“哥斯拉厄尔尼诺”将至，2027或成最热年份

In the United States, we have a president in the White House who is um remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America, and yet last year when he returned to office, more than 90% of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. What that means is that for every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we were building, we built nine times as much green energy.

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This is a gray area. I'm Sean Illing. My guest today is David Wallace-Wells. He's a writer and a recorder for The New York Times, and for my money, one of the sharpest voices on the climate beat. David recently wrote a piece about a massive El Niño building in the Pacific, one that could make 2027 the hottest year on record by far, and maybe also give us a glimpse of everyday life in 2035 and beyond. So, David and I tried to think through what this El Niño might reveal about a climate future we are really already entering.

And we talk about why these climate-related disasters still seem to surprise us, and whether there is any kind of shock that could come that would really fundamentally change our politics. David Wallace-Wells, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Just about everybody has heard the term El Niño, but I think most of us, myself included for the most part until very recently, don't really know what it is. So, let's just start there. What is an El Niño?

It's a climatic that happens irregularly, but pretty often, usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven, in which you get a burst of warmer than normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, um off the coast of South America, and then that has a lot of amazingly global consequences in ways that I think are not intuitive to most normies who don't know all about the details of climate science, and in particular this genre of climate science, um called teleconnections, where um scientists have identified relationships between, you know, certain weather events, um in different parts of the world, even if they can't um always identify exactly what about one weather event is driving another weather event, they can see in the record that they happen together, and that there's some kind of connection for them in it.

So, in this case, you see across the western US, you tend to see a lot more rain. Um you see tend to see a lot less rain across, um Brazil and the Amazon. Um you see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia. Um you see, you know, a similar disruption to, um rain across the across the, um Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, and you see a kind of a suppression, typically, of hurricane activity in the Caribbean. Which is all to say, um it's a disruption, it's a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on, but the disruption isn't all in one direction.

At the global level, it makes things hotter, and the one t