Meteorologist explains why El Niño could trigger a disaster on the scale of The Day After Tomorrow

The film The Day After Tomorrow turned catastrophic climate disruption into a familiar image: tornadoes tearing through Los Angeles, New York under water and much of the Northern Hemisphere suddenly frozen. A study by Sybren Drijfhout, a researcher at the University of Southampton, examined how some of the film’s underlying ideas might translate into the real world.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study used climate models to explore what could happen if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, collapsed. If the system slowed sharply, some regions could cool enough to offset part of the temperature rise caused by global warming.

That cooling could last 15 to 20 years, but it would not mean climate change had stopped. After that period, warming would regain control and temperatures would rise again. The process would also be far slower and less dramatic than in the movie. The areas near the North Atlantic would face some of the strongest cooling, while other regions would continue to experience global warming.

El Niño is a separate climate phenomenon, not an AMOC collapse. It occurs when surface waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific become warmer than usual, changing atmospheric circulation. Its effects can travel thousands of kilometers, altering rainfall, drought and temperatures in distant parts of the world.

Drijfhout’s work identified El Niño, along with changes in the Southern Ocean, as one natural variation that can contribute to periods of reduced warming. A strong El Niño expected in the coming months could nevertheless produce serious global effects, particularly by shifting rainfall patterns and favoring extreme droughts or floods in different regions.