{"id":24486,"date":"2026-06-17T05:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T05:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/climate-change-and-el-nino-could-form-dangerous-double-act-australian-broadcasting-corporation\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T05:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T05:15:20","slug":"climate-change-and-el-nino-could-form-dangerous-double-act-australian-broadcasting-corporation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/climate-change-and-el-nino-could-form-dangerous-double-act-australian-broadcasting-corporation\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change and El Ni\u00f1o could form 'dangerous double act' – Australian Broadcasting Corporation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Topic:<\/span>Weather
Wed 17 Jun 2026 at 2:55pm
El Ni\u00f1o events have driven droughts and led to dust storms in the past. (Supplied: Shae Ferguson<\/span>)<\/cite>
An El Ni\u00f1o is underway in the Pacific, which could mean hotter, drier conditions in Australia, but scientists say climate change is making its impacts harder to predict.
This El Ni\u00f1o could be the strongest on record, but that does not necessarily mean Australia will experience record heat.
Experts are waiting to see how this El Ni\u00f1o affects rainfall and temperatures over the coming months.
As Australians brace for the second half of 2026 to be influenced by El Ni\u00f1o, scientists are warning that the impacts of the weather pattern are becoming harder to predict due to climate change.
The Bureau of Meteorology has officially declared an El Ni\u00f1o active in Australia, which refers to an extended period of warmer-than-usual water in the central and eastern Pacific.
It is the first time such a declaration has been made in almost three years and means much of the country is set to experience hotter and drier conditions over the coming months.
It was Peruvian fishermen, hundreds of years ago, who first noticed and named El Ni\u00f1o. Little did they realise they had named one of the most consequential climate drivers on Earth. This is how it works.
Modelling suggests this El Ni\u00f1o could become the strongest on record, but that does not necessarily mean Australia will experience record heat and drought.
Monash University adjunct professor and climate councillor Andrew Watkins said this event coincided with global temperatures increasing by about 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"With climate change, we've already boosted the risk of heat and fire weather and drought and even marine heat waves and coral bleaching," he said.
"El Ni\u00f1o adds to all of those, so increases the risk even further of having heat, drought, fire weather and coral bleaching as well.
Dr Watkins said scientists could still predict when El Ni\u00f1o and the cooler, wetter La Ni\u00f1a were likely to develop, but climate change was making their effects harder to forecast.
"We now have more moisture in the atmosphere for each degree of global warming," he said.
"With El Ni\u00f1o, long dry periods, cloudless skies, but when that weather does come that can bring a bit of rain. It could bring more rain than normal."
UNSW climate scientist Andrea Taschetto said research suggested El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a events could become more regular and intense, but the data record was short.
"The fact that we have a warmer atmosphere with more moisture in the atmosphere, that means that the impact of El Ni\u00f1o can be different than it has been in the past," she said.
"Climate models in the future project that there is an intensification of El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a in the future, which might have a stronger impact in the future for us."
El Ni\u00f1o typically brings drier conditions to central and eastern Australia in winter and spring.
"El Ni\u00f1o is a cruel system. It tends to give us a burst of rain just as it's developing \u2026 then the drought sets in," University of Queensland emeritus professor of climate science Roger Stone said.
Below median rainfall is still tipped from July to September as El Ni\u00f1o continues to develop in the Pacific Ocean. (ABC News<\/span>)<\/cite>
The Bureau of Meteorology's long-range forecast suggests rainfall is likely to be below average across parts of southern and eastern Australia from July to September.
The whole country is facing above-average overnight temperatures and everywhere, apart from northern Australia, can expect higher-than-usual daytime temperatures over coming months.
Dr Taschetto said the forecast was consistent with what was typically seen during an El Ni\u00f1o.
"A drier spring, which is the time when El Ni\u00f1o has a stronger influence on Australian rainfall and warmer days and nights," she said.
Professor Stone said recent cutbacks to monitoring systems run by the United States's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had made it harder to track how this El Ni\u00f1o was developing.
"There's been a cutback in measurement systems over the last couple of years," he said.
Australia's weather is also shaped by other climate factors, meaning outcomes can vary.
Much of the country is experiencing a wet month, which is being influenced by conditions in the Indian and the Southern Ocean, as well as local water temperatures.
The last El Ni\u00f1o, which developed in 2023, saw Australia's driest three-month period on record between August and October, but it was also influenced by a strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole.
"It's not only about El Ni\u00f1o, but it's also what is happening in the atmosphere in terms of lows and highs that produces the weather that we feel on the ground," Dr Taschetto said.
The 2025\/26 summer heatwave happened against the backdrop of weak La Ni\u00f1a conditions, the cooler and wetter counterpart to the El Ni\u00f1o.
Modelling suggests that this year's El Ni\u00f1o could become the strongest in the modern era, with warming in the Pacific possibly exceeding 3 degrees Celsius.
But Professor Stone said the strength of El Ni\u00f1o was not always proportional to impacts.
"The last really super El Ni\u00f1o of the century was only three years ago \u2026 it had absolutely no effect on most of Australia \u2014 perhaps a bit around Perth and the north-west of Western Australia," he said.
"It dried out the Indian Ocean, of all things, Cocos Islands, Bali, places like that, but had very little effect on Australia."
Professor Stone said prolonged droughts, such as those between 1991 and 1995 as well as the Millennium Drought, were historically linked to moderate El Ni\u00f1o.
"The way the Pacific behaves and the way the atmosphere behaves, it doesn't necessarily mean the warmer the sea temperatures are in the central Pacific, the worse the droughts are in Australia," he said.
"It's a system where the change in the atmosphere over the Pacific changes the circulation patterns over Australia and that then decides whether we're going to have a severe drought or not."
Wed 17 Jun 2026 at 2:55pm
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Personalise the news andstay in the knowEmergencyBackstoryNewsletters\u4e2d\u6587\u65b0\u95fbBERITA BAHASA INDONESIATOK PISINFind any issues using dark mode? Please let us knowTopic:WeatherWed 17 Jun 2026 at 2:55pmEl Ni\u00f1o events have driven droughts and led to dust storms in the past. (Supplied: Shae Ferguson)An El Ni\u00f1o is underway in the Pacific, which could mean hotter, drier conditions in Australia, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}