Super El Niño threatens global weather, agriculture and commodity markets

Meteorologists warn that a Super El Niño—potentially the strongest on record—has begun with a rapid rise in Pacific Ocean temperatures. NASA’s Sentinel‑6 satellite detected a massive Kelvin wave, a swell of warm water extending hundreds of kilometres along the equator, raising sea level by more than 15 cm and confirming the anomaly.

The warming is expected to reshape global weather patterns: severe droughts across Asia and Africa, heightened rains and flooding in South America, and altered conditions in the western Pacific such as Indonesia and Australia. These shifts will suppress coffee, sugar and palm‑oil production, push cocoa prices past the $5,000‑per‑tonne threshold, and disrupt copper mining in Chile and Peru. In the United States, milder winters could lower gas prices, while China’s hydroelectric output may fall, prompting Beijing to build coal reserves. Overall, the event could lift commodity prices by about 5 %, sustaining food‑price inflation for many months and causing potentially trillion‑dollar losses in agricultural and industrial output.