El Niño is one of nature’s many phenomena, and it affects countries all over the world. In the book Tropic of Chaos by Christian Parenti, he elaborates on the topic of El Niño in different regions and how it is being affected by climate change. I’ve learned about El Niño in the past, but never considered how it could be altered by our warming planet. Parenti talks about how the conditions due to El Niño were increasing back when he was writing this book, and I was curious what the current ones might be like now.
This event takes place irregularly every two to seven years in the Pacific Ocean, but its impact is not limited to those boundaries. During a typical El Niño, environmental factors differ including things like surface waters warming, wind patterns changing, and upwelling is reduced. Whether these changes are strong or weak can play a role in those affected areas in terms of fishing, rain fall amounts, and the intensity of severe weather events. Thus, impacting the livelihoods of citizens left to hope that El Niño will be on their side once it rolls around. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/ElNino/images/walker_circulation.png
From further research, I was able to learn that climate change is still increasing the extremities of El Niño events. This could be new hurricane patterns, larger floods, and intensified droughts that we have never seen before. It all comes back to this change of weather in the ocean. However, although there are many areas that are affected by El Niño, it can be different in regions like Latin America versus Asia. During a non-El Niño year, the trades winds blow westwards and cause the warm surface waters to border Asia and Australia. Then when El Niño does occur, then the winds change and bring that water the other way. This can result in droughts during this time for Asian countries such as Indonesia. It can also cause a dramatic rise in surface air temperatures in southeast Asia, and in 2016 they faced one of the warmest averages ever. In turn, energy usage and crop production were disrupted in the countries there. These record-breaking stats are most likely tied back to global warming, also causing reduced rainfall and cloud coverage spanning into the Philippines.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Latin America is given basically the opposite effects of El Niño. During the event, precipitation increases from the convection above the now warm waters, and along with that comes more coastal flooding and erosion in Ecuador and northern Peru. In these communities, their infrastructure and crops could be destroyed or transportation might become limited because of the weather pattern change. The warming of our planet could affect where this extreme rainfall impacts and is predicted to shift east along the equator in the Pacific Ocean.
Furthermore, the warm waters that are normally in Asia are now able to reach the coast of South America, resulting in the prevention of the upwelling that normally happens there. Upwelling is when cold water is brought up to the upper layers of the ocean and brings up nutrients from the deeper parts with it. These nutrients provide food for marine life and allow for thriving fishing industries in Peru, Ecuador, or Chile. However, El Niño stops this movement of water, and the fish are forced to move to different places in search of food or can die off entirely. This can cause a crash in the fish dependent countries of Latin America. An example of this can be seen in Chile, when almost 8,000 tons of sardines were found dead during the El Niño season.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/ElNino/images/chilean_sardines.jpg
It has been found that that during El Niño years, the levels of carbon dioxide that are being put into the atmosphere is typically more than non-El Niño ones. Perhaps it could be from the increased amounts of wildfires that we’ve seen growing in recent years along with our heating planet. Since the intensity and frequency of droughts goes up during this time, strong wildfires are also more likely to occur. Their additional smoke, combined with the continuous release of pollutants by humans, along with the earth’s processes that release CO2 naturally (i.e., volcanoes) is adding up. Such amounts of added components are bound to affect the planet and its cycles, including El Niño.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/ElNino/images/atmospheric_co2_chart.png
El Niño combined with climate change has resulted in high impacts on daily life for those in both Asia and Latin America. The more frequent and intense weather events brought along by the two events have the strength to hit these direct areas hard. The El Niño fires contributed to at least 100,000 deaths in 2015-2016. By April of 2016, 60 million people throughout Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America required food assistance from those years El Niño. These conditions can be found to have brought about an outbreak of Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, in 2016 as well. The effects of climate change on El Niño were increasing when Parenti wrote Tropic of Chaos, and they still are going up today. In the future, it has been found that these weather events that are a result of El Niño are supposed to start happening even more within the next 20 years. Even if we do manage to get some sort of control on our carbon emissions, weather events will still persist and continue to affect the globe’s weather patterns. The damage of the climate crisis has already struck El Niño and now we are stuck with the consequences. Within these next decades, hopefully governments across the globe can work together to come up with some sort of solution.
Hi Brooke, really great post. I thought it was interesting how you brought up how El nino conditions have implemented conditions to support Zika. Also, connecting this back to my blog post, we have seen the effects of la nina in Afghanistan with its harshly dry conditions. Crops destroyed, and water dried up. This was a great post that was very straight forward and gave thorough descriptions about what el nina truly is, I didn't fully understand before but now I am fully informed.
ReplyDeleteHey Brooke, great post! This was a very good and in depth explanation of El Nino which I have always found to be a very difficult topic to grasp well. I wonder if we would be able to definitively say that climate change is affecting El Nino years in frequency since it is already such a random event.
ReplyDeleteHey Brooke! I really enjoyed reading your post. I found it really helpful in explaining El Nino because this was a topic in the book that was confusing for me. I also really liked how you explained it and then explained how it's being changed by climate change. Great job!
ReplyDeleteGreat post Brooke! Like the other commenters have said, I really liked and appreciated your in depth exploration of El Nino, in my opinion it's a hard topic to understand and this post made it a lot easier and clearer for me, thank you! I remember hearing about the Zika virus, but I had no clue that El Nino contributed to it until today. I think it was really interesting to learn that fact and overall really interesting to read your post!
ReplyDeleteHi Brooke, great job! I enjoyed reading your post a lot, and appreciated the depth in which you went into explaining El Niño. With the occurrence of El Niño not always being predictable in the first place, it certainly does not help when its effects occur and are amplified. Your post did a great job of illustrating how and why El Niño effects so many aspects of society as well, talking about the droughts, floods, and destructive weather it produces, typically hitting developing countries much harder and impeding their growth, increasing inequality.
ReplyDeleteHey Brook, very informative post that you wrote. I have always struggled to understand the idea of El Nino and La Nina. Your post did a great job at diving into the definition and explantation of a topic that can be difficult to understand. Also, I liked how you wrote about the Zika virus and how El Nino had an effect on the outbreak.
ReplyDeleteHi Brooke - great post! I had some basic understanding of El Niño and La Niña but this post really helped me understand their patterns and how they affect so many weather patterns (and even something like the Zika virus) worldwide. I remember hearing about that virus but I never would have thought it was related to El Niño. It is also shocking to hear that El Niño years are associated with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, I’m really interested as to what research is being done on this phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing as Amelia - I don't have a good grasp of El Niño but your post helped. We only have one planet, and our ability to survive is so interdependent.
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