Pagasa starts La Niña watch as El Niño weakens
THE Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) has started its La Niña watch as El Niño has started to weaken, although its impact will be felt until May.
Pagasa Administrator Nathaniel Servando said in a press briefing on Thursday that El Niño has shown signs of weakening.
”But its impact is expected to persist up to April and May this year,” he said.
Majority of the climate models suggest a transition to ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation)-neutral conditions during the April-March-May-June 2024 season, the weather agency said.
Servando said there is a 55 percent chance that La Niña will develop in June or July.
”With this development, the Pagasa ENSO Alert Warning System is now raised to La Niña Watch,” the Pagasa chief said.
La Niña is characterized by cooler-thanaverage sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.
Fast return
The rapid return of the La Niña weather phenomenon “may actually decrease” the risk that 2024 smashes last year’s record heat, Europe’s climate monitor said amid enduring historic global temperatures.
Although the past nine consecutive months have clocked temperatures previously unseen by humanity, they fell in line with climatologists’ predictions of human-caused climate change, which “could have taken more into account,” said Carlo Buontempo of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
Contributors to the successive record temperatures range from natural cyclical events like the warming El Niño weather pattern and solar activity, Buontempo said, to greenhouse gas emissions.
“Greenhouse gases keep going up. And it would be very hard to explain or to see temperatures so high if it weren’t for the greenhouse gases added in the atmosphere,” he said.
The recent “El Niño has not been as extreme as previous El Niños and still the top temperatures we have seen were remarkably warmer,” he said.
It followed a lengthy cooling La Niña, which he said may have downplayed the extent the planet was warming.
Despite El Niño peaking in December, February marked another month of record heat — a typical pattern as global mean temperatures spike after the extreme of the weather pattern, Buontempo explained.
A transition to neutral is expected by the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring and then to La Niña.
“There are some indications suggesting a transition to La Niña is happening faster than expected,” he said.
It means that while 2024 “was on track to become another very warm year, potentially a record-breaking year ... the chance may actually decrease,” he said.
In February, the planet saw four straight days exceed the 2-degree Celsius mark above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming.
While breached, the Paris target is actually measured by “an average over 20 years,” Buontempo said.
The 2 C threshold was first crossed in November, which was “remarkable and at the same time not really surprising.”
Global temperatures have been consistently rising and “this means that temperature extremes will be exceeded more frequently at the daily level, at the monthly level, at the annual level,” he said.
“The last 12 months have been above 1.5 (degrees) and this is the first time that exceeds that threshold.”
Uncharted territory
While temperatures are still “broadly” consistent with scientists’ projections, the climate has entered uncharted territory, Buontempo said.
“Our civilization has never had to cope with this climate. Our cities, our culture, our transport system, our energy system — none of those things ever had to cope with this climate,” he said.
“Indeed, there have been surprises in the last few months of things that we didn’t know were going to happen so fast. If you look at the projections made at the beginning of the century for the temperature of the 2020s, they were actually quite accurate. We could have taken more notice of those.”