El Niño is now stronger than at any point in the last 1,000 years, study finds

Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the warm and cold swings of a single system, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and that system is the largest source of year-to-year climate variation on Earth. Its swings sit atop the steadily rising temperatures driven by global warming.