Climate change could spawn more frequent El Ninos

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Crown Capital Eco Management

• Climate change could spawn more frequent El Ninos

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Study predicts that extreme weather events will
occur more often.

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• Some of the worst El Niños, the infamous climate
  patterns that shake up weather around the world,
  could double in frequency in upcoming decades due
  to global warming, says a new study out Sunday in
  the journal Nature Climate Change.
• During an El Niño, water temperatures in the
  central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean tend
  to be warmer-than-average for an extended period
  of time typically at least three to five
  months. This warm water brings about significant
  changes in global weather patterns.
• The most powerful El Niños such as the ones
  that developed in 1982-83 and 1997-98 are
  forecast to occur once every 10 years throughout
  the rest of this century, according to study lead
  author Wenju Cai of the Commonwealth Scientific
  and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's
  national science agency. Over the past 100 years
  or so, however these "extreme" El Niños occurred
  only once every 20 years, he said.
• This means that the extreme weather events fueled
  by El Niños such as droughts and wildfires in
  Australia, floods in South America and powerful
  rainstorms along the U.S. West Coast will occur
  more often.

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• The most recent El Niño ended in 2010.
• The research results came from an aggregation of
  20 climate models, which were used in the
  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
• The models found that this doubling of extreme El
  Niño episodes is caused by increased surface
  warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
  because of climate change. This area of the ocean
  warms faster than the surrounding waters, the
  researchers found.
• But Cai acknowledges those findings stand in
  contrast.to previous studies that found no solid
  consensus on how El Niños will change because of
  global warming.
• "The question of how global warming will change
  the frequency of extreme El Niño events has
  challenged scientists for more than 20 years,"
  said study co-author Mike McPhaden of the
  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
  "This research is the first comprehensive
  examination of the issue to produce robust and
  convincing results."
• "It looks like a solid study," said meteorologist
  Michael Mann of Penn State University, who was
  not involved in the research. "The authors appear
  to provide reasonably convincing evidence that El
  Niño events are likely to become more extreme as
  the climate continues to warm, in turn implying
  greater future regional climate/weather extremes
  than past studies."

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• However, another expert, senior scientist Kevin
  Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric
  Research in Boulder, Colo, said that some aspects
  of the study are not really new, although it is
  cast in a new way. He notes that there remain
  issues in how well models simulate El Niño
  events, which means uncertainty remains on just
  how El Niño and the climate of the tropical
  Pacific will actually change.
• He suggests that a way forward is to also look at
  the atmospheric component of El Niño and how that
  is changing.
• "Even if the projection for this increased
  frequency of extreme El Ninos is correct, there
  will still be extended periods of infrequent and
  weak El Ninos, such as has been experienced since
  the late 1990s (since the last big event of
  1997-98)," said Lisa Goddard, director of the
  International Research Institute for Climate and
  Society with Columbia University.
• "This is likely the result of decadal
  variability, which is something the climate
  community is actively researching at present,"
  she added.
• A separate study published in Nature Climate
  Change in 2013 found that El Niños appeared to
  occur a lot more than normal over the last 50
  years, just as temperatures worldwide rose
  because of global warming, also suggesting a
  connection.