Is this El Niño a glimpse of a future, hotter Earth?

Andrew Dessler · 17 Aug 2026

Andrew Dessler did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The same global average temperature can arise from greenhouse warming or from El Niño and still produce very different regional climate impacts.

Their wordsThe catch is that the future world that has been warmed by greenhouse gases and a present-day world that has been temporarily warmed by El Niño can have the same global-average temperature while having significant differences in the impacts of this warming.

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