The other El Niño

This year's El Niño arrives with the usual warnings, the satellite maps and the atmospheric pressure readings and the ocean surface temperatures measured to two decimal places across millions of square kilometres of Pacific, and on the strength of those readings governments issued advisories, insurers repriced their exposure, and farmers in the affected regions watched the sky and adjusted their plans accordingly. The instruments pointed upward, which is where they have always pointed.

There is another pressure system, and it appears on no meteorological chart, carries no government advisory, has prompted no insurer to reprice, and occupies no line in any institutional risk framework or agricultural equity model currently in circulation.

It has been building since approximately 1962, and to understand what is coming you have to understand what an El Niño actually is.

An El Niño is not a storm. It is a pressure differential, an invisible accumulation of energy within the ocean system that distorts atmospheric circulation across the entire planet at once, delivering drought where there was rain and flood where there was drought and crop failure where there was harvest, all of it simultaneous and all of it traceable to a single accumulation of pressure that was building long before anyone watching the sky thought to look.

The event is never the arrival. The event is the release of pressure that was always there, building unobserved by those watching the wrong instrument.

The substrate has its own pressure system, and by every biological measure available to anyone willing to read it, that system is releasing now.

Beginning in the 1960s, governments and corporations across every inhabited continent subsidised the conversion of biologically complex landscapes into perennial monocultures at a scale and speed the land had no evolutionary mechanism to absorb, and they did it everywhere on the same logic, whether the crop was coconut or almond or pistachio or eucalyptus or teak.

1. Standardise the input
2. Regularise the spacing
3. Remove the variables
4. Extract the yield

Performing under stage names like Timberland and Regen Forests, we were sold a new model of nature. These are not nature. These are outdoor factories, measured in hectares and valued in rotation cycles, financed on the assumption that what was planted would keep producing, that what was producing would find a successor, and that the ground beneath all of it would remain capable of supporting both indefinitely.

None of those assumptions asked the ground what it thought.

Consider the hierarchy of what we have chosen to measure. Take the latest object of financial fascination: SpaceX, a single company valued in the trillions for a product most people will never touch.

If water stopped working tomorrow, every person on earth would have roughly 72 hours before the consequences became unsurvivable, an extinction event measured not in decades but in days. If SpaceX stopped working tomorrow, almost nothing about the daily experience of eight billion people would change at all.

Water, unpriced. The company, worth more than most nations' GDP.

We have built a civilisation that treats the optional as visionary and the existential as invisible, and so the atmosphere gets the satellites while the substrate gets the silence.

The atmospheric El Niño arrives with decades of measurement infrastructure behind it, which is why scientists can see it forming months in advance and model its probable trajectories, and why the argument among them concerns the precision of the forecast rather than the existence of the signal.

The other El Niño has none of that. It has no measurement infrastructure and no forecast model, even though the signal has been present and entirely readable for anyone willing to look at biological time rather than quarterly returns.

This is not a climate story and it is not a weather story. The atmospheric El Niño is this year's disturbance, while the other El Niño is this decade's reckoning, and the difference between them is that one has happened many times before with steadily improving forecasts while the other has not happened within living memory, because the system that created the conditions for it did not exist within living memory until now.

What follows is an in-depth diagnosis, and it makes for uncomfortable reading for anyone with exposure to, or reliance on, nature, which is everyone who eats and everyone who has assumed the ground beneath the food system will keep doing what it has always done without being asked.

This article is also published by Indo Eden. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy Thought Leaders, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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