Is this El Niño a glimpse of a future, hotter Earth?

[...]

The best-known example of unforced variability in our climate is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (referred to by scientists as ENSO). El Niño events, which make up the warm phase of ENSO, occur every few years and last a year or so, and alternate with cooler La Niña events. These ENSO events are associated with large-scale shifts of rainfall and temperature patterns around the globe, and these have enormous consequences for humanity. Some regions see more rainfall during an El Niño, and some see less; some regions experience warmer temperatures than normal, while others are cooler.

[...]

The catch is that the future world that has been warmed by greenhouse gases and a present-day world that has been temporarily warmed by El Niño can have the same global-average temperature while having significant differences in the impacts of this warming.

[...]

We can regress the global average temperature against the ENSO index, which tells us that the globe warms about 0.08°C for every degree increase in the ENSO index. The forecast is for the ENSO index to reach +3.9°C in November 2026, which implies approximately +0.3°C of (temporary) global warming in the following year 1 . This additional ENSO warming is the reason that 2027 will be a record breaker and a preview of a greenhouse-warmed world of the late 2030s.

[...]

The coming El Niño may temporarily push global-average temperatures to a level that will not occur during (ENSO-neutral) conditions for another decade or two. In that sense, it really is a glimpse of the future.

But it is not a true time machine. It does not provide a full picture of what the Earth will actually look like a decade hence.

[...]