Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the warm and cold swings of a single system, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and that system is the largest source of year-to-year climate variation on Earth. Its swings sit atop the steadily rising temperatures driven by global warming.

But we didn't know whether global warming was making it stronger. It’s possible that the added energy in the atmosphere and oceans was causing its swings to be more dramatic.

“We've been seeing some very strong El Niño events in the late 20th and early 21st century, and what we didn't know was how unusual those are,” said Julie Cole, an environmental scientist at the University of Michigan. Because models disagree with one another and the instrumental data are too short to separate a trend, Cole’s team reconstructed a thousand-year-long ocean surface temperature record by analyzing fossilized Galápagos corals.

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The city of Houston, where I live, has been ground zero for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. So far this year there have been two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, that have formed. And the centers of both have passed near or directly over Houston.

Two "strikes" in a year might seem notable, but like the middling hurricane season to date, Arthur and Bertha were both middle-of-the road tropical storms in terms of intensity.

As a resident of a coastal region prone to hurricanes, one never wants to tempt fate. And in truth, since it is only early August, the bulk of seasonal activity definitely lies ahead of us. But all indications are we can look forward to a quiet season.

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