El Niño is a weather pattern that temporarily warms the planet every few years, creating a pattern of droughts and floods across the world. Its gentler effects outside the tropics can help farmers there, but in poorer places its consequences are often devastating. Argentina and Uruguay tend to get too much rain; southern Africa, India and South-East Asia too little.
The "super" El Niño in 2015-16 caused food-crop production to decline by up to two-thirds in some southern African countries. The El Niño of 2023-24 brought the worst drought in 100 years to southern Africa as a whole; crops failed and thousands of cattle and other livestock died. According to the World Bank, more than 30m people required food assistance.
The world is due to be hit by another El Niño in 2026, which could be especially powerful. Its true strength will not become clear until the northern summer, but it will layer on top of accelerating global warming, which makes dry regions drier and wet ones wetter, stacking extremes on top of extremes. Its timing coincides with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has trapped nearly 2m tonnes of fertiliser behind the blockade, threatening to compound the geopolitical food shock with a geophysical one.
Charm is a way of getting the answer "Yes" -- without having asked any clear question.