Warnings of an El Niño unlike any other are starting to become reality.

For years, climate change was a problem waiting somewhere in the future, but the question of human survival has stepped out to the forefront of global reality.

Climate change has already doubled the world’s heatwaves between 2024 and 2025 and brought more severe droughts, floods and water shortages to Africa.

Across southern Europe, increasingly extreme heat, wildfire and intense rainfall are forcing planners to consider how one event can alter the risk of the next. Portugal’s exceptionally wet winter and another summer of wildfire risk are an example of this.

South Africa is already experiencing the effects of climate change, and those impacts are expected to intensify as global temperatures rise, President Cyril Ramaphosa warned earlier this year.

A new study suggests that El Niño — the natural climatic chaos agent that pops up periodically and spikes global temperatures — are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change.