A super El Niño is officially here.

El Niño events occur every two to seven years, when ocean surface temperatures are higher than normal. Anything above 0.5°C constitutes an El Niño event, while numbers beyond the 2°C threshold make it a “super” event. These warmer surface waters shift jet streams and precipitation patterns, affecting weather worldwide.

And the higher the temperature, the greater the potential for supercharged weather events.

In the past, it has weakened hurricane activity in the Atlantic but strengthened it in the Pacific. It’s brought strong winter rains to California and the South while drying out the Pacific Northwest. And despite creating favorable agricultural conditions in the U.S, it’s brought severe drought to Brazil, India, Southeast Asia, and other major food-producing regions.

The impacts have always been severe—but scientists believe this El Niño will take them to a whole new level. And with the Trump administration targeting the agencies that help us predict and brace for these impacts, well…

We’re not as prepared as we could be.

Consider the National Weather Service, whose DOGE-driven upheaval cost the agency promising young talent and countless senior staffers. Many offices have had to reduce hours, suspend data-collecting operations, and operate without experts who can make the right calls in critical situations. The overall level of experience at the agency has dropped—and with hiring proceeding slowly, most offices are a long way off from being fully staffed, let alone rebuilding the institutional knowledge that has been lost.

But that’s not the only way the Trump administration is jeopardizing our preparedness.

You may remember earlier this year, when Congress voted to reject the Trump administration’s steep cuts to our federal scientific agencies. Since then, the Office of Management and Budget has been working to disrupt appropriations by releasing much-needed funding at an incredibly slow pace. This creates massive uncertainty for institutions like NOAA’s partner labs, which rely on on-time grant disbursement to stay afloat—and it already almost cost us an atmospheric research lab in Colorado.

So where does that leave us?

It’s clear that the Trump administration’s war on science won’t be stopping anytime soon. Countless Americans will suffer as a result of its regressive decision-making, and it will take a long time for our country to rebuild what it has broken.

But if we’ve learned anything through this fight, it’s that public opinion has immense power—and when we raise our voices, we can win.

Pushback is what drove the House and the Senate to fully fund our federal science agencies earlier this year. It’s what prompted OMB to fund that Colorado lab before their furlough deadline. And it’s what ultimately prevented the dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative—a deep-sea observation system considered a cornerstone of weather forecasting and global climate science.

Pushing back may not always make a difference. But we know for a fact that nothing will happen if we don’t try.

Let’s keep making our voices heard!