Hansen says this El Nino is already the strongest; two of three metrics still put it behind

Three comparisons are on the table and they do not point the same way. Adam Scaife's figure, about 2 degrees against roughly 2.5 degrees at the 1997/98 peak, leaves this event half a degree short on the conventional index ^[4][12]. The daily value Daniel Swain prefers, 2.75 degrees on 8 August before a slight drop back, sits about 0.35 degrees below the nearly 3.1 degrees reached in November 2015 ^[5][13]. James Hansen's heat anomaly for the upper 300 metres of the equatorial Pacific is the one that has already passed 1997-98 ^[2]. One gauge of three puts the event in front, and it is the gauge measuring stored heat in a 300-metre column rather than the temperature of a box of ocean surface between 5 degrees north and south, 120 to 170 degrees west ^[15][3].

The wording matters because Hansen's newsletter also said the Nino3.4 metric far exceeds prior values ^[18]. New Scientist's reading is that he meant prior values for this time of year, which is the version Swain endorses, and Hansen had not answered a request to clarify by the time the piece went out ^[9][6]. The publication's own conclusion is that the event will soon exceed previous ones on all measures ^[20], which is a forecast rather than a completed comparison, and worth keeping separate from the subsurface number that has actually been passed.

For the planning question, the useful sentence belongs to Scaife. He says he has never seen an El Nino signal this intense in the Met Office's forecasts, and that if the forecast is accurate, 2026 will far exceed recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences ^[10]. The conditional is his. Hansen's framing puts maximum effects several months beyond an early-August reading, which lands the peak near the turn of the year and the consequences inside the year Scaife names ^[1][17].

Hayley Fowler's statement is the largest claim in the set and the one this season cannot settle ^[19]. The share of the population she cites for 1877-78 was measured against a world of roughly 1.25 to 1.7 billion people ^[14]. Her claim is about the size of the ocean anomaly. The toll attached to it describes what the food and relief systems of the 1870s did with a shock of that size, and treating it as a projection is a step nobody quoted here takes.