A powerful form of the climate phenomenon is generating extreme weather, and it’s only getting started.

Why is this El Niño different? 
It’s a result of the incredible amount of heat that has built up in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño occurs naturally every few years, when the Pacific trade winds that typically blow westward—from the Americas to Southeast Asia—either slow down or reverse course. When that happens, huge volumes of warm ocean water start moving from the western Pacific toward the Americas. El Niño’s “function in the global earth system,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain, “is to release heat from the deeper oceans that has been temporarily stored there.” That release then warms the atmosphere, which in turn has a domino effect on weather patterns around the globe. “It is like throwing a stone into a lake,” said climate researcher Fred Kucharski. “The energy spreads all over the lake through wave propagation.” No two El Niños behave the same way, but there are patterns: unusually heavy downpours and floods in the southern U.S., for instance, and brutal droughts and crop failures in the normally lush Amazon region. The water being pushed eastward by the current El Niño, which began this summer, is far hotter than anything recorded in recent decades—turning the phenomenon into a “super El Niño” that scientists warn could bring with it cataclysmic weather events. 

What counts as a ‘super’ El Niño? 
It’s determined by measurements from a vast area of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. If the sea-surface temperature of that patch of ocean is at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for several consecutive months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declares the onset of El Niño. And when it’s 3.6 degrees or higher, it qualifies as a super El Niño. The current cycle shot past that threshold last month, when temperatures hit 5.49 degrees above average—the highest daily temperature on record. Because the phenomenon typically reaches its greatest strength around December, NOAA says there’s a 75% chance that the current El Niño will exceed the strength of previous events dating back to at least 1950. “Most El Niño years are a nuisance,” said Julia Rizzo, a Latin America agribusiness analyst for Morgan Stanley, “but this one has the makings of a shock.” It’s already contributing to weather chaos around the world. 

Where is it hitting hardest? 
Hawaii is enduring an unprecedented hurricane season. In the space of a month, three storms have passed within 50 miles of the archipelago—the most ever in a single year. None made landfall, but Hurricane Lala in August dumped more than 45 inches of rain in some areas, triggering damaging landslides and flooding. Cooler ocean waters around Hawaii normally act like an anti-hurricane force field, but that protection has faded this year as ocean temperatures have spiked. El Niño has had the opposite effect in the Atlantic. No hurricanes have yet been recorded there this season, thanks largely to fiercer upper-level winds tearing apart nascent storms. In Indonesia, unusually dry conditions are fueling a cascading series of forest and peatland fires. In Peru, the world’s largest catcher of anchovies, the fishing industry collapsed after the tiny baitfish abandoned the country’s waters for cooler northern climes. India’s monsoon rains, crucial for the country’s rice harvest, are running 15% below normal. And conditions could worsen as the super El Niño intensifies: 2024 was the hottest year on record in part because of the combined effect of El Niño and human-caused climate change. In 2027, said Jonas Jägermeyr of Columbia University’s climate school, the super El Niño “could drive global temperatures and weather extremes to new highs.” 

Are countries prepared? 
Thanks to real-time tracking systems and predictive models, scientists and governments have a good sense of when El Niño’s worst effects will hit, and how strong they’ll be. That’s why Brazil has hired a record number of firefighters to combat expected blazes in the Amazon, and why numerous African countries are now stockpiling huge amounts of rice. At the very least, the world is more resilient than it was during the 1877–78 super El Niño, which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere and has been called by researchers “the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity.” Still, some experts say a humanitarian crisis is inevitable this year and next. A report from the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab estimates that the extreme heat generated by El Niño will cause some 450,000 excess deaths globally, including 3,500 deaths in the U.S. Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that crop failures and smaller harvests could push 50 million people into acute hunger. 

How will El Niño affect U.S. weather? 
States in the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies, Plains, and Great Lakes typically get milder, slightly warmer winters during El Niño years, while precipitation increases across the Sun Belt. If that pattern holds this time, drought and wildfire risks could increase in Washington and Oregon, while wetter conditions might alleviate yearslong droughts in parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and coat the southern Rockies with ample snow. The prospect of a wetter, stormier winter has Southern California on edge—punishing waves can cause significant coastal flooding and erosion, leading to landslides and cliff collapse. The Golden State is also bracing for a massive pulse of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave, that is rolling toward its coast and could temporarily raise sea levels by 6 inches or more. Homes along the shoreline are especially at risk. “We need to be in the highest level of preparedness,” said Brett Sanders of the University of California, Irvine. “This is likely to be the most stressful winter we have had in a number of years in terms of waves.” 

Doctors in Tennessee this week had to “save the life of a woman whom the state had just tried to kill,” said Doreen St. Félix in The New Yorker. After the Supreme Court cleared the way for Christa Pike to die by lethal injection, the 50-year-old death row inmate was strapped to a gurney in Nashville’s Riverbend prison and said her last words. Then things started to go wrong. It took an hour and seven needles to establish an IV line in her arm. After the first dose of pentobarbital was administered, Pike—who had asked to be hanged, fearing a blood disorder and small veins would make lethal injection painful and ineffective—moaned, thrashed, and said her blistering “arm felt like it might burst.” She lost consciousness after a second dose but kept breathing. After an hour, Pike was taken to a hospital; she regained consciousness days later and was receiving critical medical care. Surely this is the very definition of the “cruel and unusual” punishment forbidden by the Constitution? 

Like two-thirds of Americans, “I believe the death penalty is just,” said Andrew T. Walker in National Review. And especially so in the case of a murderer like Pike, who in 1995 at age 18 helped stab and bludgeon a classmate to death, keeping a chunk of her victim’s skull as a souvenir. All this botched execution proves is that we have made a mistake by “medicalizing capital punishment.” The use of gurneys, IVs, and talk of humane “procedures” masks what the state “is justly doing: killing.” We should “bring back what is efficient and works: hanging and firing squads.” 

I can’t understand why so many conservatives, “who tend to distrust the government,” want government to have power over life and death, said Robert Gebelhoff in The Washington Post. Pike was clearly guilty, but since 1973 at least 200 people sentenced to die have been exonerated. The problem isn’t the method of execution; it’s the death penalty itself. Pike’s ordeal is far from unique, said Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic. Last May, Tennessean Tony Carruthers had his chest “sliced open with a scalpel” so executioners could insert a central line, which also failed. In 2022 alone, 35% of lethal injections nationwide went wrong. And though Tennessee has paused executions and ousted its prison commissioner, we can expect more “horrifically botched” lethal injections: Most doctors and pharmaceutical companies now refuse to participate, leaving states reliant on under-trained personnel and drugs from poorly regulated compounding pharmacies. How many more Christa Pikes will it take for states to understand that “America’s experiment with lethal injection has failed”?

Sylvester Stallone needed a Rocky-esque amount of willpower to survive his childhood, said Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times. At age 2, he was dropped off at a boardinghouse in Queens by his former chorus-girl mother and hairdresser father; they picked him up four years later. “I was raised by strangers,” said Stallone, now 80. “My parents were never nurturing, so this was actually a bonus compared to where I was living.” When he was 11, his parents split and he was shuttled between their homes in Maryland and Philadelphia. His mother frequently reminded him he was alive only because her attempt at a coat-hanger abortion had failed, while his father was brutally violent. After a young Sylvester made a mistake on a grocery store errand, “he kicked me in the stomach, laid me out.” Annoyed by a cat’s yowling, Stallone’s father “shot it and left it in the washtub. I think he did that to impress me. Like, ‘You’ll never be as tough as your old man.’ And I won’t. There is no chance.” As a teen, he was sent to a reform school that punished students by housing them in a nearby mental asylum. “The smell, the filth, people running around naked, clawing, hands tied, drooling. This is what they thought would impress you never to break the rules again.” The principal wanted to know if Stallone had learned his lesson. “I said, ‘I learned a much better lesson: You can’t break me.’”