As COP31 nears, forecasters weigh a warm winter outlook
With global climate talks set to open and an El Niño in play, attention turns to the season ahead and the state of a warming world.
As negotiators prepare to gather for the COP31 United Nations climate summit, due to open in the days ahead, forecasters are weighing a winter outlook shaped by an El Niño pattern and a warming baseline, in a year that has again delivered extremes around the globe.
The climate talks, hosted this year in Türkiye, bring together nearly 200 nations to assess progress on cutting emissions and helping vulnerable countries adapt, against a backdrop of record or near-record global temperatures and a mounting toll of disasters. Expectations and tensions run high, as they have at recent summits, over the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels and the delivery of climate finance.
On the seasonal front, the El Niño declared earlier in the year is expected to influence the coming winter, often bringing milder conditions to the northern tier of the United States and shifting storm tracks and rainfall patterns worldwide. Layered atop the long-term warming trend, it points to the likelihood of continued above-normal global temperatures.
Forecasters cautioned that seasonal outlooks describe broad tendencies rather than guarantees, and that significant cold outbreaks and storms remain possible even in a warm winter, particularly if the polar vortex is disrupted.
The convergence of a major climate summit and the turn of the seasons offered a moment to take stock: of a planet continuing to warm, of the extremes that warming is fuelling, and of the choices that will shape the climate of the decades to come.