#anticipate : El Niño Will Supercharge Shocks Like the Iran War
By Tom Ellison, originally published in Lawfare, April 21, 2026
The event will amplify the effects of conflict, highlighting the importance of climate resilience to global security.
Tom Ellison argues that a coming El Niño could intensify the global fallout from the Iran war by compounding energy, food, and political shocks. The conflict has disrupted oil, gas, fertilizer, and shipping flows, while backlogs, insurance risks, damaged infrastructure, and higher fuel costs may persist even after fighting eases. El Niño would add extreme heat, droughts, floods, and higher electricity demand, worsening grid stress, crop losses, fertilizer shortages, and food-price spikes. The article stresses that vulnerable populations and import-dependent states face the greatest risks, especially as U.S., European, and multilateral aid capacities have weakened. These pressures could fuel instability, disinformation, resource conflict, and hybrid warfare, including in Europe and the Middle East. Ellison’s central claim is that climate resilience is not a secondary environmental issue but a security imperative: governments should harden food, water, energy, infrastructure, and aid systems while avoiding short-term energy responses that deepen long-term vulnerability.
The Iran war has sparked generational shocks to global energy and food security. As the effects of these shocks—from fuel shortages to food price spikes—become increasingly apparent, they will strain peace and stability worldwide. Some of these impacts are already unavoidable, with disruptions intensifying if the conflict persists. But independent of U.S. actions in the region, the coming of a hotter, more dangerous weather pattern known as El Niño is set to exacerbate the food and energy security fallout of Iran—reminding us that Mother Nature gets a vote on our priorities, too, and that climate resilience is inseparable from global security goals.
As world leaders talked geopolitics at February’s Munich Security Conference and returned home to March’s Iran conflict, scientists started forecasting that Earth is starting to transition from its current La Niña phase, entering an El Niño phase as soon as June. During El Niño, warm waters shift east in the Pacific, raising global temperatures and intensifying extreme storms, precipitation, and droughts in many parts of the world. The most recent warm cycle in 2023-2024 gave us the hottest year ever recorded, briefly breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark, and fueled record-breaking drought, floods, and other disasters around the world. Even with La Niña sanding off climate change’s sharpest edges, 2025 temperatures were 1.4 degrees above preindustrial levels and the third hottest year ever recorded, with today’s cool periods regularly hotter than the warmest periods of history. This was described as “a breaking point” and forced militaries to deploy more than 150 times around the world for climate disasters.
The next El Niño is likely to intensify warming to even greater highs in 2026-2027, with a growing probability of an especially warm “Super” El Niño. A climate change-fueled El Niño will amplify the global shocks of the Iran war, many of which will unfold over the coming year even in the unlikely case that risk of renewed conflict resolves soon.