Super El Niño
Though not a recognized scientific term and more like a Marvel villain, the ‘super El Niño’ is nonetheless an event not to doomscroll past without worry.
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Though not a recognized scientific term and more like a Marvel villain, the ‘super El Niño’ is nonetheless an event not to doomscroll past without worry.
For the past three weeks, roughly half of Filipinos, mostly in Mindanao, probably couldn’t relate to, moreover understand, what the other half, mostly in Luzon, were concerned about.
To some it may have been weird, but experts assured that it was normal, even predicting that it would get worse before Christmas.
No, it wasn’t about tribal politics or the colors green, red or pink, though it coincidentally looked like it.
Instead, it was plainly about man’s ancient tough nemesis: unpredictable weather.
So yes, the weather messed with Filipinos’ heads and minds in the strangest way. If you took a plane from rainy and flooded Metro Manila you landed two hours later in sweltering Cagayan de Oro City, hoping not to catch a cold and cough.
How that happened, the weather bureau explained, was typhoon-influenced Luzon drew more than its usual share of the southwest monsoon or habagat rains while Mindanao hardly got any.
But this event, warned weather and disaster officials, was merely the foreplay for even worse weather ahead, when the extremist “super El Niño” shall unleash its full wrath.
Though not a recognized scientific term and more like a Marvel villain, the “super El Niño” is nonetheless an event not to doomscroll past without worry.
El Niño, of course, is familiar to us. The naturally occurring weather pattern, which happens every two to seven years and that lasts for around a year, is no strange beast.
As a quick refresher, El Niño is caused by unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean. Scientists typically declare an El Niño when sea surface temperatures in key areas of the Pacific Ocean are 0.5-degrees Centigrade or higher above the long-term average.
But this year’s “super El Niño,” which began in June and is predicted to last until 2027, has a current temperature in tested areas of the Pacific Ocean of 2°C, well above normal. The latest forecasts suggest the warming can go higher later this year, exceeding 3°C, once the super El Niño nears its peak.
If that happens, this El Niño could be the strongest in living memory, says the BBC, “probably the largest such event since the 19th century.”
Besides other severe impacts like food and water shortages, the “super El Niño” largely means more rainfall in some areas and drought in others.
Specifically for Asia, “super El Niño’s” warming of the trade winds, which blow from east to west across the Pacific Ocean, means that strong typhoons are “less likely to move towards the Philippines and are instead more likely to affect China, Japan and South Korea,” says climate change publication Carbon Brief.
This largely means that drier conditions will prevail in Southeast Asia and parts of Australia in the coming months, raising risks of severe drought and wildfires.
Now, even if it’s predicted that strong typhoons will likely spare the country for the rest of the year, experts nonetheless say that our foresight-challenged disaster officials better think beyond one lazy catch-all disaster plan that is prepared only for dry conditions.
Disaster officials must also have separate contingency plans on the get-go in case there’s heavy flooding in northern Philippines, experts insist.
As of now, it’s unclear if disaster officials have separate disaster plans. Or if they have, they’re failing to clearly tell us what those are, much less tell us what exactly we’re supposed to do.
