If this monster El Niño pops off this year the way scientists are predicting it will, things could get really wild in California.
What is El Niño you say? That's the name given to the irregularly occurring shift in wind and climate patterns that happens in the Pacific every so so often, when warmer water temperatures cause all types of crazy weather shit to happen.
Specifically, torrential rains that cause massive flooding are the real danger. Cali definitely needs water with the hardcore drought it's going through, but all that parched earth mixed with an insane amount of rain could actually be disastrous.
From i09:
"Back in March of this year, scientists declared that El Niño conditions had emerged in the Pacific Ocean. Initially, it was thought that the event was too weak and too late to be of any significance, but conditions have changed over the past several months. According to NASA and other agencies, surface waters are getting warmer in the central and eastern Pacific, while conditions to the west are getting drier and cooler. What’s more, these conditions bear a striking resemblance to the substantial El Niño event of 1997-98."
That would not be good.
The El Niño of '97 brought mudslides, flooding, farming disasters, roads collapsing into giant potholes and record-breaking rain to California. It also caused a severe outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya and southern Somalia, one of Indonesia's worst droughts on record, and made 1998 the hottest year on record up to that point, according to this Associated Press story from the time.
The only good thing it ever did may have been this:
