UN: World should prepare for El Nino, new record temperatures

GENEVA, Switzerland, May 4 ------ The United Nations warned Wednesday of a growing likelihood the weather phenomenon El Nino will develop in coming months, fuelling higher global temperatures and possibly new heat records.

The UN's World Meteorological Organization said it now estimated there was a 60-percent chance that El Nino would develop by the end of July, and an 80-percent chance it would do so by the end of September.

"This will change the weather and climate patterns worldwide," Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of WMO's regional climate prediction services division, told reporters in Geneva.

El Nino, which is a naturally occurring climate pattern typically associated with increased heat worldwide, as well as drought in some parts of the world and heavy rains elsewhere, last occurred in 2018-19. Since 2020 though, the world has been hit with an exceptionally long La Nina -- El Nino's cooling opposite -- which ended earlier this year, ceding way to the current neutral conditions. And yet, the UN has said the last eight years were the warmest ever recorded, despite La Nina's cooling effect stretching over nearly half that period. Without that weather phenomenon, the warming situation could have been even worse.

Source: philstar.com