The ocean doesn’t just witness climate change—it drives it, absorbs it, and increasingly, warns us about it.
On the latest episode of Rising Tide the Ocean Podcast David and Vicki talk with Boulder- based weather and climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain about the emerging El Nino that’s predicted to become a major, perhaps historic one this fall on top of a new marine heatwave already impacting the Pacific coast. Along with working with the University of California and National Science Foundation’s Center for Atmospheric Research, Daniel also shares his knowledge of weather and climate across our blue world through his popular Weather West blog and Weather West YouTube channel. So, he’s the right informed communicator in this summer of climate disasters to talk about what we can expect and why in the coming months.
Understanding the Ocean’s Influence
Swain, who works with the University of California and the National Science Foundation’s Center for Atmospheric Research, laid out a sobering picture: marine heatwaves, El Niño, and extreme weather events aren’t separate crises—they’re symptoms of the same underlying system. The ocean covers more than 70% of Earth’s surface, and it is, Swain explained, the planet’s primary engine for long-term climatic variation, absorbing and redistributing heat on a scale land simply can’t match.
The Dynamic Dance of El Niño and La Niña
The conversation turned to the El Niño Southern Oscillation—the push and pull between El Niño and La Niña that reshapes weather patterns from California to the Horn of Africa. Swain walked through the recent transition out of La Niña and into one of the strongest El Niño events on record, a shift with the power to rewrite the climate story of the coming year.
Impacts on Land and Sea
The toll is already visible along America’s coastlines. Kelp forests are collapsing. Coral off the Florida Keys is dying in real time. The Gulf of Alaska is running anomalously warm. Goldstein and Swain both pointed to these as evidence of the ocean’s dual role: it’s both a vault storing decades of trapped heat and a messenger delivering that heat’s consequences back to shore. For California, Swain warned, this El Niño could mean a volatile winter ahead—heavy flooding, storm surge, and ecosystems pushed further off balance.
The Underlying Question of Predictability
One of the episode’s sharper threads examined how predictable a warming world actually is. Swain offered some reassurance: the physical laws governing weather and climate haven’t changed. But the empirical relationships scientists have long relied on—the statistical shortcuts built from decades of past data—are shifting under a warming climate, forcing researchers to develop new tools just to keep pace with a planet that’s rewriting its own baseline.
Political Interference in Climate Research
The discussion also confronted a threat with nothing to do with physics: politics. Goldstein and Swain addressed proposed changes under the Trump administration that could reshape how scientific research gets funded. Swain didn’t mince words—such moves risk dragging climate science into partisan waters, a shift that could choke off the kind of unbiased, sustained inquiry that climate research, and science broadly, depends on.
Raising Awareness and Taking Action
Throughout the episode, the message returned again and again to public engagement: submitting comments during public comment periods, joining coalitions pushing for science-based policy, staying loud in the spaces where decisions get made. The ocean’s warnings only matter if people act on them.
The episode’s conversation with Dr. Swain lands on a hard truth: the ocean is both colossal and fragile, a force powerful enough to shape global climate and vulnerable enough to be pushed past its limits. Understanding its signals isn’t just good science—it’s a matter of preserving life on Earth as we know it.
The Rising Tide: The Ocean Podcast continues its mission to navigate these waters, guided by a simple conviction: science matters, the environment matters, and democracy remains the best vessel for steering toward a sustainable future.