Bolivia’s second largest lake has nearly disappeared. Lake Poopó, a saltwater lake located in a shallow depression in the Altiplano Mountains, used to cover an area about the size of Los Angeles. While it’s not the first time the lake has dried out, scientists believe its recovery hangs in the balance due to the combined stress of drought, climate change, and water diversion.
2015 was the hottest year in the historical record, easily breaking the mark set only one year earlier. The unusually large El Niño weather pattern is releasing enormous amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, but climate scientists say that the bulk of the record-setting heat is due to the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions. The global land surface temperature was 1.6°F above the 20th century historical average. That’s a huge jump from 2014, which was 1.3° above average. That may sound like very little, but for the planet as a whole, it is extremely large.
There has been plenty of discussion of El Niño, the periodic weather phenomenon in which prevailing easterly winds in the Pacific Ocean weaken, allowing warm water to move eastward and wreak havoc with the weather in North and South America. The current El Niño is a particularly strong one; some say it may be one of the strongest ever and are calling it the “Godzilla El Niño.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – or NOAA – 2015 was the second hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.
There are starting to be a lot of news reports about a strong El Niño being on the way later this year. El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs in the eastern tropical Pacific every two to seven years. East-to-west trade winds weaken and ocean surface temperatures go up. The result impacts the weather throughout the Pacific region.