In December 1916, a small band of Russian aristocrats murdered Grigori Rasputin in a St. Petersburg basement, convinced that killing one strange, unaccountable man would restore order to a system spinning out of control. It didn't work. The war ground on, the granaries emptied, and within three months the monarchy Rasputin had supposedly corrupted collapsed anyway. The historian Dominic Lieven later argued that Rasputin's actual influence over Russian policy before 1914 had "always been wildly exaggerated." The tsarist elite needed a villain they could point to and remove. What they actually faced was a set of structural pressures: an unwinnable war, a broken supply chain, a population running out of patience. No assassination could touch these forces.

I keep thinking about that mismatch between the story people tell themselves and the forces actually bearing down on them as I read the latest warnings out of Geneva and Melbourne. The World Meteorological Organization says the world is bracing for a "supersized" El Niño, and Australia's Bureau of Meteorology now forecasts it could be the strongest on record. Pacific sea surface temperatures have already risen more than 2°C within six months, with the phenomenon expected to linger into early 2027. Researchers cited in that reporting call the climate-change influence on this intensity "alarming." This is not a one-off weather curiosity. It is, by the WMO's own definition, part of a very short and very consequential list: the "super El Niño," officially a very strong event defined by sea surface warming of 2°C or more, has occurred only a handful of times in recorded history.

A Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight

The 2023-2024 El Niño was already the fifth-most powerful on record, and it did real damage: droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves, and disrupted cyclone patterns across multiple continents. Rice, palm oil, sugar, soy, and corn prices all rose, and food insecurity deepened for the world's most vulnerable populations. That event alone should have been treated as a dress rehearsal. Instead, much of the global policy conversation treated it as a discrete crisis to be managed and then forgotten, the way a government manages a currency shock or a bad harvest. An anomaly rather than a preview.

El Niño and its cooler counterpart La Niña are not new. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a natural, if irregular, cycle in Pacific winds and sea temperatures that has shaped monsoons, droughts, and fisheries for millennia; paleoclimatologists have traced "mega-Niños" back long before modern recordkeeping. What is new is the frequency and intensity with which the "super" variant is now arriving, and the fact that serious researchers are attaching the word "alarming" to the role climate change plays in generating record-breaking versions of a cycle humanity has lived with for thousands of years.

That is the actual story here, and it's a story about economic design, not meteorology. We built the modern global economy, with its just-in-time supply chains, its commodity futures markets, and its assumption that a bad harvest in one hemisphere can be offset by a good one in another, on the implicit premise that climate variability would stay within a historically familiar range. Super El Niño events blow through that premise. When Pacific temperatures spike more than 2°C in months rather than years, agricultural planning, water allocation, insurance pricing, and central bank inflation models all built on decades of relatively stable seasonal patterns get overtaken by a volatility they were never designed to absorb.

The Rasputin Temptation

Here is where the historical echo becomes useful rather than merely decorative. Faced with a crisis whose roots are structural and tangled in global systems that took decades to build, political and economic elites have a strong and recurring temptation to find a proximate villain instead. The Romanovs blamed a mystic monk for problems rooted in a failing war economy, an overstretched bureaucracy, and a population that could no longer be fed at a price the state could sustain. Kill Rasputin, the thinking went, and the pressure would ease. It didn't, because the pressure was never really about him.

Today's equivalent is the temptation to treat each supersized El Niño as its own emergency, a discrete shock to be managed with emergency food aid, temporary price controls, or a currency intervention, rather than as one recurring symptom of a warming ocean system whose baseline has permanently shifted. The 2023-2024 event drove up prices for staple crops that hundreds of millions of people depend on for survival. If the coming event genuinely proves the strongest on record, as the Bureau of Meteorology now forecasts, the same dynamic will replay at a larger scale. Policymakers will again be tempted to treat the resulting inflation, crop failure, or fishery collapse as a discrete, external shock rather than as the predictable output of a system operating outside its historical parameters.

What History Actually Teaches

The broader twentieth-century record offers a caution here too. By 1980, developing nations had accumulated roughly $500 billion in debt, with annual interest payments alone reaching about $50 billion. Much of this was incurred because commodity-dependent economies borrowed to cover shortfalls when harvests or export prices failed to cooperate with lenders' assumptions of steady growth. Ban Ki-moon, reflecting on decades of development failure, noted that the world's population had grown from roughly 5 billion to 7.5 billion in twenty years, and that by 2030 humanity would need 50 percent more food and 45 percent more energy than it currently produces. He warned bluntly that "the scarcest resource of all" was time. That warning predates the current El Niño forecasts, but it describes exactly the kind of math that a supersized El Niño scrambles: an already-tight global food and energy system given a sudden, sharp shock precisely when the margin for error is shrinking, not growing.

None of this means El Niño itself is a product of industrial carbon emissions; the oscillation is ancient, older than agriculture, older than the nation-state. What has changed is the amplitude, and amplitude is exactly what economic systems are worst at pricing. Insurance models, central bank forecasts, and agricultural futures all rely on historical distributions. A "supersized" event, by definition, sits outside that distribution. That is precisely why the WMO's language matters: this is not simply "an El Niño," it is a warning that the tail risk has moved into the realm of realistic near-term probability, arriving with sea temperatures already exceeding 2°C above baseline well before its expected peak.

The Honest Position

The defensible, if uncomfortable, position is this: societies cannot eliminate El Niño any more than the Romanovs could eliminate the structural rot of a failing war economy by removing one mystic. But societies can choose whether to keep treating each supersized cycle as an isolated emergency requiring only reactive food aid and price controls, or to finally build the buffers, diversified grain reserves, climate-indexed insurance, and water infrastructure resilient to 2°C swings. These acknowledge that volatility itself has become the new baseline. The 1916 lesson was not that Rasputin didn't matter; he genuinely did influence a fragile court. The lesson was that removing him solved nothing because the underlying system had already lost its capacity to absorb shocks. A world staring down its strongest El Niño on record would do well to ask which kind of shock this is: a passing anomaly, or the visible edge of a system whose margin for error is quietly disappearing.

A Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight

The Rasputin Temptation

What History Actually Teaches

The Honest Position

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