Scientists urge emergency ocean interventions for super El Niño — SkimNews
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- Michael Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey and co-authors published a paper calling for "emergency" interventions, warning that sea surface temperatures could reach 4°C above average in the east-central Pacific — 60% higher than the previous record — because the super El Niño stacks on top of 150 years of global warming.
- John Bruno at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argued proven interventions are "relatively low-cost," recommending governments limit fishing after past super El Niños collapsed fisheries like Peru's anchovy catch, and ban predator harvests like the sheephead wrasse, which helps protect California kelp forests from sea urchins.
- The paper proposes "rescue missions" to extract endangered specimens; during the 2023–2024 El Niño, scientists moved 25 rare Tasmanian red handfish into tanks before later returning them to the wild, and others temporarily relocated corals into aquariums.
- Recommended geoengineering tests include cloud brightening via seawater-particle sprays (Australian scientists have trialed the technique on the Great Barrier Reef with UK government funding), artificial upwelling with wave-powered pumps (a Gulf of Maine trial accelerated kelp growth), shade structures over bleached Florida corals, and probiotic microbes shown to keep Red Sea corals photosynthesizing through heatwaves.
- Daniela Schmidt at the University of Bristol pushed back, warning that untested geoengineering could worsen El Niño damage and preferring the "precautionary principle," since short-term rescues cannot substitute for cutting fossil fuel emissions or expanding marine protected areas.
- Meredith — who previously argued geoengineering research can be "environmentally dangerous" — now frames the crisis as a "natural lab" to test small-patch ocean interventions, marking a shift from his earlier position in favor of studying only large-scale proposals cautiously.
Why it matters: With August already the ocean's hottest month on record and east-central Pacific anomalies projected 60% above prior highs, fisheries agencies in Peru, the US, and Australia face near-term pressure to enact emergency catch limits and predator bans while scientists begin field-testing geoengineering — interventions that are cheap to pilot but whose ecological side effects on small ocean patches remain unmeasured.
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