JG Nuke on El Niño and food prices

by Freddenver: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The thing about El Niño that gets lost in the weather chatter is what it does to the price of food, and that's the thread JG Nuke is pulling on here. His starting point is pretty simple: take the temperature of the water sitting on top of the Pacific, right along the equator. Run a little hot compared to what's normal for that stretch and you're technically looking at El Niño. Run a little cold and you've got La Niña instead. That's the whole definition, no more complicated than a thermometer reading. Where it gets interesting is the scale. According to JG Nuke, what we're sitting in right now either is the strongest El Niño of the last 100 years or is on its way to earning that label, and it has already outdone the majority of years stretching back over several decades. That's not a small claim. He also points to a storm in the Atlantic that made the jump from tropical storm to hurricane, and notes a category 5 sitting out in the Pacific. Then comes the part that actually matters for anyone buying groceries. El Niño flips the script on rainfall. Places that normally get soaked turn dry. Places that normally run dry start getting the water. So the wet zones and the dry zones basically trade places across the Pacific. That swap is the mechanism JG Nuke ties directly to a threat against food prices. Not a curiosity, not just a weather headline. The argument is that when the rain goes where it isn't expected and skips the places that count on it, the cost of food is what ends up carrying the damage.