The El Niño weather event currently forming over the Pacific Ocean is likely to be the strongest since the 19th century, increasing the likelihood of extreme weather in the UK, the Met Office has warned.
Because of the UK’s distance from the Pacific, the link between El Niño and British summers is less clear. But climate scientists warn it will likely make future heatwaves even more intense.
English is lit! Great Expectations rewritten by AI in Gen Z slang
‘I call myself Pip. It’s not a name with much rizz’
One of the great classics, written by Charles Dickens, has been modernised – but it’s not aimed at children studying the text in class.
- The Dickens classic has been fed into the AI model Claude Opus 4 to produce “Bare Expectations”.
- The shortened adaption uses the slang of teenagers today, using words like “ick” and “drip”.
- It was made by Tesco Mobile, in partnership with author Chloe Combi, to help parents better understand their children and keep them safe online.
- It was also read as an audio book by Allan Mustafa, from Kurupt FM.
Classic for the modern age
You’d think the best MC in the galaxy would know all the latest slang, and I do. If any kid tells you otherwise, they’re lying. Any words I don’t know are just not cool enough for me to care about!
Allan Mustafa, MC Grindah from Kurupt FM, told Retail Times.
A closer look at the detail
But 77 per cent of parents worry about their online safety. One in four parents felt unprepared when giving their child their first phone. More than half are confused by their child’s language at least once a week.
But campaigners say the best way to keep children safe online is by not giving them a smartphone in the first place.
Are Channel crossing numbers down?
The French authorities have become more “effective” at stopping migrants crossing in dangerous small boats across the Channel, the UK Government has said.
What do the figures tell us?
The figures compared to last year
5%
The increase in the number of small boats intercepted in the last three months compared with last year.
The Home Office said, citing French figures, that since April, 61 per cent of small boats have been intercepted.
The deal agreed by the UK and France in April.
This includes £161m in performance-based targets.
Channel crisis
In the past few weeks, three boats were stopped – two of which were at sea.
Numbers falling
Some 15,897 migrants have crossed the Channel, 43 per cent down on the same period last year.
Last month, a record 165 migrants reached the UK in a single boat.
“People smugglers should be in no doubt, we’re taking down their operations, seizing their equipment and breaking their business model for good,” said Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
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British rapper Yung Filly to face retrial on rape charges in Australia
The rapper and YouTuber who appeared on Celebrity Bake Off will face a retrial after a jury could not reach a verdict during trial.
Yung Filly denied all charges
The Colombian-born rapper, whose real name is Andrés Felipe Valencia Barrientos, was charged with raping and assaulting a 20-year-old fan after his show in Perth 2024. He denied all 10 charges and a jury last month found him not guilty of three charges of rape.
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He was accused of raping a fan
Barrientos was accused of having consensual sex with her until he turned violent and didn’t stop when asked. His lawyer said the evidence was full of “inconsistencies, embellishments and outright lies”.
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A closer look at the detail
- Last month, a jury found him not guilty on three counts of rape.
- He was cleared of one assault charge and another of strangulation.
- But he was found guilty of two counts of assault.
- Jurors were unable to make a decision on three counts of sexual penetration without consent.
Could El Niño make next year even hotter?
The naturally occurring phenomenon known as El Niño, which can drive up global temperatures and is brewing in the Pacific, could be the strongest in living memory, the Met Office has warned.
What is El Niño?
It is a climate phenomenon which occurs in the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years.
Normally, trade winds blow east to west across the equator – during and El Niño period, these weaken or reverse.
This pushes up global temperatures as warmth is taken from the ocean into the atmosphere.
El Niño’s impact already been seen
It has already started to affect weather systems in other parts of the world, with below-average monsoons in India and suppressed hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean. In the UK, El Niño is usually felt later in winter.
A particularly strong El Niño coupled with global warming has left scientists worried that 2027 could be even warmer.
El Niño is strongest in living memory
We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event. I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts.
Professor Adam Scaife, head of
long-range forecasting, the Met Office
Risk of most intense El Niño in 1,000 years
- El Niño is declared when the sea temperature in the tropical eastern Pacific rises 0.5°C above the long-term average.
- But currently it’s over 2°C and could reach 3°C later this year.
- Some have suggested it could go above 4°C – meaning it would be the strongest El Nino in the last 500-1,000 years.
Next year could be hottest ever
The precise effect El Niño has on global weather can be unpredictable. But Met Office climate scientist Dr Nick Dunstone told the BBC average global temperatures could rise next year. This would make 2027 the hottest year on record, after 2024.
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‘Ingredients for a hot summer’
El Niño is a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs every two to seven years and disrupts normal weather patterns around the world.
The impacts are felt strongest in regions surrounding the Pacific Ocean, though an El Niño also increases the likelihood of the UK experiencing wet, windy autumns followed by cool, dry winters.
It’s predicted that 2027 will be the hottest year on record as the strong El Niño coincides with the ongoing impacts from climate change.
This doesn’t automatically mean the UK will have a hot summer (while El Niño made 2024 the hottest year on record, UK temperatures weren’t higher than normal). But it does mean any heatwaves due to come are likely to be even more extreme.
“It is still too early to say what next summer will bring for the UK. However, El Niño’s additional warming, combined with an already warmer climate, could provide the ingredients for a hot summer,” said Dr Akshay Deoras, senior research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science.
Will the El Niño bring another drought?
Over 70 per cent of England and all of Wales is currently in drought, after many parts of the country went over two months without any rainfall this summer.
The drought is likely to continue into the winter as affected areas need months of above-average rainfall for reservoirs, rivers and groundwater to be replenished.
El Niño increases the likelihood that the UK will experience a wet autumn, which will help with the drought. However, it also means we are more likely to get a dry winter.
Deoras said the UK needs a “really, really large amount of rainfall over the next few months” to replenish our water resources.
A worst-case scenario could see the UK entering next spring still in drought and then experiencing another particularly dry summer.
Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research professor at the University of Oxford, said climate forecasts are expected to be released next month outlining the impact of El Niño on the UK’s winter rainfall.
“We can hope that they will show abundant rain over the UK. If they don’t, we’re in serious trouble,” he said.
UK summers will only get worse
While it’s too early to predict what will happen in the UK next summer, experts agree we should be preparing for another hot, dry summer.
“This is the least extreme climate we’re going to experience in our lifetime,” said Dr Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University.
“Hopefully we won’t get five heatwaves again next summer, but at some point in a summer very soon we’re going to get even worse conditions than we’ve experienced this summer,” she added.
Emma Howard Boyd, professor in practice at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said this summer has already illustrated a number of vulnerabilities in the UK’s preparedness for extreme heat, including in schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure.
This summer alone, there was one heatwave a month. It also saw Britain’s annual wildfire record broken by mid-August, widespread travel disruptions, rivers running low, water shortages and thousands of heat-related deaths. Homes and trains are ill equipped, though plans to adapt Britain’s homes and railways are still in their early days, experts previously told The i Paper.
While some “emergency” measures, such as shading in playgrounds, can be done over the next year, some departments currently have decade-long strategies for adapting their infrastructure, she said.
“We need to ensure that preparing for our changing climate is absolutely a priority, as opposed to something that possibly gets cut as we forget that we had a hotter period of time,” she said.
The indirect ways El Niño could impact the UK
The biggest impact of El Niño on the UK is likely to be more indirect, through rising food prices and disruptions to supply chains.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs previously predicted this El Niño could cause a 15.8 per cent surge in food prices, which would not be fully felt in the global economy until the end of 2028.
Rice and chocolate are among the foods most vulnerable to El Niño price spikes due to the impacts of extreme weather on south Asia and parts of Africa.
A strong El Niño can also disrupt global trading routes – and this is already happening. On Thursday the Panama Canal Authority announced it was cutting the number of vessels passing through the key waterway due to low rainfall, bringing further disruptions to global supplies.