{"id":17658,"date":"2016-02-11T13:06:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T18:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17658"},"modified":"2016-02-11T13:06:24","modified_gmt":"2016-02-11T18:06:24","slug":"el-nino-and-climate-change-wild-weather-may-get-wilder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17658","title":{"rendered":"El Ni\u00f1o and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/wp-admin\/post-new.php\" target=\"_blank\">El Ni\u00f1o and Climate Change:\u00a0Wild Weather May Get Wilder<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"dek\"><strong><em>This year\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon is spawning extreme weather around the planet. Now scientists are working to understand if global warming will lead to more powerful El Ni\u00f1os that will make droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes more intense.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Wild weather is gripping the planet. An El Ni\u00f1o has been wreaking havoc around the world, causing major flooding in South America, droughts in Indonesia and southern Africa, an unprecedented hurricane season in the North Pacific last fall, and much more.<\/p>\n<p>Climatologists are still calculating whether this is the biggest El Ni\u00f1o on record. What they do agree on is that there have now been three \u201csuper-El Ni\u00f1os\u201d in the space of just over three decades \u2014 in 1982-83, 1997-98, and now 2015-16. This unusual recurrence gives weight to a forecast made by Wenju Cai of Australia\u2019s national science agency, CSIRO, two years ago that headline-grabbing \u201csuper El Ni\u00f1os\u201d were in the process of upgrading from once every 20 years to once every ten years.<\/p>\n<div class=\"imageleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/images\/features\/argentina_flooding_el_nino.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"credit\">AFP\/Getty Images<\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\">This town in Entre Rios Province, Argentina, was flooded after El Ni\u00f1o-related rains in December.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>So what is going on? Is global warming beginning to cause more frequent and intense El Ni\u00f1os? And what effect might more powerful El Ni\u00f1o cycles have on the planet\u2019s steadily warming climate?<\/p>\n<p>El Ni\u00f1os are short-term aberrations of ocean currents and weather systems that start in the waters of the tropical Pacific and send shock waves around the world. They usually occur after several years of calm conditions during which prevailing tropical winds blowing across the world\u2019s largest ocean pile warm water up in the west of the Pacific, around Indonesia.<\/p>\n<p>This cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, there is a breakout. The warm waters turn and wash back east toward the Americas.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>El Ni\u00f1o and Climate Change:\u00a0Wild Weather May Get Wilder This year\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon is spawning extreme weather around the planet. Now scientists are working to understand if global warming will lead to more powerful El Ni\u00f1os that will make droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes more intense.\u00a0 Wild weather is gripping the planet. An El [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,252,288,12333,369,12334,7163],"class_list":["post-17658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-el-nino","tag-extreme-weather","tag-fred-pearce","tag-global-warming","tag-wild-weather","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17659,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17658\/revisions\/17659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}