The longer you have to prepare for a disaster, the likelier you are to walk away from it mostly intact. Tornados can spin up in minutes, barely giving you time to hustle to a cellar or bathtub. Hurricanes might give a few days’ notice, letting you at least get to higher ground.

The Godzilla El Niño growing in the eastern Pacific is a rare catastrophe that promises widespread devastation but is also predictable enough to give us time to limit the damage. It’s a bit like climate change in that way.

In fact, this will be a dress rehearsal for handling an environment that we’re making permanently more chaotic. Because as historically massive as this El Niño promises to be, it’s only a preview of what will be routine before too long.

The El Niño climate pattern is basically a giant valve letting off steam when the eastern central Pacific Ocean gets too hot. And man, is it ever hot. As of this writing, this band of ocean, which fluctuates in temperature, heating and cooling the planet in cycles, was nearly 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than its long-term average, demolishing all records for this stage in a typical El Niño’s development. And scientists don’t expect the heat to peak until the end of the year, by which point it will probably be the strongest such event in a millennium.

All of this extra energy pouring into the atmosphere is a disaster factory, spreading heat around the world and inflicting floods on some regions and droughts on others. None of these effects are guaranteed because weather is chaotic. And some of them aren’t even bad: we can thank Godzilla for the no-show of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, for example.

But stronger El Niños make the typical regional impacts more likely. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the non-profit research group Berkeley Earth, recently tracked the expected local weather effects of the eight strongest El Niños since the 1950s and found they occurred 86 per cent of the time. Some effects, such as heavier winter precipitation in the US Southeast, unusual winter warmth in central Canada and prolonged drought in the Amazon, happened every time.

If I could routinely predict things with 86 per cent accuracy, then I would be richer than anyone reading this column. It’s little wonder, then, that whole hedge funds have sprung up to make bets on El Niño effects and that money managers such as T. Rowe Price have already started trying to limit the damage to their emerging-market portfolios.

This easy-money argument also applies to climate change generally. It’s a phenomenon with even more predictable and profound effects than any El Niño. That’s why companies involved in clean energy, efficiency and other such climate-friendly businesses are by one estimate now a $10 trillion industry, third in size only to tech and industrials.

In the short term of this El Niño, society’s most urgent priority shouldn’t be making money but keeping people fed. Intense heat, drought and flooding in key grain-growing regions from Argentina to Indonesia will hurt crop yields and push 49 million people into acute food insecurity by February 2027, the United Nations has warned.

The El Niño of 1887-88, once the strongest on record, caused famines that killed an estimated 50 million people, or nearly four per cent of the global population at the time. Farming and weather forecasting improved quite a bit in the following century. That didn’t stop the super El Niño of 1982-83 from causing the worst global agricultural disaster in recorded history, according to a 2019 study by Columbia University researchers. They called this climate pattern “the only mode capable of forcing globally synchronous crop failures”.

As with all climate effects, the world’s most vulnerable people will suffer the most from food shortages. But no grocery store is immune. And the special pain El Niño will deliver to our food supply will only be piled on top of what plain-old climate change has already wrought. Run-of-the-mill climate disasters directly contributed to at least 12 different food-price spikes over the past two years, according to a new report this week from the non-profit research firm Zero Carbon Analytics.

Is your cheeseburger still expensive? Blame a prolonged drought in the Great Plains and a freakish late-winter heat dome in the Mountain states that hurt cattle-feed crops, paring already thin herds and spiking beef-price inflation to levels not seen since the pandemic. Now imagine this happening everywhere all at once.

Although El Niño has already begun to affect crops, including a shortened rice-growing season in India, we still have some months to avoid even bigger losses. Farmers in Brazil are adjusting their soil and crop management. The UN World Food Programme has spent $14 million to help countries prepare, an investment it says will reap between $3 and $7 in savings for every $1 spent.

It would be nice if that kind of maths inspired people with money to invest in stopping global hunger with the same enthusiasm with which they start $500 million hedge funds. Again, as it is with El Niño, so it is with long-term global heating: avoiding its worst impacts will preserve 20 per cent of global GDP for each 1 degree centigrade of warming prevented, by one estimate. We’re talking about roughly $25 trillion a year, which buys you a lot of hedge funds.

The examples go on and on. El Niño could help double California’s sea-level rise essentially overnight, University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain has warned. But the state’s highways, neighbourhoods and other critical infrastructure are routinely threatened by the sea-level rise global warming has already caused.

Meanwhile, the heat El Niño produces will almost certainly raise average global temperatures to records, potentially 2 degrees centigrade (3.6 degree fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages for a short time.

That extra heat could cost 451,000 lives, according to a study by Climate Impact Lab, a non-profit research group. Governments should try to prevent those deaths. But they should also try to keep the world from hitting 2C of warming permanently, which we’ll do before 2050 at the rate we’re spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

One reason this El Niño is such a monster is that the entire ocean is already hotter than ever before in recorded human history, and its warming is accelerating. Scientists recently had to change how they measure El Niño’s heat for that reason. At some point, the difference between short-term and long-term disasters disappears.

• Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change