A powerful El Niño is building in the tropical Pacific, and forecasters say there is a 63% chance it will become one of the strongest on record by winter 2026-27. In a climate already running hot, the consequences could be severe: widespread drought, wildfires, dangerous flooding, and an intensified hurricane season in the Pacific. History offers a grim reminder of what happens when such events arrive undetected.
In 1877, a similarly powerful El Niño coincided with global crop failures that killed between 30 and 60 million people. North Americans that year experienced what became known as the "year without a winter." Drought ravaged India, China, parts of Africa, and Brazil. The collapse was compounded by colonial policies and other social factors, but the underlying cause was a climate shock nobody saw coming. The difference between then and now, experts argue, should be our ability to see it coming.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 real-time sensors deployed across the world's oceans, is designed to provide exactly that advance warning. Stretching from the Gulf of Alaska to the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland, and down to North Carolina's waters, the system took a decade to build and cost approximately $386 million. The data it collects measures deep-ocean temperatures, the best gauge of how much excess heat the planet is absorbing, and feeds directly into hurricane forecasts and disaster-preparedness models.
This spring, the National Science Foundation announced plans to dismantle it. The agency began removing sensors and buoys from four of the network's five sites, a process it described bureaucratically as "descoping" the program. The move was presented as a budget matter, but observers say it is part of a broader Trump administration campaign to weaken federal climate science and its capacity to measure warming.
The response from the scientific community and Congress was swift and rare. The Senate unanimously passed legislation introduced by senators Lisa Murkowski and Jeff Merkley that would block any federal funding for dismantling the network pending a thorough review. Last week, the NSF reversed course, announcing it would halt removals, maintain the system's operation, and redeploy equipment that had already been pulled from the water.
But the reprieve may be temporary. The NSF has merely paused its actions and punted the network's future to a panel that has not yet been convened. Some sensors have already been removed, and interrupted data streams are not equivalent to continuous operation. Independent researchers warn that losing U.S. ocean observations like these would increase the error in annual estimates of ocean heating by 163%, degrading the forecasts and early-warning systems that help the country prepare for disasters.
The economic case against removal is stark. In 2025 alone, climate-related disasters cost the United States $115 billion. The ocean data also supports fisheries management for an industry that generates $319 billion in annual sales and supports 2.1 million American jobs. The administration was willing to jeopardize all of that to shut down a system that costs just $56 million a year to operate.
The danger lies not in a single event, but in the pattern. If critical monitoring systems remain vulnerable to political decisions and election outcomes, an extreme event will eventually catch the country unprepared. When it does, the consequences will be dismissed as an unavoidable act of nature, just as the famines of 1877 were. But they were not unavoidable. They were the result of failures to anticipate and respond.
Congress should move to write permanent protections into law, ensuring that the instruments used to understand the ocean cannot be dismantled by administrative whim. The window to act before the next major climate shock arrives is closing.
Author James Rodriguez: "We came within weeks of losing a system that could mean the difference between preparation and catastrophe during the next big El Niño. That should never happen again."
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