Angela Eagle has told British people to keep enough food and water at home to get through a few days without power or water as the El Niño weather warning intensified. Forecasters and the UN say the warming Pacific event is strengthening fast and could drive wetter winters, more extreme storms and heavier flooding elsewhere.
Angela Eagle and the UK
Eagle, the environment secretary, said households should prepare for a short spell without basic services rather than wait for help to arrive. She said: “If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t.”
She also said: “So some of it is that kind of preparation for just being a bit more resilient.” The advice is straightforward: keep enough food and water at home for a few days, not a long-term stockpile, and treat the warning as a prompt to make ordinary emergency plans now.
Forecasters and UN
The scale of the warning is what has changed. The UN said El Niño was “supersizing before our eyes,” while forecasters said they were braced for the biggest El Niño in 1,000 years. A temperature anomaly above 0.5C is classed as El Niño; the most recent data from Monday showed the ocean temperature at the heart of the event was 2.6C above the 30-year average.
Based on the average of 14 different models, the peak is forecast to reach about 4C in November. Zeke Hausfather said data from corals, tree rings and historical documents suggested no El Niño had reached this level in the last millennium. In practical terms, that gives households only a limited window to prepare before the strongest phase arrives.
WMO and António Guterres
Celeste Saulo said El Niño could deliver “a massive blow to communities and economies across the world” and added: “We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies.” António Guterres said: “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”
Angela Eagle said the UK would probably face “drier summers, wetter winters, with more extreme storms in this country,” and said the event would do “a lot more damage in Asia with flooding.” The tension in the warning is plain: the UK is being urged to prepare for a possibly severe winter even as the same science says 2027 is set to blow apart the record and become the hottest year ever recorded. This summer already brought the most extreme heatwave ever recorded in Europe, with at least 35,000 deaths.
The British government is planning a campaign urging citizens to prepare for national emergencies, and Eagle’s advice gives that effort a concrete starting point: food, water and a few days of self-reliance. The next pressure point is November, when forecasters say the El Niño peak is due to arrive.
