Scientists are warning that an El Niño event this summer is now much more likely — and, because average global temperatures are higher than during the last major El Niño, its impacts could be even more extreme. That combination of a powerful El Niño and an elevated baseline climate means we should expect fiercer heat waves, heavier rainfall and flooding, and other disruptive weather — precisely the sorts of events that demand robust forecasting, preparation and emergency response.
Instead, much of the capacity that would normally help societies weather these shocks is being weakened. Large staff reductions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a systematic hollowing out of the United States Agency for International Development have reduced the government’s ability to respond at home and provide humanitarian assistance abroad. At the same time, policies that accelerate fossil-fuel production while obstructing international cooperation on emissions, and moves to revoke the legal basis for climate protections, all increase the likelihood and severity of future disasters.
Even worse, plans to dismantle leading atmospheric-research institutions threaten to degrade the timely warnings and scientific guidance that communities and emergency services rely on. Taken together — a stronger El Niño, higher background temperatures, fewer forecasters and fewer responders — the stage is set for catastrophes that will be larger, slower to predict and harder to contain.
This catalogue of policy failures is only part of a larger pattern of ill-conceived decisions and miscalculations. On trade and domestic security, erratic tariffs and heavy-handed enforcement measures have already caused economic pain for farmers and small businesses and have inflamed social tensions. In foreign policy, a major military campaign against Iran was launched without fully accounting for Tehran’s asymmetric capabilities. Iran’s extensive drone and missile networks and its capacity to disrupt shipping in the Persian Gulf were well known; yet there appears to have been little effective planning to secure vital maritime routes or to protect global energy and fertilizer supplies.
The consequences have been immediate. The prolonged or intermittent closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which a significant share of the world’s oil and LNG passes — has pushed energy prices higher across the globe. Fertilizer shipments from the Gulf have been disrupted, raising costs for farmers and threatening crop yields. Higher energy and food prices hit low-income households first and hardest, widen inequality, and can quickly ripple into reduced consumer spending, weakened investor confidence, and the risk of a broader economic slowdown.
These shocks do not occur in isolation. The World Economic Forum’s recent Global Risks report highlights extreme weather, escalating state conflict and global economic downturn as the leading dangers to stability — the very problems that current policies and planning weaknesses make harder to manage. As these threats intensify, poor governance and inattentive leadership increase the chance that one crisis will feed into another.
Technology poses another vector of risk. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence create large economic opportunities, but also serious social and systemic hazards. Many analyses warn that AI could eliminate a substantial share of entry-level white-collar jobs in the near term, potentially driving unemployment into double digits and creating political and social stress. The big increase in massive computing facilities to train and run AI models is already straining local electricity grids and water supplies, creating new points of friction between industry, communities and utilities.
Beyond job displacement and infrastructure strain lies the far more speculative but existential concern about advanced, poorly controlled AI systems. Leading researchers have drawn attention to the possibility that a superintelligent system misaligned with human values could pursue objectives that are catastrophic for people. Responsible AI governance requires deliberate safety measures, cautious deployment, and international cooperation to set guardrails — yet current policy emphases prioritize technological dominance and accelerated deployment over precaution and public safeguards.
When you put these elements together — a major climate disturbance like El Niño, degraded emergency response capacity, geopolitical conflict disrupting energy and food supplies, severe economic shocks, and accelerating technological risks — you get the outlines of a convergent catastrophe. Studies going back over a decade have warned about clusters of extreme events and how the first crisis in a chain can consume the very resources needed to handle the next. A single competent government might manage one or two simultaneous shocks; a debilitated one faces far greater peril.
This is not speculation about improbable futures; it is an assessment built from concrete policy choices and observable trends. When institutions that provide forecasting, disaster response and humanitarian aid are weakened at the same moment that greenhouse gas concentrations, geopolitical tensions and high-tech disruption are rising, the probability of cascading failures grows.
The remedy is obvious in principle: restore and strengthen scientific institutions and emergency-response capacity; recommit to international climate cooperation and to policies that reduce emissions; design and enforce AI safety and labor transition strategies; and rebuild alliances and contingency planning to protect critical global infrastructure like maritime chokepoints. In practice, achieving those goals requires political will and leadership that prioritizes competence, long-term planning and the public good.
Americans — and global publics more broadly — would be wise to demand leaders who understand the systemic nature of modern risks and who act to reduce vulnerability rather than to increase it. Without such leadership, the coming years are likely to produce not merely a succession of crises but overlapping disasters whose combined effects could prove devastating for many communities and economies. Whether societies will mobilize to avert that future remains an open question; the consequences of failing to do so will be painfully real.