño Could Lock Earth Into a Hotter Climate - Inside Climate Newshttps://insideclimatenews.org/news/25042026/el-nino-earth-warming/Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades.
Climate impacts amplified by strong El Niños keep hitting the same vulnerable regions, may be more widespread than previously thought and can persist long after the tropical Pacific cools, according to an El Niño study published December 2025 in Nature Communications.
The study concluded that “super El Niños” are not just passing weather events, but more like climate shocks that can push parts of the Earth system into new states, co-author Jong-Seong Kug wrote in an email.
The study’s definition of a super El Niño is when the sea surface temperature anomaly in the tropical Pacific “exceeds 2 standard deviations above normal”—not an ordinary fluctuation, but more of a systemic warning sign.
The impacts are clustered in areas known to be sensitive to long-distance climate connections and regions “that are already prone to climate regime shifts,” wrote Kug, a climate researcher at Seoul National University in South Korea.
There are only three super El Niños on record: in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. All of them contributed to regime shifts in regional ocean temperatures, leading to unprecedented marine heat waves that destroyed or damaged coral reefs and caused mass die-offs and starvation among many marine organisms, from starfish to seabirds and marine mammals.
Those impacts, as well as changes in drought and extreme heat over land areas, persisted for years and could shift some regional patterns for decades, according to the study.