What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin
I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.
I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.
It's clearly an op by people who don't want the story to be about a historic heatwave ravaging Europe, so instead they make it about dum Europeans without air conditioning (which they didn't need before).
It should be more grating that Europe's refusal to adopt air conditioning is murdering their most vulnerable at rates comparable to American gun deaths and (unlike climate change or gun violence) there's a trivial solution that would prevent this immediately instead of waiting decades.
It would be one thing if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars, but if anything it is only marginally better than the US. Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America, while restricting themselves from using air conditioning as some kind of virtue signaling. That's the problem as I see it.
So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
I stayed in an otherwise lovely flat in northwestern Europe in the summer in an area where the minor heat wave at the time gave daytime temperatures in the mid to high seventies (F) and lows in the sixties. No usable A/C.
If there had been screened windows that opened wide and faced in different directions, it would have been very comfortable by just leaving some windows open for cross-ventilation. Instead it had unscreened high-end “European” windows that could either crack open a bit at the top or could open wide, swinging inward and banging into obstacles (like the bed or anyone’s head who was trying to sleep!). And bugs would come in while the windows were open.
I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.
>So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
>Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
The same industries that got rich over those 50yr selling BS we didn't need because the government mandated it are gonna get rich over the next 50 installing smart ventilation and heat pump A/Cs and whatnot when the next pile of mandates to undo the ills of the prior ones gets written into the building code.
I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology.
Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business.
50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
> I would absolutely be looking into how to get [...] at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough.
For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot.
For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity. Only an AC can lower the humidity, by conditioning the air.
Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
> Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems
I'm not sure thats true.
Most aircon in "warm" europe is standard split aircon
The "heatpump" shit that the UK is sorta looking at is as you describe. However its half the price to install "aircon" over heatpumps (because grants, amongst other things)
Like most recently refurbished offices will use normal aircon (certainly all the one I have worked in)
The annoying thing is that UK at least has a bigger grant for air-to-water systems.
I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
I live in Europe. We have in fact invented air conditioning here too, but I am not concerned with what we should be doing next year. That's a trivial matter. I'm concerned about what will happen if this trend continues another 5-10 years. How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs.
China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China).
Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe.
To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned.
There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it?
Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them.
And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better.
To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse.
All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power).
Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ...
There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions.
And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change.
So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario
No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.
We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
The 1.5C target (which, as others pointed out, is not an end-of-the-world scenario) is about average temperature above pre-industrial baseline across 20 years. The temperature anomaly of a single year has nothing to do with that; 2028 will likely be colder again.
Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.
That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.
And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.
- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.
- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.
- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.
- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.
- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?
We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.
Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
I don’t recall the more serious predictions predicting anything worse than what we’ve actually experiencing. There were plenty of predictions about nasty consequences if we experienced X degrees of warming by, say, 2050, and it’s not 2050 yet…
>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.
Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.
Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.
We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.
So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.
Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.
We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.
Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.
I've seen dozens of videos and articles about this strongest ever event. And I still have no clue if the next year I should evacuate from Paris for the summer because heatwaves may be even crazier than this year, or prolonged heavy rains are more likely and can make the city more livable.
Given what I learned from "chaos" by James Gleick, the predicament we're in is that we likely cannot predict outcomes or the events themselves, rather what we know is that weather will become more unpredictable and more extreme.
So the answer to your question is it could be either or both or neither. Whatever happens is going to be on average more extreme than what you're used to.
It might end up like a covid situation where even if you have good AC in your home, you don't want to be in the area because the medical system is on its knees overwhelmed from treating all the cases of heat related illnesses.
It's funny that I said "evacuate" and did not mention air travel. In that part of the world, trains are the default, with nuclear green power powering the majority of consumers. Maybe that other default is a problem. And yes, bien sûr, an abandoned personal flight or train will counter balance China, India or mega leaks of methane in US. And all AC owners must be incarcerated, it's so worse than a car. A new leftist mayor of Paris even said ACs warm up neighbors' places, should be forbidden obviously...
As someone who had to do exactly that this summer (multiple times, to boot), I'm doing my part and working to get the fuck out of here permanently before next summer hits.
I've got an excellent overview of consequences from Claude Opus 5. I'd post it here but there's a "no AI content" policy, so sorry, you need to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).
What's worse than an AI generated comment... a comment about having generated an AI comment that you can't read!
If it's useful to the conversation (and objective + with sources) post the key findings - IMO I think it's AI generated prose / subjective posts that will get blasted.
I can hardly wait to see how this shakes out locally. We have had 3 La Ninas in a row that have left us with a rainfall deficit of 23.5" (597 mm) under the 20 year average annual total that I have measured here in NTexas. It's been dry overall for several years.
Considering the situation going into the 2015-2016 El Nino we were also in a multiyear drought with a rainfall deficit accumulated from 2010-2014 of over 31" (787 mm). That is just under the 20 year average annual precipitation total for my place - 36.3" (922 mm). We were missing almost a full year's rainfall over that 5 year period. I use a NOAA manual rain gauge of the type that can handle up to 11" (279.4mm) of rain before needing to be dumped. I have recently added a digital tipping gauge unit beside the manual gauge so I can have a clear comparison and track rain rates.
Anyway, if it works out like 2015 did then we went into the year with a deficit but it quickly began raining well above normal so that by mid-June we were already above the normal 20-year average rainfall total. Then it dried up with below normal rainfall from mid-June to late October. There was no rain at all between the first week of September and the last week of October. For the year though we were still 3" (76.2 mm) above the 20 year normal annual total when it started raining again.
Between the last week of October and the end of the year it rained an additional 28" (711 mm) and then it stopped and we fell behind again until finally catching up to normal accumulation in the second week of March 2016.
Currently our accumulation to date is almost 1" (25.4 mm) above the 20 year average annual total for this date. So, just as in 2015 we are a little above normal during summer. I expect that if it works out like 2015 then we can expect a lot more rain beginning in the fall, probably by October.
If I look back over the previous 5 years from 2021-2015, we are again running a rainfall deficit of 26.2" (665.5 mm). That is about 72% of rainfall expected in a normal year using my 20 year average accumulation. Nearly 3/4 of a year's rainfall behind at this point over a 5 year period. Interesting.
I suspect I will need to have some more rock hauled in to repair the driveway by the end of the year since it will all wash down the hill again.
Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.
Remember that you don't need AC to beat the heat - we've had other options for centuries. One of my favorites is fans.
I've lived in a hot subtropical climate most of my life. The best modes of cooling are, in order of comfort: shade, clothing, breeze, fans, A/C.
Our rather large home didn't have A/C when we bought it. But it did have a huge attic fan that kept the air moving throughout the entire house on hot days. That worked fine from the time the house was built in about 1930 to present (yes, it's still there). At one point we installed a few window units in designated rooms but they were never necessary.
shade - Even on a hot day it's very comfortable in tree-shaded areas. The trees cool the air.
clothes - wear light-colored clothes with fabrics that wick perspiration.
breeze - if you live in an area with a constant breeze, you'll be more comfortable. Sometimes that comes with a caveat: watch out for storms associated with coastal breezes (such as hurricanes).
fans - sometimes a small room fan is just right. Or if you live someplace where you can pay someone to wave a palm frond around you all day, so much the better.
A/C may seem to be the best but imo it isn't b/c it is not transparent: other people are always messing with the controls, there are insufficent/incorrectly-demarcated "zones" in a building, the humidity varies unsuitably, condensation forms in unexpected areas (even inside walls and under floors) and you don't find out for 12 years, etc.
I live in the US in the Pacific Northwest, one of the *least* air conditioned regions in the country. I have never had built-in AC since moving here in the early 2000's.
Back in the 2000's, it was fine - maybe a few hot days in the summer, but bearable with shade, fans, proper clothing like you said.
But the last ten years or so, the summer has gotten to be more and more brutal. Heatwaves where it's 70-80% humidity and 100+F outside for more than a few days in a row. We have a portable A/C and find ourselves hooking it up more and more often.
You just need a well-isolated house, which are rare in the US, but common in Europe. A well-isolated house doesn't warm up as much on a hot day, unless you open windows wide. Temperature outside can be 35 Celsius, inside <25 Celsius.
Personally, I much prefer this solution than ACs, because ACs sometimes affect my throat and make me feel tired.
> Fans do you no good when the humidity is above a certain point.
That would be related to the wet-bulb temperature. If the wet-bulb temperature is more than about 30°C, then I'd consider the area to be uninhabitable. (A wet bulb temperature of 35°C is considered lethal).
Fans are surprisingly effective as most people are stationary and thus produce almost a bubble of high humidity around themselves. Fans disperse that localised high humidity and allow people to effectively reduce their temperature through sweating/evaporation.
We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
"Wait, do you mean I should pay to capture the carbon my neighbors emits? No way!"
That's why.
Edit: Also, as some other comment said, thermodynamics tell us that it would take an inordinate amount of energy to bring carbon back to safe levels. More than what we get from burning oil. It's about entropy and all that. So there's that.
We needed to reach zero emissions 20 years ago and today we should have strong negative emissions.
At this rate I don't think humanity will reach zero emissions before 2050. It's going to take a couple of very bad years for humanity to take this seriously.
Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.
Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.
Not necessarily... it isn't as straightforward as "stronger El Niño means more rain".
The steering of the jet stream seems to have some qualitative changes in these conditions but also more chaos. It could steer storms anywhere along the coast, so different parts of CA, OR, and WA get different impact. Just in my lifetime in CA, I've witnessed some very wet El Niño winters but also some drier than average.
The biggest precipitation threat on the west coast seems to be a repeat of some of the biggest flooding events known historically or geologically. But, these are relatively infrequent and most of the record predates any understanding or tracking of the El Niño oscillation. So the correlation cannot be stated so clearly. These are atmospheric river events which seem to stall, producing heavy rains over the same area for a much longer period.
Just in the recent centuries of CA history, there have been massive floods in northern and southern regions in different month-long rain events. There have been improvements to flood control infrastructure since then. But, the only reason those events aren't known as the most costly is because there wasn't as much economic development here back when the floods happened.
Our usual storms sweep through an area the heaviest rains over just part of a day. Our varied terrain means that each individual storm also has very uneven rainfall amounts due to orographic intensification. Prominences with the right aspect towards the wind will get far more accumulation. Our watersheds can absorb quite a bit of this, but even those brief rains can cause localized flooding.
If the rain continues for many days in a row, we will see widespread mudslides and flooding of larger rivers, basins, etc. Some of the historically extreme events had rain persisting for over a month!
Edit: along with these "mega storm" scenarios, we also have evidence of "mega droughts". It's worrisome to imagine what challenges may come from a more energetic and chaotic climate.
El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation across the southern third of the state. The relationship between El Niño and cool season precipitation is weaker in the central and northern parts of the state.
Flooding is possible, particularly if dams exceed capacity, perhaps exacerbated by earlier snowmelt and peak runoff. Landslides are a more widespread, and less manageable problem, particularly as loose-material slopes are waterlogged. The deluge -> high growth -> heavy fuel load -> large wildfire -> landslide cycle is one that's become fairly well-known in California.
Levee failures within the Sacramento Delta or Central Valley could result in very large-scale flooding, affecting agriculture or communities.
The San Francisco Bay Area may see "king tides" and general flooding throughout the bay and delta region, particularly during December and January, and all the more so if high tides coincide with heavy river run-off. Remember that the entire Central Valley of California, nearly 500 miles long north-to-south, drains out through the Bay. Prevailing winds may create a wind setup or seiche which can result in flooding along a some but not all shorelines, or alternating across a body of water.
The aquifers are all extremely depleted and the reservoirs nearly empty. Extra rain will be very good. If private interests are allowed to graze and log public land, fire risk can be mitigated.
We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.
We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.
It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.
Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.
I wrote to Alan Kay over 8 years ago about my fears of global warming and how tech seems to dismiss it as a concern on the whole.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend more energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years (30,000-45,000 EJ range) just to put the system back to where it's safe.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
Do we even have the capability to do it? As we continue to expand our industrial capacity, we also use non-renewable resources like oil and metals we can't recycle. As we exploit them, we degrade our industrial capacity for the future. For a deeper analysis read Limits to Growth and work related to it.
The weather in Japan has been completely wack I can tell you that. The rainy season is never ending in central and north Japan. It was actually declared over but it's back again. Never seen that before.
Its a bit more complicated than that, you have a period during the spring called the spring persistence barrier that makes skillful prediction of a developing el nino difficult. What is impressive is that multi month model predictions before this spring barrier had a historic el nino developing which turned out to be correct (an out of sample prediction).
Another thing AI makes worse because of all the energy consumption.
I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.
Even if we don't do anything about emissions and climate change picks up, lives in 2126 will be unmistakably better than ours in all dimensions that matter.
I could not be more excited about the upcoming warm, dry summer here in NZ's North Island. The media keeps trying to scare us but I'm pumped. I can't do anything about the future of planet Earth and I'm not going to ring my hands and lose sleep over it, but if atmospheric changes are going to result in some great seasons I'm here for it.
If things get really unsustainable, I'm talking about a sizeable percentage of the world's population dying because of heatwaves, shall we see desperate measure being taken?
For example some scientists suggested installing sunshades but... Literally a sunshade: deploying an umbrella of sort, in space, so that less heat reaches the heart.
Now of course as we've been ruled by luminaries since decades, bringing us to the situation we're in now, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to fuck up that too: for example by fuxxoring the sunshade and killing another sizeable percentage of the population by creating a new ice age.
But really I wonder: at what tipping point shall desperate measures be taken to try to fix things and what could those be? That sunshade doesn't seem that crazy or is it?
Large scale ecosystem modifications run huge risks of unintended consequences.
Due to the chaotic nature of these systems we are incapable of predicting the effect of our actions.
It could very well be that by artificially increasing cloud cover we cross a different tipping point with grave consequences (e.g. flooding, ecosystem collapse from lack of sunlight, or who knows what)
but if you keep declaring a time clock every decade only to reset it for the past 50 years, does it not weaken the point of it ? we should've had an apocalypse by now, we haven't and unlikely to so for quite some time.
why are we so eager and unquestioning of the published narratives going to the length of censoring counter theories?
If/when the temperature differential between equator and pole decreases because of a warming arctic, we actually do get a permanent reduction in hurricane propensity and destructiveness.
Not everything gets worse if the planet heats up a little more.
Do you know if this balances out to a lower death count than the heatwave would have, or just better for people in that area? Even thinking just about the US south I'd imagine heat is a bigger risk than hurricanes
> widespread drought and famine in multiple countries, causing the death of more than 50 million people. Disasters associated with it include the Great Famine of 1876–1878 in India, the Grande Seca in Brazil, and the Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879.
The buried lede:
What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin
I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.
I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.
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It's clearly an op by people who don't want the story to be about a historic heatwave ravaging Europe, so instead they make it about dum Europeans without air conditioning (which they didn't need before).
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It should be more grating that Europe's refusal to adopt air conditioning is murdering their most vulnerable at rates comparable to American gun deaths and (unlike climate change or gun violence) there's a trivial solution that would prevent this immediately instead of waiting decades.
> “…Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation…”
Sounds like a ‘mixed-meme’. I appreciate your concern, but confused thinking bringing heightened emotions is counterproductive.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/mixed...
What should they have done differently? They de-industrialized and did the out of sight and out of mind thing europe does now before europe?
It would be one thing if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars, but if anything it is only marginally better than the US. Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America, while restricting themselves from using air conditioning as some kind of virtue signaling. That's the problem as I see it.
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So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
Yup. Built a house in 2016 in Belgium. Perfectly insulated. You didn't have to run heating in winter. Kept it all inside.
Also, it overheated instantly.
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I stayed in an otherwise lovely flat in northwestern Europe in the summer in an area where the minor heat wave at the time gave daytime temperatures in the mid to high seventies (F) and lows in the sixties. No usable A/C.
If there had been screened windows that opened wide and faced in different directions, it would have been very comfortable by just leaving some windows open for cross-ventilation. Instead it had unscreened high-end “European” windows that could either crack open a bit at the top or could open wide, swinging inward and banging into obstacles (like the bed or anyone’s head who was trying to sleep!). And bugs would come in while the windows were open.
I found this to be rather disappointing.
I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.
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>So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.
>Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
The same industries that got rich over those 50yr selling BS we didn't need because the government mandated it are gonna get rich over the next 50 installing smart ventilation and heat pump A/Cs and whatnot when the next pile of mandates to undo the ills of the prior ones gets written into the building code.
Seems pretty long sighted to me.
I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology.
Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business.
50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
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Don't worry it will even out when the Gulf Stream chokes out /s
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> I would absolutely be looking into how to get [...] at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough.
For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot.
For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity. Only an AC can lower the humidity, by conditioning the air.
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> if not a heat pump
Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
Seems like a good thing for them to reconsider between now and next summer!
> Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems
I'm not sure thats true.
Most aircon in "warm" europe is standard split aircon
The "heatpump" shit that the UK is sorta looking at is as you describe. However its half the price to install "aircon" over heatpumps (because grants, amongst other things)
Like most recently refurbished offices will use normal aircon (certainly all the one I have worked in)
The annoying thing is that UK at least has a bigger grant for air-to-water systems.
I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
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El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
I live in Europe. We have in fact invented air conditioning here too, but I am not concerned with what we should be doing next year. That's a trivial matter. I'm concerned about what will happen if this trend continues another 5-10 years. How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
> How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
That's the neat part, you don't.
Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs.
China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China).
Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe.
To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned.
There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it?
Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them.
And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better.
To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse.
All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power).
Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ...
There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions.
And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change.
So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
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> hello
Wow, clearly Gemini
And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius.
Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees.
All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.
> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario
No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.
We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
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The 1.5C target (which, as others pointed out, is not an end-of-the-world scenario) is about average temperature above pre-industrial baseline across 20 years. The temperature anomaly of a single year has nothing to do with that; 2028 will likely be colder again.
Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
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Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
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What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.
That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.
And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.
- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.
- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.
- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.
- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.
- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?
We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.
It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.
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Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
I don’t recall the more serious predictions predicting anything worse than what we’ve actually experiencing. There were plenty of predictions about nasty consequences if we experienced X degrees of warming by, say, 2050, and it’s not 2050 yet…
Interesting. Do you mind sharing some of the predictions you have been revisiting?
This sounds neat...I'd love to do it as well. Any past predictions vs current conditions tools or datasets that you're using?
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>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.
Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.
Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing very little?
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We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.
Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.
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We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.
So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.
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Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.
We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.
Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.
I've seen dozens of videos and articles about this strongest ever event. And I still have no clue if the next year I should evacuate from Paris for the summer because heatwaves may be even crazier than this year, or prolonged heavy rains are more likely and can make the city more livable.
Given what I learned from "chaos" by James Gleick, the predicament we're in is that we likely cannot predict outcomes or the events themselves, rather what we know is that weather will become more unpredictable and more extreme.
So the answer to your question is it could be either or both or neither. Whatever happens is going to be on average more extreme than what you're used to.
It might end up like a covid situation where even if you have good AC in your home, you don't want to be in the area because the medical system is on its knees overwhelmed from treating all the cases of heat related illnesses.
And AC won’t work if the grid can’t handle it (at least, not unless you do a lot of additional preparation).
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In the short term the year-to-year temperature fluctuates. Next year might be better than this year
In the medium term, summers in Paris WILL be worse than this year
It will come a day that good years are the ones that are as mild as 2026
I would bet on it becoming hotter for longer, with some really bad but short torrential rain in between.
So get some sturdy shade structure and an heat pump.
Water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect so I don't think rain is going to make it better.
No offense, but using air travel to avoid climate impacts is a bit ironic and part of the reason we’re in this mess.
No need to fix the root cause, I’ll just fly somewhere cold during the summer /s
It's funny that I said "evacuate" and did not mention air travel. In that part of the world, trains are the default, with nuclear green power powering the majority of consumers. Maybe that other default is a problem. And yes, bien sûr, an abandoned personal flight or train will counter balance China, India or mega leaks of methane in US. And all AC owners must be incarcerated, it's so worse than a car. A new leftist mayor of Paris even said ACs warm up neighbors' places, should be forbidden obviously...
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As someone who had to do exactly that this summer (multiple times, to boot), I'm doing my part and working to get the fuck out of here permanently before next summer hits.
He didn't say he would be flying
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I've got an excellent overview of consequences from Claude Opus 5. I'd post it here but there's a "no AI content" policy, so sorry, you need to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).
What's worse than an AI generated comment... a comment about having generated an AI comment that you can't read!
If it's useful to the conversation (and objective + with sources) post the key findings - IMO I think it's AI generated prose / subjective posts that will get blasted.
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I can hardly wait to see how this shakes out locally. We have had 3 La Ninas in a row that have left us with a rainfall deficit of 23.5" (597 mm) under the 20 year average annual total that I have measured here in NTexas. It's been dry overall for several years.
Considering the situation going into the 2015-2016 El Nino we were also in a multiyear drought with a rainfall deficit accumulated from 2010-2014 of over 31" (787 mm). That is just under the 20 year average annual precipitation total for my place - 36.3" (922 mm). We were missing almost a full year's rainfall over that 5 year period. I use a NOAA manual rain gauge of the type that can handle up to 11" (279.4mm) of rain before needing to be dumped. I have recently added a digital tipping gauge unit beside the manual gauge so I can have a clear comparison and track rain rates.
Anyway, if it works out like 2015 did then we went into the year with a deficit but it quickly began raining well above normal so that by mid-June we were already above the normal 20-year average rainfall total. Then it dried up with below normal rainfall from mid-June to late October. There was no rain at all between the first week of September and the last week of October. For the year though we were still 3" (76.2 mm) above the 20 year normal annual total when it started raining again.
Between the last week of October and the end of the year it rained an additional 28" (711 mm) and then it stopped and we fell behind again until finally catching up to normal accumulation in the second week of March 2016.
Currently our accumulation to date is almost 1" (25.4 mm) above the 20 year average annual total for this date. So, just as in 2015 we are a little above normal during summer. I expect that if it works out like 2015 then we can expect a lot more rain beginning in the fall, probably by October.
If I look back over the previous 5 years from 2021-2015, we are again running a rainfall deficit of 26.2" (665.5 mm). That is about 72% of rainfall expected in a normal year using my 20 year average accumulation. Nearly 3/4 of a year's rainfall behind at this point over a 5 year period. Interesting.
I suspect I will need to have some more rock hauled in to repair the driveway by the end of the year since it will all wash down the hill again.
Other than "numbers go up" it's unclear to me what the consequences are, as I'm not extremely familiar with El Niño events. Hurricanes, maybe?
US NOAA has a (still generally useful) list of links to various impacts:
<https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/impacts-of-el-nino>
Those include: hydrology (floods, drought), sea-surface temperatures (hotter or cooler, both of which impact local ecologies and fisheries), storms (weaker hurricane season in the Atlantic, due to high-altitude wind shear, stronger in other areas), and others: economic, fisheries, military, human health, marine life, and specific regional impacts.
I live in the Southeast Asia, so this El Nino event is worrying. It also means drought and super typhoons.
Wow, this thing should be nicknamed "El Hombre"
Remember that you don't need AC to beat the heat - we've had other options for centuries. One of my favorites is fans.
I've lived in a hot subtropical climate most of my life. The best modes of cooling are, in order of comfort: shade, clothing, breeze, fans, A/C.
Our rather large home didn't have A/C when we bought it. But it did have a huge attic fan that kept the air moving throughout the entire house on hot days. That worked fine from the time the house was built in about 1930 to present (yes, it's still there). At one point we installed a few window units in designated rooms but they were never necessary.
shade - Even on a hot day it's very comfortable in tree-shaded areas. The trees cool the air.
clothes - wear light-colored clothes with fabrics that wick perspiration.
breeze - if you live in an area with a constant breeze, you'll be more comfortable. Sometimes that comes with a caveat: watch out for storms associated with coastal breezes (such as hurricanes).
fans - sometimes a small room fan is just right. Or if you live someplace where you can pay someone to wave a palm frond around you all day, so much the better.
A/C may seem to be the best but imo it isn't b/c it is not transparent: other people are always messing with the controls, there are insufficent/incorrectly-demarcated "zones" in a building, the humidity varies unsuitably, condensation forms in unexpected areas (even inside walls and under floors) and you don't find out for 12 years, etc.
I live in the US in the Pacific Northwest, one of the *least* air conditioned regions in the country. I have never had built-in AC since moving here in the early 2000's.
Back in the 2000's, it was fine - maybe a few hot days in the summer, but bearable with shade, fans, proper clothing like you said.
But the last ten years or so, the summer has gotten to be more and more brutal. Heatwaves where it's 70-80% humidity and 100+F outside for more than a few days in a row. We have a portable A/C and find ourselves hooking it up more and more often.
You just need a well-isolated house, which are rare in the US, but common in Europe. A well-isolated house doesn't warm up as much on a hot day, unless you open windows wide. Temperature outside can be 35 Celsius, inside <25 Celsius.
Personally, I much prefer this solution than ACs, because ACs sometimes affect my throat and make me feel tired.
Fans do you no good when the humidity is above a certain point.
You’re also losing a lot of water to evaporation from sweating if it is doing anything at all.
There is a reason why Singapore switched to AC pretty much everywhere except old hawker centers, and why it’s not alone.
> Fans do you no good when the humidity is above a certain point.
That would be related to the wet-bulb temperature. If the wet-bulb temperature is more than about 30°C, then I'd consider the area to be uninhabitable. (A wet bulb temperature of 35°C is considered lethal).
Fans are surprisingly effective as most people are stationary and thus produce almost a bubble of high humidity around themselves. Fans disperse that localised high humidity and allow people to effectively reduce their temperature through sweating/evaporation.
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We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
"Wait, do you mean I should pay to capture the carbon my neighbors emits? No way!"
That's why.
Edit: Also, as some other comment said, thermodynamics tell us that it would take an inordinate amount of energy to bring carbon back to safe levels. More than what we get from burning oil. It's about entropy and all that. So there's that.
Will doubling of forest helps ? ( not that it is possible )
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Indeed.
We needed to reach zero emissions 20 years ago and today we should have strong negative emissions.
At this rate I don't think humanity will reach zero emissions before 2050. It's going to take a couple of very bad years for humanity to take this seriously.
There are three possible scenarios for the next decades:
1) return to preindustrial level of pollution, possibility less than 1/10000
2) make radical changes suggested by scientists, less than 1/100
3) continue with the current pace
The pyramid of pollution, which is directly proportional to the pyramid of wealth, is almost impossible to shrink as the latter is also inevitable.
Just brace for impact.
4) Farm upvotes for posting another “we must do something!” comment, practically 1/1
People who post to concerntroll should be flagged as shitposters.
First person who finds an actual answer to this can potentially make a lot of money. Think it over.
Bomb fossil fuel power plants. They’ll be replaced with the least expensive alternative, solar and batteries.
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Does this mean California is more likely to get mega flooding?
Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.
Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.
Yes, atmospheric rivers all winter.
Next year a super bloom then the following year massive wild fires.
rain -> fuel -> fire
Not necessarily... it isn't as straightforward as "stronger El Niño means more rain".
The steering of the jet stream seems to have some qualitative changes in these conditions but also more chaos. It could steer storms anywhere along the coast, so different parts of CA, OR, and WA get different impact. Just in my lifetime in CA, I've witnessed some very wet El Niño winters but also some drier than average.
The biggest precipitation threat on the west coast seems to be a repeat of some of the biggest flooding events known historically or geologically. But, these are relatively infrequent and most of the record predates any understanding or tracking of the El Niño oscillation. So the correlation cannot be stated so clearly. These are atmospheric river events which seem to stall, producing heavy rains over the same area for a much longer period.
Just in the recent centuries of CA history, there have been massive floods in northern and southern regions in different month-long rain events. There have been improvements to flood control infrastructure since then. But, the only reason those events aren't known as the most costly is because there wasn't as much economic development here back when the floods happened.
Our usual storms sweep through an area the heaviest rains over just part of a day. Our varied terrain means that each individual storm also has very uneven rainfall amounts due to orographic intensification. Prominences with the right aspect towards the wind will get far more accumulation. Our watersheds can absorb quite a bit of this, but even those brief rains can cause localized flooding.
If the rain continues for many days in a row, we will see widespread mudslides and flooding of larger rivers, basins, etc. Some of the historically extreme events had rain persisting for over a month!
Edit: along with these "mega storm" scenarios, we also have evidence of "mega droughts". It's worrisome to imagine what challenges may come from a more energetic and chaotic climate.
"El Niño, California Precipitation, and Landslides" <https://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/landslides/el-nino>
El Niño is the “warm phase” of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and features warmer than average ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.... Historically, the presence of El Niño conditions tilts the odds in favor of wetter than normal precipitation across the southern third of the state. The relationship between El Niño and cool season precipitation is weaker in the central and northern parts of the state.
Flooding is possible, particularly if dams exceed capacity, perhaps exacerbated by earlier snowmelt and peak runoff. Landslides are a more widespread, and less manageable problem, particularly as loose-material slopes are waterlogged. The deluge -> high growth -> heavy fuel load -> large wildfire -> landslide cycle is one that's become fairly well-known in California.
Levee failures within the Sacramento Delta or Central Valley could result in very large-scale flooding, affecting agriculture or communities.
The San Francisco Bay Area may see "king tides" and general flooding throughout the bay and delta region, particularly during December and January, and all the more so if high tides coincide with heavy river run-off. Remember that the entire Central Valley of California, nearly 500 miles long north-to-south, drains out through the Bay. Prevailing winds may create a wind setup or seiche which can result in flooding along a some but not all shorelines, or alternating across a body of water.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_setup>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche>
The aquifers are all extremely depleted and the reservoirs nearly empty. Extra rain will be very good. If private interests are allowed to graze and log public land, fire risk can be mitigated.
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We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.
We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.
It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.
Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.
The costliest floods in state history were in the winter 1994-1995 which was a weak El Niño year.
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I wrote to Alan Kay over 8 years ago about my fears of global warming and how tech seems to dismiss it as a concern on the whole.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend more energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years (30,000-45,000 EJ range) just to put the system back to where it's safe.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
Do we even have the capability to do it? As we continue to expand our industrial capacity, we also use non-renewable resources like oil and metals we can't recycle. As we exploit them, we degrade our industrial capacity for the future. For a deeper analysis read Limits to Growth and work related to it.
> Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species?
Hey Claude, enter plan mode
The weather in Japan has been completely wack I can tell you that. The rainy season is never ending in central and north Japan. It was actually declared over but it's back again. Never seen that before.
Related: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/el-nino/
I for one am impressed we get couple months of warning before it happens
It's a massive oscillating system (millions of square miles), so we have plenty of lead time. It's easy to measure and watch evolve.
Its a bit more complicated than that, you have a period during the spring called the spring persistence barrier that makes skillful prediction of a developing el nino difficult. What is impressive is that multi month model predictions before this spring barrier had a historic el nino developing which turned out to be correct (an out of sample prediction).
Looks like I’m definitely getting a season pass to the local ski resort this year. Should be epic!
Another thing AI makes worse because of all the energy consumption.
I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.
Yes. Something like 45% of global emissions come from electricity generation.
Even if we don't do anything about emissions and climate change picks up, lives in 2126 will be unmistakably better than ours in all dimensions that matter.
If you're a single-celled creature living near the Arctic.
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I really believe this is corporate propaganda. "Don't worry, we have the solutions".
You don't.
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can you show us the world model that predicts this outcome? which variables does it take into account?
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This is propaganda
I could not be more excited about the upcoming warm, dry summer here in NZ's North Island. The media keeps trying to scare us but I'm pumped. I can't do anything about the future of planet Earth and I'm not going to ring my hands and lose sleep over it, but if atmospheric changes are going to result in some great seasons I'm here for it.
If things get really unsustainable, I'm talking about a sizeable percentage of the world's population dying because of heatwaves, shall we see desperate measure being taken?
For example some scientists suggested installing sunshades but... Literally a sunshade: deploying an umbrella of sort, in space, so that less heat reaches the heart.
Now of course as we've been ruled by luminaries since decades, bringing us to the situation we're in now, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to fuck up that too: for example by fuxxoring the sunshade and killing another sizeable percentage of the population by creating a new ice age.
But really I wonder: at what tipping point shall desperate measures be taken to try to fix things and what could those be? That sunshade doesn't seem that crazy or is it?
> I'm talking about a sizeable percentage of the world's population dying because of heatwaves, shall we see desperate measure being taken?
At that point, won't it be too late?
Funding was proposed by Congress during the Biden administration but didn't get a lot of press at the time
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/01/white-house-cautiou...
Cloud cover to raise the Earth's albedo can be done by a smaller independent team, vs needing the whole world to agree to stop polluting.
Large scale ecosystem modifications run huge risks of unintended consequences.
Due to the chaotic nature of these systems we are incapable of predicting the effect of our actions.
It could very well be that by artificially increasing cloud cover we cross a different tipping point with grave consequences (e.g. flooding, ecosystem collapse from lack of sunlight, or who knows what)
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Come on, Trump would never "tarrif" something called "El Nino".
He would first deport it a couple times.
He'd grab it's pussy first.
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You have a point about it not being necessary to invoke his name here but any use of TDS just shows you are in a different reality.
are you arguing with a joke?
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all of it
and because we've been doomed since the 70s
but if you keep declaring a time clock every decade only to reset it for the past 50 years, does it not weaken the point of it ? we should've had an apocalypse by now, we haven't and unlikely to so for quite some time.
why are we so eager and unquestioning of the published narratives going to the length of censoring counter theories?
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You don't seem to understand how this works. El Niño is one half of a 2 part cycle. You don’t get permanent hurricane reduction.
I understand perfectly how it works! I'm just happy not to worry about hurricanes this year! I'm an optimist. More bad news for you, I fear.
If/when the temperature differential between equator and pole decreases because of a warming arctic, we actually do get a permanent reduction in hurricane propensity and destructiveness.
Not everything gets worse if the planet heats up a little more.
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Do you know if this balances out to a lower death count than the heatwave would have, or just better for people in that area? Even thinking just about the US south I'd imagine heat is a bigger risk than hurricanes
Let’s see…: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
> widespread drought and famine in multiple countries, causing the death of more than 50 million people. Disasters associated with it include the Great Famine of 1876–1878 in India, the Grande Seca in Brazil, and the Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879.
Let me guess, you think solar panels are chinese spying machines.
Why bother posting crap like this?
And, soon, brand new, never before seen waterfront property! Invest now so your children can enjoy sand where St. Augustine grass once flourished. \s
It’s the down hill house racing contest this winter that you want to pay attention to. Be sure to take precautions.
If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
Yeah like earthquakes, the top registered earthquake happened 66 years ago.
The fact that you see record breaking more often than log of time implies a drift in one direction.
And it varies in intensity because human activity is putting more energy into the system
It varies in intensity because it always has.
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