By Dominique Mosbergen, Huffington Post, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Jan. 5, 2015 – The El Niño of 1997-98 was the worst on record. It caused an estimated 23,000 deaths worldwide as widespread drought, flooding and other natural disasters rocked the globe.
NASA says the destructive weather system “shows no signs of waning.”
The catastrophic weather system also caused the most devastating coral bleaching in recorded history, killing off about 16 percent of the world’s reef systems. In the U.S., the total economic impact of that year’s El Niño was between $10 billion and $25 billion.
Sounds bad? Well, according to NASA, we may now be facing an equally-destructive El Niño; one that’s poised to only worsen in the first few months of 2016.
The weather system — which has already wreaked havoc globally, contributing to the East Coast’s balmy Christmas, deadly storms in the South and the worst floods in South America in 50 years — “shows no signs of waning,” NASA wrote on Dec. 29.
