Everybody talks about the super El Nino. World recognized El Nino expert Michael Mcphaden with the known – and known unknowns – of this historic weather changer. What will this winter bring? Atmospheric scientist Judah Cohen warns winter cold snaps are not banished by warming. Trouble can still arrive from the stratosphere, linked to Arctic snow and ice.
I’m Alex Smith. Welcome to an hour of essential knowledge.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
– Richard Feynman, 1974.
NOAA EL NINO EXPERT MICHAEL MCPHADEN
Is this a “super” El Nino? What does that mean? Business people, farmers – everyone wants to know what to expect. We reached the man, a world-recognized expert on El Nino. With over 300 papers, Dr. Michael Mcphaden is one of the most cited authors on El Nino. After his work with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Mcphaden is now a Senior Scientist at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. That is in Seattle, Washington.
Listen to or download this 27 minute interview with Dr. Michael Mcphaden in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
There is a lot of media – and warnings from scientists – about this remarkable burst of heat in the Eastern Pacific, as we speak. Is it overblown? Should we be concerned? Mcphaden’s response:
“No, it is not overblown. We have a really monumental El Nino underway that will rival, if not exceed, previous extreme El Ninos that we’ve witnessed in the past 50 years. This event has the potential to be the strongest El Nino ever recorded. Now, this doesn’t mean that we should panic, but it does mean that we should be aware and we should take steps that can help us mitigate the more adverse impacts of this event.“
Michael led deployment of ocean measuring buoys in the Pacific providing a lot of what we know. Hard data. How does he rate the developing El Nino right now in 2026?
“This event has already broken some records in the tropical Pacific. The sea surface temperatures in a large area of the central and eastern Pacific that we use as an index region were the highest ever recorded in June, July, and August of this year and likely to be the highest in September. The event continues to amplify.
El Ninos typically peak at the end of the calendar year, October, November, December. The seasonal forecast models that we use to look seasons in advance into the future tell us that this event has the potential to achieve an amplitude that we’ve never seen before.”
Later Michael tells us:
“…we are already seeing the impacts of El Niño in many parts of the world. In Indonesia, a severe drought has led to extreme wildfires that are creating a toxic haze that are affecting millions of people in the region. The Indian monsoon, the summer monsoon, has been deficient.
Fifteen percent less rainfall, which is affecting their ability to generate hydropower and their agricultural production. There’s been a major heat wave in Peru because of the El Niño. These are just a few examples, and there are more to come in our winter season when this El Niño peaks.”
Mcphaden co-authored a 2022 ENSO blog saying a La Niña year today is significantly warmer than an El Niño year was a few decades ago. Now with 14 more years of emissions and warming, are El Nino and La Nina substantially different?
The October 31, 2022 blog says:
“The simplest evidence is that global average temperature during recent La Niña years is warmer than for El Niño years in earlier decades! In fact, the La Niña year of 2020 tied 2016 – a year that started with a major El Niño – as the all-time-record-high global surface temperature.”
This pattern of Pacific heating and cooling has existed for thousands of years. But now the world is warmer each time El Nino returns. Mcphaden lead a 2020 AGU report called “El Niño Southern Oscillation in a Changing Climate”. You can watch a 2023 Earth Week presentation on this here on YouTube.
ENSO AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The big question is: How does climate change affect ENSO and how does ENSO affect climate change? Mcphaden:
“Climate change and El Nino interact in a few distinct ways. One of them is that during an El Nino event, a tremendous amount of heat is released from the ocean to the atmosphere. This is because the surface temperatures are so warm, water evaporates, and when that water condenses and rains out in the atmosphere, it releases heat. So the entire global atmosphere responds to heating in the tropics due to El Nino.
This means that big events like the one we are experiencing now will push global mean surface temperatures to a new record high. The last record high global mean surface temperature was in 2024. It was about 1.55 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline.
This event, given how strong it is and how much heat will be released from the ocean to the atmosphere, could push global mean surface temperatures to 1.7 degrees Celsius or more above the pre-industrial baseline. That’s pretty worrying when you think of what that means. It sounds like a small change, but it’s a huge change.”
DOES GLOBAL WARMING CHANGE EL NINO EVENTS?
Mcphaden:
“…one of the big questions is whether climate change has affected El Nino. And there are three threads of evidence that we have to suggest yes. One is the instrumental record that dates back 150 years.
This is from the time when we began to systematically measure the ocean with instruments. Now, 150 years sounds like a lot, but as I mentioned, there’s so much diversity and natural variability in the ENSO cycle. It’s a little hard to say whether the last 50 years during which we’ve seen some really strong events.
Is that due to a fingerprint of climate change or is that due to just natural variability? Would it happen anyways? Another thread of evidence is from paleoproxies. These are tree rings from the rim countries or the chemistry in the growth shells of corals that grow in the water in the Pacific Ocean. Here you can go back hundreds or thousands or 10,000 years and look at El Ninos in the distant past.
And it does appear in coral chemistry records that El Nino is more energetic in the past 50 years relative to the previous 1,000. Now, the issue here is these are proxy measurements. They’re not direct measurements of temperature or some climatic variable.
They’re a measure of something in a living organism and you wonder whether or not the biology, chemistry, or some other physical factors might have affected that record in a way that it’s not completely representative of oceanic conditions. So the corals have their limitations just like the instrumental record. And then we have big climate change models.
These are basically, we code in the equations of motion for the ocean and the atmosphere equations for radiative transfer. They’re very heavily physically based. And we can run these models for hundreds or thousands of years and they suggest that El Nino in the last 50 or 60 years is stronger than it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
Now, the problem with these big models, they have their own limitations because they don’t always get everything right about the climate system in all places at all times. We know they are in some cases biased in a way that does not represent truly what happens in nature. So we’ve got these three threads, all of which have their own limitations, but they all point the same direction.
They’re all suggesting that climate change has affected El Nino by some small amount, by about 10% amplification. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but what that suggests is that the big events are getting stronger. And like with hurricanes, it’s the strong ones that are the most damaging.”
ALEX ON MCPHADEN AND SCIENCE
Did you find it distressing that Dr. Mcphaden offered evidence against theories he favored? This is true science according to theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. In his 1974 Caltech Commencement Address, called “Cargo Cult Science“, Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In that same address, Feynman elaborated on the duty scientists have to seek out every flaw in their own ideas and share those details openly so others – even opponents – can test them. Feynman told the students:
“It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”
“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it.”
– Richard Feynman
We see this honesty in good scientific papers, where the “Discussion” section contains doubts and arguments against itself. This is frustrating for the public. We want definite answers. Good scientists can seldom give them, especially for vast complex systems on Earth and with allegedly intelligent human agents in the mix.
Keep your mind open and working. We all need to be awake.
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SEASONS AHEAD
JUDAH COHEN
What will this winter bring? Fuel companies, investors, farms, cities – they all want to know. Dr. Judah Cohen is a specialist in the private sector. He watches big picture data and season signals, publishing over a hundred key papers. Check out two of his recent co-authored works: “Observed changes in accumulated dangerous heat during Northern Hemisphere summers” (July 2026) and “Possible Mechanisms Linking North American Cold Waves to Arctic Sea Ice and Eurasian Snow Cover Interannual Variations” (September 2026).
Judah Cohen is Director of Seasonal Forecasting – and Principal Scientist for the company Janus Research and a research scientist with MIT. Keep up with his blog here.
Listen to or download this 29 minute interview with Dr. Judah Cohen in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Europeans are worried about this winter.
Natural gas prices are sky high. The EU is banning all Russian Liquefied Natural Gas imports starting January 1st. Qatar can’t get gas out of the Persian Gulf. An article says Europe is betting on a mild winter. Is it a good bet? Cohen tells us:
“My answer would be kind of mixed. Yes and no. You know, if you’re a big believer, the trend is your friend, which a lot of times I am, then that is a good bet, because Europe is one of the fastest warming places on Earth, which, to no one’s surprise, almost shocks me, and that includes winter.
Certainly this past summer, Europe got a lot of headlines for the heat waves and, unfortunately, fatalities and wildfires, but it also is true for winter as well. They see warming more rapidly than other regions across the Northern Hemisphere. So based on that, it is a good bet.
However, I don’t think Europe’s never going to see a cold winter again, so there’s always, even if it’s maybe, say, the chance of a cold winter is no longer 50-50, I don’t think it’s, like, less than 10%. You know, I think things like to revert to the mean, I eventually will see a winter that, you know, kind of feels like the winters of yesteryear. So, you know, it is kind of like a Russian roulette game, a little bit of Russian roulette. Excuse the pun there. You know, every winter betting on a mild winter. I do think at some point it’s not going to work out.”
SEE THIS: “Europe bets on mild winter when it should be cutting gas demand”
The continent is approaching winter amid high gas prices, escalating conflicts raising supply concerns, and historically low gas storage levels. The current strategy – to hope for a mild winter – is not a plan, writes Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Via Inside Gas, Greig Aitken Sept 24 Source: Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis: IEEFA
Ana Maria writes:
“Europe is approaching winter with high gas prices, escalating conflicts disrupting supply and gas storage at the lowest level for this time of year since records began in 2011. Compounding these challenges are intense competition with Asian buyers for liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes and doubts about how El Niño will impact the weather.
Consequently, Europe faces several uncertainties this winter:
Whether disruption to LNG transit through the Strait of Hormuz is prolonged
Whether Asian buyers outbid Europe for US LNG
Whether gas price volatility surges
Whether storage levels remain critically low
Whether the winter is exceptionally cold
Whether gas supply from Norway or other major producers is disrupted
Whether other critical shipping routes are obstructed
Only some of these need to materialise for buyers to pay a steep premium to guarantee security of supply. That pushes up gas and electricity bills. Where households and businesses cannot pay, the result is involuntary demand destruction that efficiency and electrification policies were meant to limit.
Europe must prepare for another imminent supply squeeze when the EU’s complete ban on Russian LNG imports under existing long-term contracts takes effect on 1 January 2027. This deadline arrives at a highly sensitive time, given that Russia supplied about 19% of the EU’s LNG imports in the first half of 2026.
EU gas demand fell by 17.7% between 2021 and 2025, providing a crucial buffer against supply shortages. Meanwhile, each new renewable energy project, battery storage system and grid upgrade helps to reduce Europe’s reliance on gas.
Wind output and temperatures will determine how tight Europe’s gas supply becomes this winter and how high prices go. Demand reduction remains the biggest lever within Europe’s control.“
THREAT TO HEATING IN NEW ENGLAND THIS WINTER
Americans in the U.S. Northeast have similar worries. Many New Englanders need heating oil to stay warm. That’s about 5 million households and maybe 12 million people. Heating oil is basically diesel with red dye and different sulfur levels. We all know what happened to diesel prices.
We talk about projections for winter in Eastern North America this year. Judah’s methods mean he does not produce a forecast for the coming winter until November. However, he put a strong hint in a couple of his blog posts, and this post on LinkedIn:
Judah Cohen:
“El Niño has certainly been an attention hog but the Polar Vortex (PV) is doing its best to get some attention. First a PV stretch bringing cooler weather in the East US followed by an almost unprecedented “warming” in polar stratosphere first week of October & a Canadian warming. Canadian warmings often bring a very mild pattern to North America but can bring cooler weather to Eurasia. But readers of the blog should know that what comes after a Canadian warming, especially this time of year, is as close as a sure thing in longer range climate prediction.”
This is the first I’ve heard of the “Canadian warming”. It is a term in atmospheric science for a stratospheric event which sounds like a weaker version of a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event (SSW). Check it out.
Anyway, my take on Judah’s veiled projections, ahead of his November forecast, is: what follows is milder, wetter air from the Pacific, rather than an outburst of cold from the Arctic. The “Canadian warming” causes the Jet Stream to move closer to the Pole, in a tight pattern – not the meandering bulges that bring cold further south.
The story of New England’s exposure to the diesel crisis is hardly reported. By early October, home heating oil in the Northeast is already over 80% higher price than last year. I did a deep dive into it and let me just say this: even if a winter is unusually warm on average, the strange set-up for New England heating oil means even a week of extreme cold can break supplies. The diesel shortage/price rise is hitting the farmers first as they harvest. The fate of New Englanders if a week-long vortex cold wave arrives – comes later.
In a New England winter storm, sometimes frozen rivers block fuel barges or blizzards shut down delivery trucks. Sometimes diesel behaves badly in sub-zero temperatures, tending to “gel”. Lines and equipment can become clogged.
NOT COVERED BY HEATING OIL RESERVES
They make it sound like the situation is covered by reserves. There is supposed to be about 1 million barrels in the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve. That is only 2 or 3 days of peak winter demand. That does not cover a cold wave lasting 4 to 7 days.
This storage is managed by private companies, not the government. How do we know those reserves have not already been drained to help keep diesel prices down? Or that refineries that might have produced that home heating variation decided there was more money in aircraft fuel instead? At the refinery, with each barrel of crude, it’s one or the other, not both. I’m told the heating oil reserve is likely there – because various methods and trackers would know if there is a short-fall. Maybe we will find out.
WINTERS GETTING MILDER?
There’s a new study, published July 9, 2026, finding “Winter Cold Spells Are Getting Milder”. Led by Weronika Osmolaska, the authors say, quote: “Most studies suggest that cold spells are becoming less intense and less frequent as near-surface temperatures rise due to climate change.”
Both Judah and I believe that does not prevent a pretty serious deviation in the winter Jet Stream bringing cold far south. My view is the atmosphere, both stratosphere and troposphere (where we live) have been destabilized by increasing heat and solar energy retained.
Dig deeper with this still valuable 2019 article “Cold waves are getting milder in the northern midlatitudes”. That Abstract says:
“The strong two-day cold wave in the midwestern United States in January 2019 again ignited the discussion as to whether cold waves are getting more severe or not as a result of Arctic amplification due to climate change “
Looking at a half dozen papers from 2010 to 2019, they find cold waves are disappearing in aggregate, across the midlatitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. But it is patchy. Some areas are still getting cold waves, and perhaps some novel areas get surprise cold? If you were a gambler, say an investor in fuel storage or a risk assessor for a big insurance company, would you feel safe in a bet that a damaging cold snap will not hit a particular region, or even will not arrive in Europe this winter?
JUDAH’S SCIENCE DISAGREES: COLD EXTREMES STILL WITH US
More recent work led by Judah Cohen finds something different. The title tells all: “No detectable trend in mid-latitude cold extremes during the recent period of Arctic amplification”. That was published in Nature in September 2023. It’s Open Access so go look for yourself.
PREVIOUS RADIO ECOSHOCK APPEARANCE
meteorologist Judah Cohen in this broadcast
Climate Disruption: Extreme Cold This Winter?
Posted on September 15, 2021
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I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
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