The iconic film that expressed the surfing culture of Southern California in the late 1960s and on, was called “Endless Summer.” The movie traced the journey of a couple of surfers as they searched the globe for “the perfect wave.” Since then, the sport has matured and had even become a major business with surfing festivals and contests all over the world. The most powerful surfing films today tend to feature those who dare to ride the biggest waves in the world, some over 100 feet in height.
In some ways, the original Endless Summer film even expressed a utopian vision of a free life in direct contact with Nature. But today’s focus seems to be catch the biggest wave or die. That may be more consistent with a more dystopian view of the seemingly endless summer is coming. The problem is, the endless summer now threatening us is completely different, because it poses an existential threat that maybe nobody can ride out to safety. The challenge of the Big-Wave is to get to a place where a colleague can pick you up on a jet ski before you drown. I may be pushing the analogy with world conditions today, but, maybe not.
You might remember when NASA climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, testified before the U.S. Congress in 1988 about the existential threat of climate chaos as the activities and emissions of industrial civilization polluted the air, sea, and land push survival risks right up to tipping points beyond which no recovery is possible. Dr. Hansen was pressured out of his NASA post due to the politically problematic nature of the information he brought to public attention. That was just short of four decades ago. Meanwhile, Jim Hansen has moved on to more forgiving university positions, and has kept working on the science of climate change. He is currently at Columbia University. The recently released findings of Hansen and his colleagues on a likely “super El Niño,” this summer and possibly into 2027, like much of his previous work, tend to diverge from the mainstream consensus, which is tethered to institutions beholden to political and economic centers of power.
Just the other day, on March 20, 2026, Dr. Hansen released his latest of many research papers published since leaving NASA, this one warning of the coming “super El Niño,” and the super-warming it is likely to bring with it. El Niño and La Niña are the two oscillating movements of warm and cold water that circulate from the Eastern Pacific Ocean to Asia and replace each other every few years. For a long time, they were fairly consistent and oscillated in a relatively predictable pattern. They affect climate all over the world, and their severity has fluctuated from one cycle to another.
Climate Science and “Go-To” Climate “Experts”
Never entirely predictable, El Niño and La Niña have been acting more erratically in recent decades, most likely in response to the larger changes in global climate. Forecasting their appearance and intensity, as well as predicting of their global impacts have always been difficult. At a larger scale, climate science itself has had problems of prediction, timing, and severity of a wide range of chaotic climate events. Estimates of diverse forms of climate change have more often than not turned out to be underestimates. That has to do with, as much as anything, the political clout that influences the reports of climate change and the political interpretation of the reports.
After all, with the climate forecasts by the many prestigious scientific investigations that have been produced for the IPCC annual and other institutionally driven reports, filtered through the political lenses of the national governments of all the participating countries, how could the reports possibly be strictly objective? Over decades, when I looked at a current report, my immediate response was that the forecast seemed too optimistic, given the recent trends. Unfortunately, my assessments consistently turned out to be correct.
All climate models must be based in part on certain parametric assumptions, since the data are never compete. However, one major glaring error, founded in political convenience tells the story. For many years, the IPCC climate assessments included assumptions that certain partially developed and unproven technologies that would be very difficult to deploy at scale, even if they were effective, would be implemented in an implausibly short time.
Factoring in such imaginary influences on climate chaos, even ignoring the ecological cost of the manufacture and deployment of carbon-capture technologies. The improbability that such fantasies would ever be implemented, was routinely ignored or downplayed. Both Carbon capture technologies and carbon sequestration strategies—long term storage—were assumed to be viable factors in reducing atmospheric carbon. Hence, the IPPC reports always underestimated climate chaos, simply because its assumptions were unrealistic. If a model incorporates unrealistic assumptions, its predictions will surely be unreasonable. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Unfortunately, the same kinds of political bias corrupt “mainstream” climate science today. The mass media draw upon what Jim Hansen dubs the “go-to expert” sources in the mainstream climate science institutions and organizations. That is why James Hansen and his colleagues consistently forecast more severe climate change than is the politically acceptable interpretation, but are much more accurate. And that is why his findings are ignored or dismissed by the largest climate-related institutions and their “go-to experts.”
El Niño and this Coming Summer
If you live anywhere in the American Southwest, from Dallas to Los Angeles, from Yuma to San Francisco, and even beyond, it would be wise to prepare for a very hot summer. I would also expect water shortages, as below average snow packs melt early, with little left to recharge reservoirs, no less bring up any water-tables to former levels. An unusually strong El Niño is expected to add to the anthropogenic amplifications to “normal” summer heat.
Remember, Los Angeles is actually a desert, despite all those green suburban lawns. And don’t forget that the water-sharing agreements among the several southwestern states allocates far more water than has been seen in the watersheds of the Colorado Basin or the Rio Grande watershed for decades. Now it is about to get worse. I would not be at all surprised to see some severe rationing schemes implemented in various districts. The water level of Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River has receded steadily for decades. It is already reaching a critical stage.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) completed a 3-mile, 20-foot diameter tunnel costing $1.4 billion, beneath Lake Mead to access water at the lowest levels in order to avert a water crisis in Las Vegas. That was an unsustainable temporary fix for a city whose population growth is also unsustainable, like much urban growth in the Southwest.
Further west, record winter heat hit the California coast this winter. On the Central Coast, winter high temperatures that typically had been in the fifties offered a rare respite in the sixties between heat waves topping out in the high 80s. When I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, twenty years ago, Santa Fe’s high temperatures in August would reach 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and would drop ten degrees after the predictable afternoon thunderstorm. Today, highs reach into the nineties and sometimes reach past 100, and the thunderstorms are less predictable. Throughout the West, snow packs have been light and area expected to run off early this springe due to rising temperatures. That will leave little to restock reservoirs all over the southwest.
California is overpopulated with energy and water hungry people, accustomed to the convenience of endless supplies of both. Few are prepared to accommodate real-world shortages, which are still politically deemed unacceptable enough to be simply denied or discounted. Be real. Expect severe heat and water shortages in what will seem like an endless summer, and not in a good way.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 