The El Niño weather pattern could push Pacific ocean temperatures to record highs as it barrels around the globe "like a wrecking ball," causing floods and droughts, United Nations officials warned on October 21, 2026, according to Reuters.
The World Meteorological Organization's new seasonal outlook predicts the event will become extremely strong, with temperatures in the central Pacific rising about 3.8 degrees Celsius above normal between November and January and peaking around December. "We have not seen in our records 3.8," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said, noting previous record events reached about 3 degrees above normal.
The warning follows the WMO's October 8 bulletin, which said there was a near-100 percent likelihood the El Niño would persist through February 2027, potentially making it one of the strongest since at least 1950, BusinessWorld Online reported. The WMO says the heat is drawn from the warmest ocean ever measured: "The ocean it's drawing from is the warmest we've ever measured it. There is simply more heat available to release," Saulo said in a statement.
El Niño is the warm phase of the naturally occurring El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, which tends to raise global temperatures and disrupt rainfall patterns — drought in some regions, heavy rains in others. The WMO said El Niño-linked extremes could worsen pressure on housing, water, sanitation, and health services, with flooding risks rising in southern Africa from November, drier and warmer conditions hitting agriculture and water supplies in Southeast Asia, and increased rainfall expected in Latin America, Reuters reported.
The UN's humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, joined the WMO in calling for urgent readiness. "This El Niño is the behemoth, it is a wrecking ball. It will tear through Latin America, Eastern and Southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific with extreme heat, droughts and flood," Fletcher warned, cautioning of massive humanitarian consequences.
The stakes are already visible: mean global temperatures in August reached 16.96 degrees Celsius, tying July 2023 as the hottest month on record, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, and researchers at the University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab predicted the "super-El Niño" could cause as many as 451,000 excess deaths worldwide between June 2026 and February 2027, BusinessWorld Online reported. What happens next depends on how quickly vulnerable regions can prepare — and how closely the record-breaking forecast holds.