The climate world is bracing itself as warnings of a potential “Super El Niño” grow louder — and this time, the models backing those warnings are hard to ignore. Over the past week, major international outlets including the BBC and the Washington Post have run with comparisons to the catastrophic El Niño event of 1877, which has sent alarm bells ringing across newsrooms and climate science communities alike. But how much of what’s being reported is grounded in solid science, and how much is premature panic?
On 8 May, Washington Post meteorologist Ben Noll shared projections from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble suggesting the world could be heading toward the strongest El Niño ever recorded, with a peak anomaly of +3.1°C projected for November 2026 and the event reaching full strength between October 2026 and January 2027. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) appears to be pointing in the same direction, adding considerable weight to those projections.
Colombian climate expert Diego Restrepo put it plainly: “El Niño is intensifying rapidly, and now 8 out of 10 models point to a super event, with four projecting the strongest on record.” That’s not the kind of language scientists throw around lightly. But here’s the thing — we’re still working with models, and between March and May, ENSO forecasting reliability is historically at its weakest, as the equatorial Pacific moves through its transition phase. The scientific community is deliberately cautious, and rightly so.
The comparisons to 1877 have understandably dominated headlines. That year’s event is associated with one of history’s worst humanitarian disasters — an estimated 50 million deaths tied to drought and famine across multiple continents. But climate scientists are pushing back hard against the suggestion that a similarly intense El Niño today would automatically produce the same results.
Why the 1877 Comparison Tells an Incomplete Story
Kimberley Reid of the University of Melbourne has been among those urging caution, noting that the intensity of an El Niño event in the central Pacific does not translate directly or linearly into on-the-ground impacts. The climate system in 2026 is fundamentally different from the one that existed 150 years ago — for better and for worse. What’s more, as historian Mike Davis documented in Late Victorian Holocausts, the catastrophe of the 1870s wasn’t primarily a story about weather. It was a story about colonial policy, the forced export of grain during famine conditions, and the deliberate dismantling of local resilience mechanisms. The El Niño created the conditions; imperial governance turned those conditions into mass death.
That distinction matters enormously when we assess the risk of a 2026 Super El Niño today. A strange and devastating combination of a super El Niño event, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and an unusually warm North Atlantic between 1876 and 1878 triggered widespread drought. But the consensus among climate historians and scientists is clear — the weather wasn’t the killer. The politics were.
This reframing is, counterintuitively, a reason for cautious optimism. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has documented a striking paradox in recent decades: while the number of climate-related disasters has multiplied fivefold since the 1970s, the number of deaths attributable to those events has dropped sharply. In the 1970s and 80s, weather-related disasters claimed an average of 170 lives per day. By the 2010s, that figure had fallen to approximately 40 deaths per day — a dramatic improvement driven by better forecasting, early warning systems, and improved disaster response infrastructure.
The WMO’s own data shows that while the 1980s recorded roughly 1,400 extreme climate incidents, that figure climbed past 3,500 in the 2000s — yet deaths continued to fall. We are, by any measurable standard, better at surviving these events than we were a generation ago.
That doesn’t mean we should be complacent. Restrepo himself has warned that “warmer oceans, far more vulnerable ecosystems, and collapsing biodiversity” mean that even a well-managed Super El Niño could carry serious consequences for food security, water supply, and public health. South Africa knows this better than most — our agricultural sector, water reservoirs, and energy grid have all felt the pressure of El Niño-driven drought conditions in recent years, and a record-breaking event on the horizon demands serious planning at every level of government.
The honest scientific answer right now is that we don’t yet know the full scale of what’s coming. June’s updated model runs will offer a much clearer picture once forecasting accuracy improves after the spring predictability barrier. What we do know is that the signals are alarming enough to take seriously, and that the window to prepare — at national, regional, and community level — is open right now. Whether we use it wisely is, as always, the question that will determine the real human cost.