Tag Archives: weather

2026’s ‘Unprecedented’ El Niño May Lead To UK Storms By November

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Early this year, researchers became convinced we were in for a “super El Niño”.

Speaking to HuffPost UK way back in April, Professor Bill McGuire, a professor specialising in climate hazards and author of The Fate Of The World: A History And Future Of The Climate Crisis, said: “El Niño is a climate phenomenon that develops every few years, and which involves the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean becoming hotter than normal.”

The signals suggesting the power of the coming phenomenon have been so strong that the UN issued an urgent climate warning over the issue. Prof McGuire told us: “The signs are that it could even be the biggest for a century and a half”.

Now, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today, Professor Adam Scaife, the head of long-range forecasting at the Met Office, agreed, saying it looks like the next El Niño will be “the largest since the 19th century”.

Why is this El Niño such a big deal?

“During a normal El Niño, the temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean typically reaches 0.5°C or more above normal,” Prof McGuire shared previously,

“If this figure reaches 1.5-2°C, the event is described as a super El Niño.”

On BBC Radio 4, Prof Scaife stated: “We’re expecting the biggest El Niño for over a century, peaking at something over 3°C. That is unheard of in modern climate records… It’s up 2°C already.”

We’ve only had five super El Niños in the last 75 years, with the most extreme being the 2015-16 event. The bigger the El Niño, the stronger its effects on the world’s weather systems.

That means we could see “particularly strong [impacts] throughout the tropics, where we expect really severe droughts in places like South America and the west Pacific”, Prof Scaife explained.

Flooding could happen in other parts of the world, and overall, the globe will likely be left hotter.

These destabilising effects could affect everything from our international food supply to disease and fire risk. The economic burden of previous El Niños has run into the trillions of dollars.

How will this El Niño affect the UK?

Though they are linked to an overall hotter climate, the effects of El Niños vary from place to place. In the UK, for instance, they can sometimes lead to colder winters.

Prof Scaife said: “There are wave-like disturbances that come out from the tropics and affect places like the UK. So we already see signals for increased rainfall and storminess in the autumn here in the UK around November time”.

After an emergency meeting last week, meanwhile, PM Andy Burnham also said: “We might be in for a wet autumn and winter straight after this, because of El Niño and some of the issues there, which was reported to Cobra”.

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Is This ‘The Coldest Summer Of The Rest Of Our Lives’?

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The part of the UK I’m in is about to experience about a week’s worth of 30°C+ weather, meaning we’re in for yet another official heatwave.

This comes after March temperatures so high that they broke not one, but two records, and the hottest UK June day we’ve ever noted. Schools closed during the last heatwave; wildfires raged; trains were cancelled, and buses caught on fire.

All this is taking place while an El Niño intensifies. It’s part of a decades-long warming trend that seems to be getting worse, not better.

So is it right to say, as I’ve heard expressed in various online spaces and various publications, that this is “the coldest summer for the rest of our lives”?

The sentence rightly points to the indisputable fact that global warming is going to get more dangerous if we don’t intervene. Heatwaves have already become more likely and more extreme.

But climate is different from weather – on a summer-by-summer basis, are we going to experience conditions worse than these every year? And what does it mean if we don’t?

We asked climate experts to share their thoughts.

“This is definitely the ‘least extreme weather’ we will experience”

Speaking to HuffPost UK, Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, MBE, the director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) and a Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Bath, said 2026 will probably pale in comparison to future weather events.

“I would say this is definitely the ‘least extreme weather’ we will experience,” Prof Whitmarsh told us.

“This is how Prof Hayley Fowler puts it, who is an expert in climate impacts.”

The professor was referring to 2025′s National Emergency Briefing by Professor of Climate Change Impacts at Newcastle University, Prof Hayley Fowler.

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Still, Prof Whitmarsh added, “there’s no guarantee every year will see a hotter summer than the one before, but the general trend is certainly hotter over time”.

″‘This is the coldest year for the rest of our lives’ is very unlikely to be true”

HuffPost UK also spoke to climatologist Prof Friederike Otto, a Professor in Climate Science at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and the leader of World Weather Attribution (WWA).

She told us, “I think [the idea that] ‘this is the coldest year for the rest of our lives’ is very unlikely to be true, but what is certain is that unless we stop burning fossil fuels extremely rapidly and global mean temperatures are stabilised around 1.5°C, this is one of the cooler summers for the rest of our lives.”

While there may be cooler summers, and even colder overall years, ahead, in the bigger picture, 2026′s endless heatwaves might go down as a regular – even moderate – example of a “new normal”.

This is especially true if we do not urgently address climate change.

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