Climate Change Linked to Stronger El Niño Events

A new study published in the journal Science indicates that El Niño events have become significantly more intense over the past 40 years, a change researchers attribute to human-caused climate change. The research, led by scientists at the University of Michigan, used chemical analysis of ancient and modern corals from the Galápagos Islands to reconstruct sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific over the last millennium. The analysis revealed that variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle has increased by 36.5 percent compared to the preindustrial period.