Hi, there.

It looks like we'll all get to baby-sit an unruly little chap this year. I am talking about El Niño, the Pacific climate phenomenon that messes up weather patterns across the world every few years and literally translates as "the little boy" in Spanish. 

Peruvian fishermen centuries ago named the warm current after the Christ child because it tended to show up around Christmas. This year's edition, though, is behaving less like a bundle of festive joy and more like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Forecasters now say there's a greater than 90% chance of a "very strong" event in the Northern Hemisphere this year — potentially the most disruptive since 1950. 

That can mean devastating floods, crop-killing droughts, scarcer fish catches and more tropical diseases. To give you a sense of scale, a Dartmouth College study found the 1982-83 and 1997-98 events, among the strongest in recent history, cost the world $4.1 trillion and $5.7 trillion respectively over the following five years.  

What makes 2026's version so alarming is that it's colliding with a climate that's already running hot. Scientists note the impact is unusually hard to predict because man-made warming is compounding the natural cycle. And that's before you add in the fertiliser and diesel shocks from the Iran war that are already pushing up food prices. 

The sheer geographic sprawl of the threat gave me pause. In Vietnam and Indonesia, dryness is jeopardising robusta coffee yields. In West Africa, cocoa farmers fear getting whiplashed between drenching rain and dry Harmattan winds.  

Argentina's record corn harvest is stuck in the mud — literally, with persistent humidity delaying drying and fieldwork. Peru's fishermen saw activity collapse 52% in June, while a local miner has bolted an extra $12 million onto its capital spending just to protect itself against flooding. 

Meanwhile in Brazil's Amazon, El Niño is sapping the Tapajós River, a key waterway for grain barge traffic. Operators at the giant Belo Monte dam have had to slash minimum river flow to keep the turbines turning. 

Even the birds are voting with their wings — Peruvian and Chilean seabirds are turning up over Panama City as warming water pushes their food further out to sea. Farmers on three continents, shippers in the Amazon, miners in the Andes, and confused pelicans in Panama: this is one weather pattern with an extraordinarily long guest list. 

But here's the bit that stings the most: the World Food Programme reckons this El Niño could push nearly 49 million more people into acute hunger, taking the global total to 274 million across 45 countries. Central America and Southern Africa are likely to be hit hardest. 

Western consumers may also see their food bill go up a little, although cocoa and coffee prices are such a small slice of what you pay for a chocolate bar or an espresso that even a price spike at the farm gate barely registers at the till. 

And speaking of who picks up the climate tab — do read my colleagues Mark John and Yoruk Bahceli's sharp piece on Europe's uninsured losses. Only a quarter of catastrophe losses in the EU are insured, meaning taxpayers increasingly foot the bill when the weather misbehaves