El Niño and our future climate: where do we stand?

El Niño and La Niña comprise the dominant mode of tropical climate variability: the El Niño and Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. ENSO variations influence climate, ecosystems, and societies around the globe. It is, therefore, of great interest to understand the character of past and future ENSO variations. In this brief review, we explore our current understanding of these issues. The amplitude and character of ENSO have been observed to exhibit substantial variations on timescales of decades to centuries; many of these changes over the past millennium resemble those that arise from internally generated climate variations in an unforced climate model. ENSO activity and characteristics have been found to depend on the state of the tropical Pacific climate system, which is expected to change in the 21st century in response to changes in radiative forcing (including increased greenhouse gases) and internal climate variability. However, the extent and character of the response of ENSO to increased in greenhouse gases are still a topic of considerable research, and given the results published to date, we cannot yet rule out possibilities of an increase, decrease, or no change in ENSO activity arising from increases in CO2. Yet we are fairly confident that ENSO variations will continue to occur and influence global climate in the coming decades and centuries. Changes in continental climate, however, could alter the remote impacts of El Niño and La Niña. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.