Dear readers,
In the short introductory video, I make the case for why you may want to watch the full 20-minute YouTube video, “It’s Happening – A Super El Niño Is Coming.” The video does a strong job explaining the mechanics of El Niño, while also raising larger questions about food security, public health, military readiness, and the value of early-warning systems.
The video helps answer four key questions:
- What is a Kelvin wave, and why can it signal the opening phase of El Niño?
- Are there risks to military readiness, food production, and the economy if budget cuts proposed by Russell Vought and Project 2025 weaken, reduce, or privatize America’s early-warning weather and ocean intelligence?
- How can weakened Pacific trade winds disrupt weather, fisheries, food production, and disease patterns around the world?
- Why could a strong El Niño be more dangerous now than similar events in the past?
If you can’t spare the time for the full video, I include my takeaways below. Thank you.
“It’s Happening – A Super El Niño Is Coming”
Takeaways
My main takeaway from the video is that a major El Niño event can do far more than warm part of the Pacific Ocean. By weakening trade winds and shifting huge amounts of stored ocean heat eastward, El Niño can disrupt global weather patterns, suppress fisheries, intensify heat, trigger droughts and floods, and put food systems under stress. The video’s central warning is that a powerful El Niño forming on an already hotter planet could multiply risks that past societies experienced more locally or regionally.
Additional takeaways:
- El Niño begins with a breakdown in the normal Pacific balance.
Under normal conditions, trade winds push warm surface water westward across the equatorial Pacific, allowing cold, nutrient-rich water to rise near South America. When those winds weaken, warm water can surge back east as a Kelvin wave. That pushes the thermocline deeper, shuts down cold upwelling, damages fisheries, and alters the temperature gradient that helps drive tropical weather patterns.
- The effects spread far beyond the Pacific Ocean.
The video explains that when the warm-water and rainfall zones shift eastward, the atmospheric circulation above them shifts too. That can change jet streams and storm tracks across North America, Africa, Asia, and South America. Past El Niño events have been linked to East African flooding and disease outbreaks, Florida tornadoes, Brazilian drought and fires, and severe crop stress in multiple regions.
- The modern risk is higher because the baseline is hotter and systems are already strained.
The video argues that today’s oceans hold more excess heat, making a strong El Niño more likely to push global temperatures into dangerous territory. It also connects climate disruption with food-system vulnerability, including crop risk in India, China, Brazil, Australia, and Africa, plus possible fertilizer trade disruptions. The result is not just a weather concern, but a potential economic and humanitarian risk.
- Cutting weather and ocean monitoring weakens national readiness, not just climate science.
The video’s warning is not only that El Niño can disrupt weather. It is that the danger becomes much greater when governments lose the ability to see these shocks coming. The video specifically points to NASA satellites, NOAA monitoring, deep-ocean buoys, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative as part of the early-warning infrastructure that helps scientists track Kelvin waves, marine heat, ocean currents, and climate shifts before they hit land, farms, ports, fisheries, and military planning assumptions.
That warning matters because proposed budget cuts tied to Project 2025 and Russell Vought’s OMB agenda could weaken parts of the public weather, ocean, and climate-monitoring system. Project 2025 calls for NOAA to be broken up and downsized, while recent budget proposals have targeted NOAA climate, weather, ocean research, and observing programs (https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration-annotated/). If those cuts reduce public weather and ocean data, the risk is broader than less accurate forecasts. It could affect military readiness, because operations depend on reliable weather and ocean conditions; food production, because farmers, fisheries, and fertilizer logistics depend on seasonal and storm intelligence; and the economy, because insurers, shippers, utilities, ports, emergency managers, and commodity markets all rely on trusted public forecasting systems.
The video’s core point is that early warning cannot stop an El Niño, but losing that warning makes the damage harder to prepare for and easier to underestimate. In coastal communities around the world, accurate weather forecasts can be the difference between life and death. Emergency supplies, response staffing, hospital readiness, shelter planning, and evacuation orders all depend on timely and reliable information. Weakening that system is not a budget tweak. It is a far-reaching public-safety gamble. Is it one we want to take?
Additional reading
Bloomberg’s Eric Roston published a timely companion piece July 6, 2026, “Today’s Climate Extremes Shock Even Scientists,” that reinforces the warning above. The article reports that recent heat records are not just being broken, but often exceeded by unusually large margins, while sea levels, polar ice melt, and extreme rainfall are also moving faster than past assumptions allowed.
The connection to El Niño is direct: a strong El Niño can amplify heat already being driven by greenhouse gas pollution, turning climate change from a long-term trend into an immediate planning problem for emergency responders, utilities, insurers, farmers, coastal communities, and military planners.
Read the full Bloomberg piece here (account needed to read complete article): https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-extreme-heat-climate-change-data/?srnd=homepage-asia
Climate conditions have shaped the spread of infectious diseases and outbreaks throughout history. David R. Kotok explores those connections with co-authors Michael R. Englund, Tristan J. Erwin, and Elizabeth J. Sweet in their 2025 book, The Fed and the Flu: Parsing Pandemic Economic Shocks.
For readers interested in learning more, the book and related materials are available here:
https://www.thefedandtheflu.com
and here:
