El Ni­no, Na­ture’s chaot­ic cli­mate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pa­cif­ic Ocean and is ex­pect­ed to grow to his­toric strength, me­te­o­rol­o­gists an­nounced Thurs­day.

Ex­perts said the El Ni­no, a nat­ur­al warm­ing cy­cle, should fur­ther heat a globe al­ready warm­ing from fos­sil fu­el pol­lu­tion and will like­ly tur­bocharge ex­treme weath­er across the plan­et. Me­te­o­rol­o­gists fore­cast it will ri­val — or ex­ceed — a record El Ni­no that be­gan in 1997 and helped trig­ger bil­lions of dol­lars in dam­age from heat waves, floods, droughts, tor­na­does and wild­fires.

The U.S. Na­tion­al Ocean­ic and At­mos­pher­ic Ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cial­ly con­firmed the ex­is­tence of the El Ni­no, which is a warm­ing of the Pa­cif­ic near the equa­tor that af­fects weath­er pat­terns across the globe. NOAA’s an­nounce­ment said there’s a 63% chance that the El Ni­no will get so in­tense this late fall and ear­ly win­ter that it “would rank among the largest El Ni­no events in the his­tor­i­cal record go­ing back to 1950.”