Cities running out of water. Heat waves that kill you if you stand outside for a few minutes too many. Climate refugees surging from the ruins of ancient settlements.
This is already the reality of life around the globe in 2026, thanks to decades of climate neglect and inaction. And with a 70 percent chance of El Niño developing by June — that’s a prolonged climate pattern featuring unusually warm ocean waters, basically — climatologists are predicting an event that could give us a horrifying glimpse at the world 10 years from now.
According to the Washington Post, chances are looking strong that the coming El Niño could be one of the most powerful in recorded history, with a potential to surpass records set in 1877. For the third consecutive month, multiple climate models have predicted a monster El Niño, which could bring record breaking temperatures, as well as droughts, humidity, and floods.
Paul Roundy, professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany, wrote on X-formerly-Twitter that “confidence is clearly shifting higher on potentially the biggest El Niño event since the 1870s.”
With red warning lights already blinking across the dashboard, the coming warming period will test our global systems of governance as much as our meteorological instruments.
During the freak El Niño of 1877, as New York Times opinion columnist David Wallace-Wells observes, the ensuing floods and droughts and heat didn’t simply present themselves as weather events. They had real, lasting social consequences that flailing feudal systems — antagonized by European colonial powers — were ill-equipped to address. Famines took tens of millions of lives across countries like India, China, Egypt, and Brazil, followed closely by raging epidemics, cataclysmic horrors which disproportionately impacted the world’s poorest populations.
It’s impossible to say exactly how the world’s various political systems will fare under the stress of what may be one of the worst climate periods in recorded history. China, having put enormous resources into food and energy independence, may fare better than, say, India, which has shown itself to be remarkably susceptible to small tremors in the global food supply chain in the face of rising temperatures.
As Wallace-Wells observes: “what comes next, as ever, would be as much a matter of political economy as climate.”
More on climate change: Climate Change Is Getting So Bad That It’s Making Food Less Nutritious