The identification of precursors of climatic phenomena has enormous practical importance. Recent work constructs a climate network based on surface air temperature data to analyze the El Ni��o phenomena. We utilize microtransitions which occur before the discontinuous percolation transition in the network as well as other network quantities to identify a set of reliable precursors of El Ni��o episodes. These precursors identify nine out of twelve El Ni��o episodes occurring in the period of 1979 to 2018 with a lead time varying from six to ten months. We also find indicators of tipping events in the data.