BRUSSELS — The world must prepare for a surge in weather extremes and heat waves as a potentially exceptional El Niño emerges, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization has warned.
The WMO said Tuesday that there’s an 80 percent chance of an El Niño — the warm phase of a natural climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean — developing between June and August, and a 90 percent chance the event will arrive by November.
El Niño’s return heralds a temporary upsurge in global temperatures on top of the warming effect of human-caused climate change. The event also disrupts rainfall patterns around the world, usually producing intense downpours and floods in some regions while bringing drought to others.
“El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement Tuesday morning. The world, he added, “must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is.”
