Thunderstorms and tornadoes struck the US north-east last Thursday, with a tornado hitting Dover, Delaware and an EF-1 tornado — peak winds of 97mph — touching down near Atlantic Beach on Long Island. It was Nassau County's first tornado since November 2021. Buildings and beach cabanas were damaged, flash flooding knocked out power. The UK, meanwhile, has flipped from a summer of high temperatures and virtually no meaningful rainfall to cooler conditions with heavy showers and thunderstorms. High pressure delivered a dry weekend, but unsettled weather returns from Tuesday with thundery rain spreading northward as warmer southerly winds develop. The bigger structural story sits in the Pacific. A powerful El Niño is developing that the UK Met Office says could be the strongest in living memory. Sea surface temperatures in the key region are forecast to climb more than 3°C above average later this year — which would make it the strongest since records began in 1950. Some forecasts push that to an unprecedented 4°C above average. El Niño's mechanism is straightforward: trade winds that normally push east-to-west across the Pacific weaken or reverse, allowing warm water to surge eastward. The heat transfers from ocean to atmosphere, pushing global temperatures higher. The Met Office projects 2027 is likely to be the warmest year ever recorded globally as a direct consequence. The effects are already visible. India has experienced weaker-than-average monsoon rainfall. Atlantic hurricane activity has been suppressed — a temporary reprieve that masks the underlying volatility. For the UK, El Niño raises the probability of a wet, stormy autumn and potentially colder winter conditions across north-west Europe. Longer-range forecast models already show signals of wetter-than-normal conditions through early winter. The critical qualifier buried in this story: while El Niño's impacts are likely to be more severe in a warming world, there is currently no strong evidence that climate change is making El Niño events themselves more likely. The frequency stays the same; the amplitude of damage grows. That distinction matters for infrastructure planning — you cannot predict when the next event hits, but you can predict that each one hits harder than the last. The extraction pattern here is diffuse but real. El Niño redistributes weather risk globally, and the costs land overwhelmingly on populations with the least adaptive capacity — Indian farmers dependent on monsoon rains, coastal communities in the US northeast with aging power grids, UK infrastructure built for a climate that no longer exists. No one is profiting from El Niño directly, but the failure to invest in resilience is a slow-motion extraction from future taxpayers and insurance pools.
