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El Niño Will Supercharge Shocks Like the Iran War
By Tom Ellison
This article was originally published in Lawfare.
The Iran war has sparked generational shocks to global energy and food security. As the effects of these shocks—from fuel shortages to food price spikes—become increasingly apparent, they will strain peace and stability worldwide. Some of these impacts are already unavoidable, with disruptions intensifying if the conflict persists. But independent of U.S. actions in the region, the coming of a hotter, more dangerous weather pattern known as El Niño is set to exacerbate the food and energy security fallout of Iran—reminding us that Mother Nature gets a vote on our priorities, too, and that climate resilience is inseparable from global security goals.
As world leaders talked geopolitics at February’s Munich Security Conference and returned home to March’s Iran conflict, scientists started forecasting that Earth is starting to transition from its current La Niña phase, entering an El Niño phase as soon as June. During El Niño, warm waters shift east in the Pacific, raising global temperatures and intensifying extreme storms, precipitation, and droughts in many parts of the world. The most recent warm cycle in 2023-2024 gave us the hottest year ever recorded, briefly breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark, and fueled record-breaking drought, floods, and other disasters around the world. Even with La Niña sanding off climate change’s sharpest edges, 2025 temperatures were 1.4 degrees above preindustrial levels and the third hottest year ever recorded, with today’s cool periods regularly hotter than the warmest periods of history. This was described as “a breaking point” and forced militaries to deploy more than 150 times around the world for climate disasters.
The next El Niño is likely to intensify warming to even greater highs in 2026-2027, with a growing probability of an especially warm “Super” El Niño. A climate change-fueled El Niño will amplify the global shocks of the Iran war, many of which will unfold over the coming year even in the unlikely case that risk of renewed conflict resolves soon.
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Fires and Falsehoods in California
Security actors around the world are beginning to recognize the risks posed by information manipulation surrounding extreme weather, climate resilience, and the clean energy transition. The overlapping interests in the physical carbon economy and the digital attention economy provide fertile ground for opportunistic extremists and authoritarian states to scapegoat adversaries, undermine democratic legitimacy, and warp policymaking processes.
California is a prime example of where these dynamics will continue to play out as climate change impacts worsen, geopolitics fragments, and information ecosystems are transformed. California plays an outsized economic role both in the United States and globally. The state produces three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts, is home to a significant portion of global tech infrastructure and Fortune 500 companies, and ranks number one in the country for tourism spending. California’s GDP would rank fourth globally, just ahead of Japan, if it were an independent nation. California hosts the largest military population of any US state, houses infrastructure for detecting or countering missile attacks on the United States, and would be a critical US staging ground in the event of conflict over Taiwan or North Korea.
It is also highly vulnerable to climate change impacts and extreme weather, most notably wildfires and drought. These economic, environmental, and security factors result in a state that is susceptible to the kind of mis- and disinformation that undermines climate action, sows seeds of social division, endangers citizens during disasters, and undermines national security. These threats can come from a mix of actors and motives, including opportunistic political leaders, foreign actors conducting hybrid warfare, domestic extremists undermining social cohesion, outrage merchants monetizing attention, and well-meaning people caught up in algorithmic echo-chambers.
(more…)The Electrified Battlespace: China’s Clean Tech Lead and America’s Missed Opportunity
Military power ultimately rests on industrial capacity. China is now translating its dominance in electric vehicles, batteries, and power-management systems into military capability.
A publicly released Army intelligence report highlights how China is leveraging its lead in “clean tech” to build battlefield capability. China’s new hybrid-electric armored vehicles not only reduce fuel consumption and associated logistics burdens, but are designed to be more mobile, quieter, and harder to detect, while also generating substantially more onboard electrical power.
This latter point is particularly important because demand for electricity across the battlefield is increasing, and electricity is becoming a central enabler of combat power, whether at small forward operating bases, in space, or across air, sea, and land platforms. Modern militaries increasingly need this power not just for propulsion, but also to meet the growing demands of AI-enabled systems, drones, advanced sensors, electronic warfare, communications, directed-energy weapons, and additive manufacturing.
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Managing Disaster at the US Department of Defense
By John Conger
It’s said that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a new report in February that asserts the military is failing to measure the impacts of natural disasters. Directed by the Senate in the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to assess the Department of Defense’s recovery from natural disasters, the report highlights the fact that natural disasters and extreme weather have caused at least $15 billion in damage to US military installations over the past decade. However, the Department has only recently begun collecting department-wide data on these events, and the system it is building remains incomplete.
The GAO notes that the Department began an effort in 2024 to track extreme weather impacts at installations, but GAO found gaps in both the scope and accuracy of that effort. In short, the report observes that disasters are already affecting readiness, but the military lacks a complete picture of the problem’s scope, which undermines its ability to plan for the impacts of future disasters and to appropriately prioritize resilience to their effects.
There’s something missing, however, in the GAO report and likely within the Department, driven by the incorrect assumption that the military repairs all the damage it takes from natural disasters. In fact, DoD maintains a deferred maintenance backlog across its enterprise that exceeds $130 billion. Some damage simply isn’t addressed or accounted for. A data call to installations is going to yield responses of variable quality and accuracy, and it may not get at the core question of how much impact these disasters have actually had. Some installations will report what has been spent to recover, while others may address damage quantified by the capability lost. They are not the same.
In other words, it seems like a simple thing – tracking damage from extreme weather – but given how the Department of Defense operates, it is not as straightforward as it seems.
(more…)Featured Report
