For Julia Cole, a palaeoclimatologist who uses corals to study Earth's past climate, the powerful El Nino event now gaining strength in the Pacific Ocean comes as no surprise. It looks like part of a century-long pattern of strong El Nino events happening more often as the planet heats up because of human-caused climate change. 'It doesn't look like a fluke,' she says. That observation is based on a reconstruction by Cole and her colleagues of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the millennium before the industrial revolution, published today in Science1. According to the analysis of coral skeletons from the Galapagos islands, the past century has seen strong El Nino events happening more frequently than in the 1,000 years before human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions began to warm the planet. Many climate models project that this trend towards more-frequent strong El Ninos will continue with climate change this century. These events lead to a temporary surge...
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