The current El Niño climate phenomenon is expected to last until February 2027, but its impacts will last much longer, environmental scientist Tara Shine has warned.

Speaking on Morning Ireland, she said that global food systems will be affected, with some parts of the world to experience food shortages and hunger, and told listeners that "for us, our food prices will be affected and will become higher in 2027 and 2028".

"There will be food shortages and hunger in some parts of the world – that is a big worry for India and Africa at the moment. The FAO anticipate[s] acute hunger will affect 50 million people.

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"We also know, with absolute certainty, that this El Niño, this disaster, which we know is coming – we can track it, we can see it, it is completely anticipated – that it will have impacts on global systems and global supply chains and that will affect all of us in our daily lives.

"Without a doubt, human influence on the climate has turbocharged this El Niño, that’s why they are calling it 'godzilla El Niño'."

This winter

She said that this winter, we can expect warmer than usual conditions, more storms and wetter weather. She added that how exactly this weather will turn up in different months is not yet known.

"We know, we have all the predictions, that our winters are getting warmer and wetter, our summers are getting drier and hotter – we just experienced that this summer. We are getting more frequent and more intense weather events."

El Niño is a climate phenomenon which refers to unusually warm surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific sea, according to the WMO.

It typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts around nine to 12 months.

"At the moment, in the Pacific Ocean, that water is now 3.05°C higher than the average, that is 0.3°C higher than one of the last times we had a very severe El Niño event in 2015-2016.

"Although 0.3°C can sound small to us, when we see what impact that can have and that excess energy released out into the system, it shows us that every part of every degree of warming happens."

Reducing emissions

"It is bad news, but there is time to do things about it.

"We have all the technology we need to reduce carbon emissions to make our air cleaner and our water cleaner," she concluded.

Speaking earlier in the week on the Morning Ireland programme, Maynooth University climatologist Peter Thorne said he predicts we will have "truly remarkable extreme breaking records" and "rainfall like we have never seen".

"That is in our future at some point, I just can’t tell you which year or month."

He criticised the Government fuel supports and said "the €2m that they will have spent trying to keep fuel prices down, they could have bought 50,000 electric vehicles outright, retrofitted 30,000 homes, put solar panels on probably north of 100,000 homes, these actions could have insulated people from fossil fuel prices in the future".