BELOW THE FOLD

The most consequential weather event in a generation is forming in the Pacific. You may not have heard much about it. Here's why that matters

In 1992, southern Africa was in the grip of a drought that would eventually threaten the food supply of 18 million people. I was there — fresh off the boat from New York, newly married to my South African husband, covering agriculture for the country's daily financial newspaper Business Day. I walked through parched fields, saw failed harvests, and watched the price of mealie meal — the white maize flour that is a staple of the southern African diet — climb beyond what ordinary families could afford. Governments that had been exporting grain scrambled to import it instead. Only later did I come to understand this was not a local catastrophe but a symptom of something vast and slow-moving, coming from the Pacific Ocean six thousand miles away.

El Niño is a periodic warming of equatorial Pacific surface temperatures that disrupts trade winds and, subsequently, rainfall patterns across the planet. A devastating cycle, it recurs every two to seven years, lasts a year or more, and has aftershocks — including the La Niña correction that often follows — that play out for years after. Think of it less like a hurricane and more like an epidemic: it takes hold slowly, moves through systems — weather, water, food production, commodity prices, government policies — and doesn't let go. When Pacific water temperatures rise by even a degree or two above normal, the consequences are felt in fields and cities that have no idea why rains have stopped or floodwaters won't recede.

Scientists are now projecting a three-degree spike in ocean temperature. The last time the Pacific ran that hot was 1877. That El Niño killed tens of millions of people.

All three of the world's major forecasting centres agree it's coming. Meanwhile the Trump administration has gutted NOAA, eliminated its entire climate research division, and driven out more than 2,000 scientists since last year. Fifty years of life-saving institutional knowledge. Gone.

This is the same man who told the world that climate change is "the greatest con job ever perpetrated" and that the carbon footprint is "a hoax made up by people with evil intentions." The same man who, nine days ago, standing on the White House lawn with inflation at a three-year high and petrol at nearly $5 a gallon, was asked directly how much Americans' financial situation was motivating his decision-making. "Not even a little bit," he said. "I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody."

Meanwhile, we are so transfixed — by the billion-dollar ballroom renovation, the $1.776 billion slush fund for pardoned criminals, the IRS immunity secured for himself and his family, the deliberate starvation of Cuba — that we’re not watching what is forming right now, in the Pacific. This is his playbook. The media failure is on us.

El Niño doesn't negotiate, tweet, or hold rallies. It just comes. And when it does, the people who feel it first will be the ones who can least afford to. The early warning systems that might have told us how bad and how soon, have been dismantled on purpose by a man who has told us that he doesn't give a toss about any of us.

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