00:00El Nino is a natural phenomenon that every few years causes the the tropical
00:05Pacific to become warmer than usual. The current El Nino that we're seeing
00:09develop now for this time of year it actually is the strongest that we have
00:13on record and we're already seeing the impacts of that El Nino across the
00:17tropics. We're seeing in Indonesia for example over a quarter million acres of
00:21land have burned. We're seeing very dry conditions in India where the monsoon is
00:26among the driest of the last 20 years. We're also seeing things like tropical
00:30storms striking Hawaii. Normally tropical storms don't get as far north as Hawaii
00:35but because the Pacific is so warm those storms can form over that very warm
00:39water. We know that El Nino supercharges global warming. What our data show is
00:45that perhaps global warming also supercharges El Nino. As the atmosphere
00:50warms it holds more water vapor and that water vapor can come out of the
00:55atmosphere when conditions are right in intense rainfall. Where El Nino would
01:00produce a flood now it would produce an even bigger flood. It's getting a lot
01:04stronger in the last few decades than it has been over the last thousand years.
01:09So really we need to look back at the root cause of this. The intensification of
01:13El Nino closely parallels warming. We know what's causing that warming. It's the
01:18human consumption of fossil fuels and so this gives us one more nudge to move our
01:23energy system towards renewables and away from fossil fuels.
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