El Niño & La Niña: "El Niño-Southern Oscillation." El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ("ENSO") climate pattern—continues in the tropical Pacific, but the atmospheric part of the pattern is now weakening. Thus conditions are likely to shift to ENSO-neutral by April-June 2024, and the odds of La Niña developing in June-August 2024 have risen to 55%. El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern across the tropical Pacific, which switches back + forth irregularly ever 2-7 yrs. When the shifts in ocean surface temperature + disruption of wind + rainfall across the tropics occur, there are cascading global manifestations. February was the warmest February in terms of Global Mean Surface Temperature or GMST ever in the instrumental era. In fact, if you look at the last 9 months, each individual month was a high temperature record going all the way back to the 1850-1900 baseline climate scientists like to use. And July last year was the warmest single month the world has seen in this era with widespread thermometers + thermisters. Scarily, if you look at the last 12 months as a whole, the GMST was up from baseline by 1.56ºC. Wait—wasn't 1.5ºC that threshold the world's nations had pledged to not cross? Slow down there, pardner, scientists are a cautious bunch. There is a general consensus that we need to see 2 consecutive years before there will be a declaration that the globe has crossed the first threshold. Since the contribution of El Niño is thought to be one of the factors explaining the last 12 month overshoot, now we need to wait for potentially another couple of years of observation without El Niño in the picture. The problem is, as I understand it, climate researchers are edging towards a consensus projection that 2024 may be hotter than 2023. While we live in interesting times, as a world community will still have agency. Every 0.1ºC that we avoid will lessen the risks of surpassing tipping points such as Amazonian or Congo tropical forest reduction, collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet + so forth. Fatalism is as dangerous as denialism.