Partly. Climate change may increase El Niño intensity and frequency

El Niño is a natural swing in the tropical Pacific climate. It arises from ocean-atmosphere interactions, and individual events can't be attributed to climate change. Research has not settled whether warming is making El Niño stronger or more frequent. Some models suggest more extreme events, but observed trends are uncertain. Some media coverage says this event is 'supercharged' by climate change. That is mostly about the warmer background it sits on: record global temperatures, marine heatwaves and heavier rain and heat extremes. It is not evidence that climate change triggered the El Niño. So the accurate answer is that climate change isn't established as the cause of the strong El Niño. It is amplifying its impacts.

• NOAA's 10 September 2026 update gave a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño in winter 2026-27, and a 75% chance of a historic event in October-December 2026.
• Carbon Brief says climate change's influence on El Niño is an area of active scientific debate.
• Harvard's Salata Institute summary says it remains unsettled whether climate change is changing El Niño itself.
• Global warming is clearly raising baseline temperatures, so El Niño's effects are layered on top of a warmer world.
• El Niño is part of the natural ENSO cycle and recurs every few years.

1. Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather interactive.carbonbrief.org
2. El Nino: A phenomenon supercharged by climate change aljazeera.com
3. El Niño 2026 Winter Forecast: U.S. Weather Outlook for 2026-27 - Perry Weather perryweather.com
4. What El Niño Means for Fall and Winter Weather in the U.S. time.com
5. El Niño set to become very strong, raising risks of extreme weather into 2027 wmo.int
6. Climate Prediction Center: ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - NOAA cpc.ncep.noaa.gov
7. El Niño will upend winter weather in the US. Here’s who will feel it the most cnn.com
8. Climate network and complexity based ENSO forecast for 2026 arxiv.org

A forecast of a strong El Niño is not an attribution of its strength to climate change: forecasts use observed Pacific temperatures, winds and model projections. Establishing how much human-caused warming contributed requires separate attribution research. Natural variability and warming can both influence the outcome, so neither 'climate change caused it' nor 'climate change has no role' is justified by the evidence presented.

• El Niño is a naturally occurring ocean–atmosphere cycle that predates human-caused warming by millions of years.
• NOAA's September 10, 2026 outlook gave a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño during fall and winter 2026–27.
• Research reviewed by NOAA suggests greenhouse gases have increased ENSO variability, but climate-model limitations complicate attribution.
• Climate change can intensify El Niño-related rainfall and drought impacts even without strengthening El Niño itself.

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El Niño is a periodic climate phenomenon that occurs naturally every two to seven years as heat shifts across the tropical Pacific Ocean. Human-caused climate change does not trigger or create these events. While greenhouse gas emissions warm the oceans and atmosphere on a planetary scale—adding extra heat that sits atop natural cycles and worsens resulting droughts, floods, and marine heatwaves—the development and specific strength of any given El Niño event are primarily governed by natural internal variability in the ocean-atmosphere system.

• El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a natural climate pattern operating for thousands of years.
• Events develop through natural interactions between trade winds and ocean currents in the equatorial Pacific, not greenhouse gas emissions.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes no clear evidence that human-caused warming has systematically altered ENSO's intrinsic strength.
• Climate change does raise global baseline ocean and atmospheric temperatures, worsening the severity of weather extremes during an El Niño.
• Climate models show mixed projections on how long-term warming will affect the frequency of strong El Niño events in the future.

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El Niño is a mode of natural climate variability, so asking whether climate change is 'causing' it is like asking whether climate change causes summer. The mainstream position is that warming likely shifts the statistics — possibly making extreme El Niño years more common and definitely raising the baseline temperature on which they occur — but it is not the driver of a specific season's El Niño, and no attribution study can pin one event on greenhouse forcing. The answer would be the same regardless of how strong the particular winter's forecast turns out to be.

• El Niño and La Niña have alternated for thousands of years, as shown in coral, sediment and tree-ring records, long before industrial greenhouse gas rise.
• The mechanism is internal to the climate system: weakening equatorial trade winds let warm water spread east, which further weakens the winds (the Bjerknes feedback); greenhouse gases are not the trigger.
• Several modelling studies (Cai et al. 2014 and 2018, Wang et al. 2019) project that extreme El Niño events could become more frequent in a warmer world, but this is a probabilistic projection, not attribution of a particular event.
• Observational records are too short and noisy to show a clear, agreed trend in El Niño frequency or strength.
• Attribution science generally cannot attribute a single ENSO event to anthropogenic climate change; ENSO forecasts come from ocean heat content, trade-wind and coupled-model signals, with limited skill beyond about six to nine months.

El Niño is a natural climate cycle characterized by warming sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. While climate change does not directly cause El Niño, the latest scientific assessments, including the IPCC AR6 report, indicate that climate change is likely increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme El Niño events. This is due to the overall warming of the oceans and atmosphere, which can amplify the rainfall and temperature extremes associated with El Niño. However, there is no evidence or consensus that climate change is directly responsible for the specific strong El Niño potential forecast for winter 2026. Instead, climate change may be making such events more likely and more severe over time, and it amplifies the impacts of El Niño on global weather patterns.

• El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon, not directly caused by climate change.
• The IPCC AR6 report states that rainfall variability related to El Niño is very likely to increase due to climate change.
• Climate models show a robust increase in extreme El Niño and La Niña events since the 1950s, with projections for further increases.
• There is no scientific consensus that climate change is directly causing or strengthening this specific El Niño event in 2026.
• Climate change amplifies the impacts of El Niño, such as extreme heat, droughts, and floods.

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2. WMO: Likelihood increases of El Niño wmo.int
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6. 2026 Has Already Broken Climate Records. El Niño Could Break More. - Eos eos.org
7. El Niño / La Niña Phenomena wmo.int
8. El Niño–Southern Oscillation - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org