David Gelles, who covers a warming world for The New York Times, has spent a large part of his career doing a strange and necessary kind of work: trying to make sense of something so vast, so slow, and so intimate that ordinary language sometimes fails to hold it. But when a powerful El Niño begins to stir the ocean, he does not reach first for the scientific instruments or the climate models. He reaches for memory. He thinks about the storms of his youth, those early encounters with weather that was bigger than any child could name. He remembers the way the sky turned a strange green before a tornado touched down, the way his parents would fill plastic jugs with water and move the car away from old trees, the way a creek that had always been gentle rose overnight into something roaring and bronze. There is a particular ache in that kind of remembrance, because youth is the place where we first learn that the world is not always our friend, that it has teeth, that it can break what we love. For Gelles, the natural disasters of his early years were not abstract headlines. They were events that happened to real people, to neighbors, to his own family, to him. And now, as El Niño returns with its familiar but still unsettling power, he finds himself standing at the intersection of memory and climate change, trying to understand what these disasters meant then and what they mean now. He knows that an El Niño is not simply a storm or a flood. It is a signal, a pattern, a rearrangement of the world’s wind and water. But to make sense of it, he has to listen to the story it tells through human lives, through the children who lived through the old disasters and who are now old enough to see the new ones coming.
El Niño, in plain terms, is a warming of the surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, a pulse of heat that sets off a chain reaction across the whole atmosphere. It changes rainfall in places thousands of miles away, weakens monsoons, strengthens droughts, raises sea levels along certain coasts, and turns quiet places into flood zones. It is not the only thing shaping the weather, but it is one of the most powerful. When it arrives, the world holds its breath, because the pattern has a history. In the 1980s and 1990s, El Niño events were already capable of unforgettable damage. But Gelles, who now spends his working life trying to translate the enormous and often invisible reality of a warming planet, understands that the old El Niños are not a perfect guide to the new ones. The climate has changed since then. The atmosphere is heavier with heat. The oceans have stored decades of excess warmth. So when a strong El Niño arrives in a world that has only gotten hotter, the risk is not the same risk. It is a magnified risk. It is as if an old song that used to make you cry is now being played by an orchestra that is twice as loud and on fire. That is the feeling behind Gelles’s reporting. He is not looking for drama in the weather; the weather is already dramatic. He is looking for the way that a powerful El Niño reveals what has become true about the earth around us, the way it strips away our assumptions that a normal season means a safe season, and the way it makes the past feel less like a refuge and more like a warning.
As a child, Gelles did not know the word El Niño. He only knew that some summers were wetter, some winters wilder, and some nights the wind wouldn’t stop. There were natural disasters in those years, the kind that get mentioned in family stories for decades after. A hurricane that shredded the coast and left the streets of inland towns lined with boats that had no business being there. A flood that swept through a small city and turned a familiar road into a channel of moving water. A heat wave that seemed to shimmer on the sidewalks and melt the tar under bicycles. He remembers the sound of rain like pebbles on the roof, the smell of wet carpet and damp cardboard, the long hours without electricity when the only light came from a radio announcing evacuation orders or maybe safe spots. There was fear in those memories, but there was also something else, something that now, as an adult and a journalist, he has learned to recognize as awe. When a person stands in front of a river that has left its banks, or watches a wildfire turn the back of a hill orange, there is a moment of terrible wonder. The world stops being background. It becomes a character, an actor, a force. In his youth, Gelles experienced that wonder without fully understanding it. He did not yet have the vocabulary to describe the difference between a flood that happened because of a strong rainy season and a flood that happened because the climate itself had been altered. But he understood that after each disaster, people would gather outside their houses, comparing stories, holding children closer, realizing that the place they lived was not as solid as they had imagined. That knowledge stays with him. It is the human root of his curiosity, the reason he keeps going back to the places where the weather has made itself impossible to ignore.
Now, as he seeks to make sense of another powerful El Niño, Gelles carries that childhood perception into the newsroom and into the field. He interviews scientists who track ocean temperatures with robotic floats and satellites, who can see the warm water moving across the Pacific like a pulse in a living body. He talks to emergency managers who spend their careers preparing for the disaster they hope never comes, who stockpile supplies in warehouses and update evacuation maps with computer models that grow more precise every year. He listens to farmers who watch the sky with a patience that can feel almost religious, to fishers who know that a warming ocean changes the movement of fish and the meaning of their work, to city planners who argue about storm drains and building codes and the price of trying to protect everything they love. But he also listens to ordinary people. He talks to a grandmother whose house has flooded three times in two decades, to a father who lost his roof in a storm and no longer sleeps through the wind, to a young person who has grown up with the quiet understanding that the future will not be like the past. These stories are not decoration on the science. They are the thing itself. A climate is just numbers until it touches a body, a house, a neighborhood. An El Niño is just a pattern until it changes the color of a river or the shape of a harvest. Gelles humanizes the story by refusing to separate the weather from the people who live inside it. He asks not only what is happening, but what it feels like, and what it means, and how it changes the decisions that parents make for their children and that communities make for their most vulnerable members.
The hard truth that Gelles has come to believe, in all his years of reporting, is that the old vocabulary of natural disaster no longer works as well as it used to. A storm is rarely just natural anymore. A heat wave is not just summer. A flood is not just rainfall. The atmosphere has been changed, and so every event that passes through it carries some trace of that change. When a powerful El Niño comes on top of a warming world, it is not a coincidence. It is a collision. The El Niño provides the great rhythm, the shove in one direction or another, and climate change provides the extra energy that makes the shove stronger, wetter, drier, hotter, more dangerous. This is not a reason for despair, though Gelles is honest about the fact that there are days when despair seems easiest. It is a reason for alertness, for care, for building differently, for paying attention. He has seen communities that learn from disaster and communities that pretend it will not happen twice. He has seen the difference between preparation and panic. The humanizing lesson of his reporting is that we are not helpless. But we are also not free. We are bound to the atmosphere, to the ocean, to the shape of the land and the habits of our own choices. An El Niño, in this sense, is not just a weather event. It is a mirror. It shows us the way we have built our homes, the way we treat our fields, the way we decide what is worth saving and who is worth protecting. It asks us, as it asked David Gelles in his youth, what we will do when the world around us refuses to stay as we left it.
In the end, that may be the true purpose of this memory-infused work of making sense. Gelles does not want to scare us, though the truth is often frightening. He wants us to remember that weather is not an abstraction. It is something that arrives in our lives with a sound, a smell, a color, a shape. It is the hurricane that interrupts childhood play, the flood that ruins a home’s belongings, the drought that turns a green field to dust. He knows that if we treat climate change only as a policy problem or a scientific debate, we will lose the very reason we should care. We will lose the human story. So he tells the story of a boy who watched the sky and learned to respect it, and the story of a man who now watches the same sky with the added knowledge of what we have done to it. The powerful El Niño is both a reminder and an invitation. It reminds us that the world has always been wild, that we have never fully controlled it, that humility in the face of weather is not weakness but wisdom. And it invites us, before the next storm, to build something better. To build walls and wetlands, early warning systems and family plans, stronger roofs and kinder neighborhoods. To build a society that does not wait for disaster to teach it the value of the people who live through it. Gelles’s work, in the end, is a form of memory making sense of the present. It is a long, careful, human effort to look at the storms of youth and the storms of now, and to understand that we are still the children who must learn, again and again, to live on a changing earth.
