El Niño is coming! El Niño is coming!
Unless “El Niño” is a defenseless child who can be violently separated from his family and thrown into a detention center, President Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear about it.
We’re being treated to a “super” El Niño this year. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency on Monday. The “super” isn’t just a fun superlative but an actual scientific distinction. OK, the technical term is the less-fun “very strong El Niño,” and it indicates that sea surfaces in portions of the Pacific Ocean have risen by 2° Celsius (this one’s projected to go up to 3ºC above).
There have been but five super El Niños in recorded history — and No. 6 is shaping up to be the biggest one yet.
I’m sure most of you have had enough of these “once in a lifetime” ordeals (COVID-19, storm surges, solar storms…), but being sick of something awful won’t make it go away. Just look at who’s still in the White House.
Now, I’m not blaming this super El Niño on Trump; even he can’t muck things up that bad. I mention him to point out that the federal government should be doing a lot more to prepare for what’s coming. Waiting to see if it actually happens and hoping it doesn’t has its problems. For one, the weather typically doesn’t respond to Trump’s medley of negotiation tactics (coming up with little nicknames, posting AI slop on social media, Sharpies or his favorite: frivolous lawsuits). And two, disasters tend to be significantly worse when you’re caught unprepared.
Shocking, I know.
Anyone remember 1997’s El Niño? It was one of the five recorded super El Niño events and caused 17 storm-related deaths and more than $500 million in damage just in California. Worldwide, it led to around 23,000 deaths and an estimated $5.7 trillion in global income losses.
How about the El Niño in 1982? That one caused an estimated $4.1 trillion in global income losses and was bad enough to get people thinking, “We should really come up with a system to predict these things so we don’t get caught with our pants down.” Well, they came up with the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean array, a buoy monitoring system that gave scientists a six-month warning that something wicked this way came. And it worked great! Until DOGE unilaterally decided that a heads-up on cataclysm was a royal waste of dough.
The strongest of the five super El Niño events was in 1877, and it was a doozy. It was one of the biggest natural disasters in recorded history, lasted about 16 months and led directly to catastrophic worldwide droughts, harvest collapse and famine. It’s estimated that up to 50 million people died as a result, roughly 3% of everybody on Earth at that point. That would be comparable to about 249 million deaths based on today’s population.
Trump has made it crystal clear he has no intention of helping blue states that didn’t vote for him. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in helping red states that voted for him, either — especially if the area in question has many people of color. Look no further than Gary, Ind., where majority-Black neighborhoods were without power for 17 days until Trump finally approved a major disaster declaration and power was restored.
Need I mention Puerto Rico, a United States territory with around 3.5 million American citizens? Nine years after Hurricane Maria, they’re still struggling with power outages and shortages of food, water and gasoline.
Can’t you just picture El Niño driving everybody out of Puerto Rico and the Trump family building a bunch of hotels and other monuments to themselves? I sure can.
You can forget about Trump helping other countries if they aren’t run by his preferred authoritarians.
Events like El Niño are bigger than politics and demand an immediate humanitarian response. Because the federal government is not already taking action, people are likely to die in the United States and across the globe in numbers that could reach the millions. And for those who gleefully lack introspection, empathy or a shred of humanity, here’s another way of looking at it: The damage could cost trillions of dollars.
A few trillion may not sound like much next to our $40 trillion of national debt, but trust me, it’s a lot of money.
El Niño is coming.
Wouldn’t it be nice if el niño in the White House started behaving like el adulto in the room? Then maybe he could do his job to help all Americans — not just the ones who donate to his ballroom.
And if he doesn’t, members of Congress need to do their jobs and hold the president accountable.
Since both are unlikely to happen, it’s up to us to do our jobs as United States citizens and vote in the upcoming midterms with all the explosive fury of a super El Niño.
