The legacy media is out in full force, vitriolically calling the end of La Niña and prematurely selling the next El Niño.

The rhetoric is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, the warm-mongering is on full show, and EVERYONE is dutifully following the instruction. These charlatans have sat patiently through three years of La Niña (cooling that they previously claimed was an impossibility) and now they’re pouncing on the very first glimpse of oceanic warming.

It is indeed early days, sea surface temperatures in the Tropical Pacific Ocean have only just crossed the threshold into ‘weak’ El Niño territory, yet the copycat, wolf-crying screamers doing the MSM rounds are ratcheting up the fear to an unprecedented level.

The dial is now firmly set to eleven:

“Terrifying ‘hyperthreat’ coming as El Nino chance rises,” is how news.com.au chose to report on this natural cycle.

And similarly to COVID, these headlines could be looked upon as the first blows of the battering ram, the initial stoking of truly apocalyptic-like fears aimed at terrifying the masses into accepting a future stripping of the few freedoms we have left.

‘In the name of saving the planet.’

Taking government agency data at face value –which is a tall ask, given their track record of proven maleficence– nothing alarming is occurring. Official forecasts are still unclear as to whether an El Niño will even develop, let alone as to its potential strength; and while it seems logical that we’re due, and the signs are all there, there are still many unknowns involved.

Researchers in the ENSO community are well aware of the forecasting challenges during the spring, especially when it comes to predictions of El Niño. It comes down to uncertainty in two of the main ingredients that give rise to El Niño:

1) In the spring, it is difficult to know whether surface west-to-east (“westerly”) wind anomalies across the tropical Pacific Ocean will continue through the summer and persist long enough to reinforce the developing El Niño.

2) The heat in the subsurface tropical Pacific Ocean is a necessary precursor for El Niño but it is not always sufficient.

You can find more of these two uncertainties in more detail here.

But put simply, first off: if the surface westerly wind anomalies fizzle out then El Niño can fail to get going, and we can only see this after the year is over; in the midst of the spring/summer scientists cannot detect what will occur.

And secondly: researchers are looking into the topic of ‘El Niño false alarms’, which are El Niño events that were confidently predicted to happen due to heat in the tropical Pacific Ocean, but then failed to materialize for one reason or another.

The figure below shows nine different ENSO forecasts made during past Aprils with above-average sea surface temperatures.

Of the nine warmer Aprils, only four went on to develop El Niños. Researchers correctly predicted three that would fail to become El Niño, but two (1990 and 2014) were officially predicted to become El Niños but then failed to form.

Model forecasts (light gray lines: means from the North American Multi-model Ensemble) and observations (black lines: ERSSTv5 temperature data) of ENSO as measured by the Niño-3.4 index. Years are selected based on the nine largest April values of subsurface warm water volume anomalies (0-500 meters below the surface) of the tropical Pacific Ocean (120E-80W). Subsurface data based on TAO buoys. Figure provided Dr. Aaron Levine (and then ‘modified’ by climate.gov).

Also worth noting, while April sea surface temperature data do indeed show signs of an emerging El Niño signal, at the same time, the PDO index is the lowest for any spring month since 1956. This contrast is very striking, and highly unusual.

[ncei.noaa.gov]

Consideration should also be given to the contentions of Professor David Dilley, who is expecting a major change in how El Niño influences global weather patterns in conjunction with the end of the North Atlantic’s 42-year warm phase and its return to a cool water phase that he forecasts will persist for the next 30+ years.

CONCLUSION

The question remains: if spring forecasting is such a challenge, then why is the propaganda so bullish, why is the media going ‘all-in’ on the probability of El Niño?