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El Nino has officially returned and is likely to yield extreme weather later this year, from tropical cyclones spinning toward vulnerable Pacific islands to heavy rainfall in South America to drought in Australia. 

After three years of the La Nina climate pattern, which often lowers global temperatures slightly, the hotter El Nino is back in action, according to an advisory issued on Thursday by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. 

El Nino is born out of unusually warm waters in the Eastern Pacific, near the coast of South America, and often accompanied by a slowing down or reversal of the easterly trade winds. 

“In May, weak El Nino conditions emerged as above-average sea surface temperatures strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean,” the advisory said. 

The last time an El Nino was in place, in 2016, the world saw its hottest year on record. Coupled with warming from climate change, 2023 or 2024 could reach new highs. 

Declaring El Nino 

Most experts look to two agencies for confirmation that El Nino has kicked off — NOAA and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The two agencies use different metrics for declaring El Nino, with the Australian definition slightly stricter. 

NOAA calls an El Nino when ocean temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific have been 0.5 Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) higher than normal for the preceding month, and has lasted or is expected to continue for another five consecutive, overlapping three-month periods. The agency also looks at a weakening of the trade winds and cloud cover. 

Australia’s BOM needs things to be hotter, with the key regions of eastern Pacific 0.8C (1.5F) warmer than average. 

On Tuesday, Australia issued their own bulletin, noting a 70% chance of El Nino developing this year. 

NOAA said there is a 56% chance that when this El Nino peaks in strength — normally during the Northern Hemisphere winter — it will be a strong event, meaning that Eastern Pacific sea surface temperatures are at least 1.5C higher than normal. 

This could yield more intense impacts — from droughts to cyclones — across the world. 

Still, impacts vary and El Ninos come in “two flavors,” said atmospheric scientist Marybeth Arcodia at Colorado State University. 

Those with their warmest waters near the west coast of South America are deemed Eastern Pacific events, such as the strong 1997-98 El Nino. The other arises in the Central Pacific, near the equator around Hawaii, as was the case in the most recent 2015-16 event. Weather anomalies can be more extreme depending on where waters are warmest, making things drier or wetter in certain regions. 

Some forecast models predict the 2023-24 winter to be a Central Pacific El Nino. 

Agriculture impacts 

Early signs of hot, dry weather caused by El Nino are threatening food producers across Asia, while American growers are counting on heavier summer rains from the weather phenomenon to alleviate the impact of severe drought.

The El Nino could lead to winter crop production falling 34% from record highs in Australia, and also impacting palm oil and rice production in Indonesia, Malaysia — which supply 80% of the world’s palm oil — and Thailand.

In India, a country that largely depends on the monsoon rains for its summer crop, impacts from El Nino could be offset by the Indian Ocean Dipole, or the Indian Nino, yet below normal rainfall was expected over north-western parts of the country. 
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Schools across the U.S. East Coast canceled outdoor activities, airline traffic slowed, and millions of Americans were urged to stay indoors Wednesday as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south, blanketing cities in thick, yellow haze.

The U.S. National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for virtually the entire Atlantic seaboard. Health officials from Vermont to South Carolina and as far west as Ohio and Kansas warned residents that spending time outdoors could cause respiratory problems due to high levels of fine particulates in the atmosphere.

“It’s critical that Americans experiencing dangerous air pollution, especially those with health conditions, listen to local authorities to protect themselves and their families,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Twitter.

U.S. private forecasting service AccuWeather said thick haze and soot extending from high elevations to ground level marked the worst outbreak of wildfire smoke to blanket the Northeastern U.S. in more than 20 years.

New York’s famous skyline, usually visible for miles, appeared to vanish in an otherworldly veil of smoke, which some residents said made them feel unwell.

“It makes breathing difficult,” Mohammed Abass said as he walked down Broadway in Manhattan. “I’ve been scheduled for a road test for driving, for my driving license today, and it was canceled.”

The smoky air was especially tough on people toiling outdoors, such as Chris Ricciardi, owner of Neighbor’s Envy Landscaping in Roxbury, New Jersey. He said he and his crew were curtailing work hours and wearing masks they used for heavy pollen.

“We don’t have the luxury to stop working,” he said. “We want to keep our exposure to the smoke to a minimum, but what can you really do about it?”

Angel Emmanuel Ramirez, 29, a fashion stylist at a Givenchy outlet in Manhattan, said he and fellow workers began feeling ill and closed up shop early when they realized the smell of smoke was permeating the store.

“It’s so intense, you would think the wildfire was happening right across the river, not up in Canada,” Ramirez said. New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the situation an “emergency crisis,” saying the air pollution index for parts of her state were eight times above normal.

Reduced visibility from the haze forced the Federal Aviation Administration to slow air traffic into the New York City area and Philadelphia from elsewhere on the East Coast and upper Midwest, with flight delays averaging about a half hour.

Schools up and down the East Coast called off outdoor activities, including sports, field trips and recesses.

A Broadway matinee of “Prima Facie” was halted after 10 minutes when actress Jodie Comer had difficulty breathing due to poor air quality. The show was restarted with understudy Dani Arlington going on for Comer in the role of Tessa, a production spokesperson said in a statement.

Even Major League Baseball was impacted, as the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies both postponed home games scheduled for Wednesday. A National Women’s Soccer League match in Harrison, New Jersey, was also rescheduled, as was a WNBA women’s basketball game in Brooklyn.

‘Unhealthy and ‘hazardous’

In some areas, the air quality index (AQI), which measures major pollutants including particulate matter produced by fires, was well above 400, according to Airnow, which sets 100 as “unhealthy” and 300 as “hazardous.”

At noon (1600 GMT), Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was recording the nation’s worst air quality index, with an AQI reading of 410. Among major cities, New York had the highest AQI in the world on Wednesday afternoon at 342, about double the index for chronically polluted cities such as Dubai (168) and Delhi (164), according to IQAir.

Smoke drifting from Canada

Smoke billowed over the U.S. border from Canada, where hundreds of forest fires have scorched 3.8 million hectares and forced 120,000 people from their homes in an unusually early and intense start to the wildfire season.

The skies above New York and many other North American cities grew progressively hazier through Wednesday, with an eerie yellowish tinge filtering through the smoky canopy. The air smelled like burning wood.

Wildfire smoke has been linked with higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, increases in emergency room visits for asthma and other respiratory conditions, eye irritation, itchy skin and rashes, among other problems.

A Home Depot store in Manhattan sold out of air purifiers and masks. New York Road Runners canceled events intended to mark Global Running Day.

“This is not the day to train for a marathon or to do an outside event with your children,” New York Mayor Eric Adams advised. “If you are older or have heart or breathing problems or an older adult, you should remain inside.”

Pedestrians donned face masks in numbers that brought to mind the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tyrone Sylvester, 66, playing chess in Manhattan’s Union Square as he has on most days for 30 years, but wearing a mask, said he had never seen the city’s air quality so bad.

“When the sun looks like that,” he said, pointing out the bronze-like orb visible through the smoky sky, “we know something’s wrong. This is what global warming looks like.”

Poor air quality is likely to persist into the weekend, with a developing storm system expected to shift the smoke westward across the Great Lakes and deeper south through the Ohio Valley and into the mid-Atlantic region, AccuWeather said.
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Most transplanted hearts are from donors who are brain dead, but new research shows a different approach can be just as successful and boost the number of available organs.

It’s called donation after circulatory death, a method long used to recover kidneys and other organs but not more fragile hearts. Duke Health researchers said Wednesday that using those long-shunned hearts could allow possibly thousands more patients a chance at a lifesaving transplant — expanding the number of donor hearts by 30%.

“Honestly if we could snap our fingers and just get people to use this, I think it probably would go up even more than that,” said transplant surgeon Dr. Jacob Schroder of Duke University School of Medicine, who led the research. “This really should be standard of care.”

The usual method of organ donation occurs when doctors, through careful testing, determine someone has no brain function after a catastrophic injury — meaning they’re brain dead. The body is left on a ventilator that keeps the heart beating and organs oxygenated until they’re recovered and put on ice.

In contrast, donation after circulatory death occurs when someone has a nonsurvivable brain injury but, because all brain function hasn’t yet ceased, the family decides to withdraw life support and the heart stops. That means organs go without oxygen for a while before they can be recovered — and surgeons, worried the heart would be damaged, left it behind.

What’s changed: Now doctors can remove those hearts and put them in a machine that “reanimates” them, pumping through blood and nutrients as they’re transported –- and demonstrating if they work OK before the planned transplant.

Wednesday’s study, conducted at multiple hospitals around the country, involved 180 transplant recipients, half who received DCD hearts and half given hearts from brain-dead donors that were transported on ice.

Survival six months later was about the same –- 94% for the recipients of cardiac-death donations and 90% for those who got the usual hearts, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings are exciting and show “the potential to increase fairness and equity in heart transplantation, allowing more persons with heart failure to have access to this lifesaving therapy,” transplant cardiologist Dr. Nancy Sweitzer of Washington University in St. Louis, who wasn’t involved with the study, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Last year, 4,111 heart transplants were performed in the U.S., a record number but not nearly enough to meet the need. Hundreds of thousands of people suffer from advanced heart failure but many are never offered a transplant and still others die waiting for one.

Researchers in Australia and the U.K. first began trying DCD heart transplants about seven years ago. Duke pioneered the U.S. experiments in late 2019, one of about 20 U.S. hospitals now offering this method. Last year, there were 345 such heart transplants in the U.S., and 227 so far this year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

In the Duke-led study, nearly 90% of the DCD hearts recovered wound up being transplanted, signaling that it’s worthwhile for more hospitals to start using the newer method.

Sweitzer noted that many would-be donors have severe brain injuries but don’t meet the criteria for brain death, meaning a lot of potentially usable hearts never get donated. But she also cautioned that there’s still more to learn, noting that the very sickest patients on the waiting list were less likely to receive DCD hearts in the study.

Schroder said most who received DCD hearts already had implanted heart pumps that made the transplant more difficult to perform, even if they weren’t ranked as high on the waiting list.

The study was funded by TransMedics, which makes the heart storage system.
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Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, began erupting Wednesday after a three-month pause, displaying spectacular fountains of mesmerizing, glowing lava that’s a safe distance from people and structures in a national park on the Big Island.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement that a glow was detected in webcam images from Kilauea’s summit early in the morning, indicating that an eruption was occurring within the Halemaumau crater in the summit caldera.

The images show fissures at the base of the crater generating lava flows on the crater floor’s surface, the observatory said.

Before issuing the eruption notice, the observatory said increased earthquake activity and changes in the patterns of ground deformation at the summit started Tuesday night, indicating the movement of magma in the subsurface.

“We’re not seeing any signs of activity out on the rift zones right now,” said Mike Zoeller, a geologist with the observatory. “There’s no reason to expect this to transition into a rift eruption that would threaten any communities here on the island with lava flows or anything like that.”

All activity was within a closed area of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

“The lava this morning is all confined within … the summit caldera. So plenty of room for it still to produce more without threatening any homes or infrastructure,” said park spokesperson Jessica Ferracane. “So that’s the way we like our eruptions here.”

She said park officials are bracing for crowds to arrive because visitors can see the eruption from many overlooks.

“Kilauea overlook was spectacular this morning,” she said of the vast lava lake. “It was molten red lava. There’s several areas of pretty robust fountaining. It’s just really, really pretty.”

The lava lake, covering the crater floor over lava that remained from previous eruptions, measured about 150 hectares about 6 a.m., Zoeller said. It measured about 1,300 meters wide.

Word was getting out and parking lots were starting to fill up at the park, Ferracane said, adding that she expected long lines getting into the park by evening.

Since the park is open 24 hours a day, visitors can beat the crowds by visiting between 9 p.m. and sunrise, Ferracane said.

She reminded visitors to stay out of closed areas and remain on marked trails for safety reasons, including avoiding gases from the eruption.

Two small earthquakes jolted Janice Wei awake. As a volunteer photographer for the park who lives in the nearby town of Volcano, she was able to see fountains she estimated to be 46 meters high around 4:30 a.m.

The volcano’s alert level was raised to warning status and the aviation color code went to red as scientists evaluate the eruption and associated hazards.

Kilauea, Hawaii’s second largest volcano, erupted from September 2021 until last December. For about two weeks in December, Hawaii’s biggest volcano, Mauna Loa, also was erupting on Hawaii’s Big Island.

After a short pause, Kilauea began erupting again in January. That eruption lasted for 61 days, ending in March.

This eruption looks very similar, Zoeller said.

A 2018 Kilauea eruption destroyed more than 700 homes.

Before the major 2018 eruption, Kilauea had been erupting since 1983, and streams of lava occasionally covered farms and homes. During that time, the lava sometimes reached the ocean, causing dramatic interactions with the water. 
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As communities in countries rich and poor face soaring costs from extreme weather and rising seas, governments are grappling with how to set up a new fund to tackle “loss and damage” driven by global warming.

The topic was for years controversial at U.N. climate talks, as wealthy nations rejected demands for “compensation” for the impacts of their high share of the planet-heating emissions that are turbo-charging floods, droughts and storms around the world.

However, at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last November, a group of 134 African, Asian and Latin American states and small island nations finally won agreement on a new fund that will pay to repair devastated property, or preserve cultural heritage before it disappears forever.

But the details of where the money will come from and how it will be disbursed were left to be worked out by this December’s COP28 conference in Dubai.

As mid-year U.N. climate talks got underway in Bonn in June, Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, called on the United Arab Emirates to declare its intention for COP28 — which it will host — to create the “Dubai Loss and Damage Fund.”

Here’s why the issue of “loss and damage” has grown in importance this past decade — and where the sticking points in finding finance to address it could lie.

What is climate change “loss and damage”?

“Loss and damage” refers to the physical and mental harm that happens to people and places when they are not prepared for climate-driven impacts, and are unable to adjust the way they live to protect themselves from longer-term shifts.

It can occur both from fast-moving weather disasters made stronger or more frequent by warming temperatures — such as floods or hurricanes — as well as from slower-developing stresses like persistent drought and sea levels creeping higher.

A large share of “loss and damage” can be measured in financial terms, like the cost of wrecked homes and infrastructure.

But there are other non-economic losses that are harder to quantify, such as graveyards and family photos being washed away, or Indigenous cultures that could disappear if a whole community must move because their land is no longer habitable.

A June 2022 report released by a forum of 55 climate-vulnerable countries — from Bangladesh to South Sudan — found they would have been 20% wealthier had it not been for climate change and the $525 billion in losses inflicted on them by shifts in temperature and rainfall over the past two decades.

Often the poorest people lack the means to recover what they have lost, particularly as aid fails to keep up with growing needs, as seen with last year’s huge floods in Pakistan or the drought that has left tens of millions hungry in the Horn of Africa.

What funding is on offer when loss and damage happens — and how can more be raised?

So far there has been very little money available apart from aid provided through the international humanitarian system to respond to disasters — which every year faces shortfalls.

A 2022 study by anti-poverty charity Oxfam found that aid needs in response to weather disasters had skyrocketed more than eightfold in the last 20 years.

But U.N.-coordinated humanitarian emergency appeals are, on average, only 60% funded.

“There is not enough money for humanitarian action — even to do the first-phase response [to disasters], never mind the preparedness, resilience [and] longer-term early recovery piece,” said Debbie Hillier, who manages flood resilience programs for Mercy Corps.

According to a 2018 study by researchers at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, the costs of loss and damage in low- and middle-income countries could reach between $290 billion and $580 billion a year by 2030.

But rich countries are already struggling to meet a goal to channel $100 billion annually to vulnerable countries for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change.

Some donor countries, including a few European nations, Canada and New Zealand, have already agreed to provide loss and damage funding to poorer nations – although so far, those pledges total only about $275 million.

Given this, climate justice activists have long argued for the need to find innovative sources for loss and damage funding, based on levies and taxation.

Those include a controversial proposal — backed by the U.N. chief — for rich governments to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.

Other ideas that have gained ground include levying a small fee on international flights – which contribute to climate-heating emissions – and a global tax on financial market transactions, which could be distributed by the new fund.

The most concrete loss and damage funding scheme so far, the “Global Shield Against Climate Risks”, aims to boost insurance coverage for vulnerable countries and communities, attracting about $200 million at its COP27 launch, largely from Germany.

It will expand initiatives — from subsidized insurance coverage to stronger social protection schemes and pre-approved disaster financing — that can swiftly channel support to disaster-hit poorer countries’ own contingency plans.

But many climate campaigners say insurance cannot be a lasting answer, with losses expected to soar and even become uninsurable as climate disasters intensify.

What are the obstacles to setting up a loss and damage fund?

A “Transitional Committee” is meeting regularly this year to work out the form and scope of the new loss and damage fund, and how to fill its coffers.

Observers say the discussions have progressed constructively — and are hoping this month’s Bonn climate talks will add political momentum. But there is disagreement on which parts of loss and damage finance should fall under the new fund’s remit.

Some countries, notably the United States, want the fund to focus tightly on two key areas less well-covered by humanitarian agencies — “slow onset” disasters, from desertification to islands sinking as seas rise, and “non-economic losses”.

That would also include support for communities — or even whole island nations — to relocate should they no longer be able to continue living in their current homes.

Climate justice campaigners and others, meanwhile, are pushing for the new fund to have a broader scope, which would include helping finance the humanitarian response to climate disasters as well as efforts to cover gaps, especially in terms of building resilience.

A report last month by the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance outlined lessons learned by the aid sector that could help the new loss and damage fund operate effectively.

Its recommendations included a warning to donors not to re-label their humanitarian aid as loss and damage funding, and to find new sources of finance.

It also stressed the need to use existing systems to deliver aid on the ground fast, find ways to get funding to fragile and conflict-hit states, and work with local groups.

The key will be to agree on how loss and damage action can both benefit from — and amplify — the work already being done by humanitarian agencies to protect vulnerable communities, experts say.

“We can’t allow the accountability to be shifted outside the [U.N. climate] system — for a very simple reason: 90% of disasters we are facing today are climate-related,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy for Climate Action Network International.

“The loss and damage fund has to be the top-level mechanism that should have oversight on whether people are getting sufficient support or not.”
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