To be fair, we didn't have the World Food Programme in 1877 which lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
Yes, AFAIU it is far and away the biggest in recorded history. That said, the 1877 one also lined up with one or two other meteorological events by chance that made the famine worse, and it’s my understanding that we don’t know if those will be present this winter or not.
A modern 1877 scale event would probably immediately fuel (pun intended) a furious climate change debate, even though attributing the existence of the El Niño itself to fossil fuels would not be scientifically justified... or maybe was the 1877 El Niño caused by fossil fuels (so many Wars happened in those years) ?
We've been on and off with water service because of it, we've got a bit of rain the last few days but the resovoirs in Puerto Rico were looking real skinny last week. Nothing humbles you like coming inside from doing yard work in the August Caribbean sunshine to realize your shower isn't running. RIP to my tomatos.
Remember that this is just a piece of the complex system that is the global climate. And over it, there are more systems affected, including human ones like food production or economy. Something this extreme may cause from a severe disruption or a permanent instability in those systems, specially considering feedback loops in all of them.
I found myself moved by this recent interview with Prof. Kevin Anderson on the topic of climate change (and associated politics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFos_T7cT0
He paints quite a bleak picture of the situation we are in (I tend to agree), but there's also a glimmer of hope in there.
I don't find that sentence confusing, but I definitely found the article poorly written. Here's the sixth nearly identical map and now let's repeat the exact same thing already stated five times or more while including one new sentence of detail. The density of actual information in the writing is so low that it's hard to follow.
The article is so repetitive and padded out with empty prose that I found myself ignoring whole paragraphs. It's like the author decided to describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe the possible consequences of a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, and finally describe what an el niño is.
Given the repition without new information, random bolded words and consistent paragraph length, I'd say this is probably written mostly or entirely by an LLM
The author is saying the surface of the ocean (where it's easiest to measure temps, so we do that the most) is the 'footprint' or the full colum of warm water below it. Additionally, like a footprint the surface area it represents might be smaller too as warm water continues to rise.
I stumbled across this too but going back to the picture made the sentence easy to understand. Maybe the sentence would have worked better if it was located before the picture. (The picture shows a ramp going up to the right deep under the ocean surface - the subsurface warm core)
I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.
I think you might be on to something: I am by no means a weather enthusiast or expert, nor do I live in California: the El Niños building up in 1997 and 2015 had similar seasons, 2023 not, the current fast onset and wave seasons (durable good surfable waves in winter) match especially well with 2015. 2023 was the exception but also slower onset. Also La Niña winters also had good winter conditions, but not as durable. So good surf conditions in NorCal outside of La Niña winters might be a visceral leading indicator for fast onset El Niño.
Check out stormsurf001 on YouTube. He’s been tracking the development of the El Niño for months now.
I (SoCal) kinda hate El Niño. Seems like it always means way more weather (blown out days) and most reefs around here are maxed out beyond overhead. It’s nice to get lots of groundswell but I’ll take 2-3 and high pressure over 6-7 and rainy any day.
Lima, Peru... daytime and night time temps are +8-+3 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) degrees celcius, usually should be like 18-16 celcius daytime, it's at 26-21 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) with +6-+8 being the most common... already past mid winter and there hasn't been a single "cold" day yet.
Pelicans are mass starving so are sea lions as cold based fish have left the shores, no long sleeves or sheets needed to sleep, it's been summer prety much all year... never seen this in 31 years of life... supposedly 98 was bad although this one is projected to be worse... summer temps might hit 39-34 celcius on average if things keep going this way when normally you have 31-27 degrees during summer, considering most houses don't have air conditioning I can definitely see a lot of heat related deaths happening and a potential food crisis forming.
I am also up in the mountains. I confirm it's the warmest summer for four consecutive times. Something happened in 2023. We may call it a tipping point. Although I enjoy milder winters (goodbye skiing), the summers are not mild anymore.
People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.
But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.
But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat. So you could make a good argument that weather events save more lives than they cost by increasing the temperature of marginal zones where people otherwise freeze.
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
Our future is extinction regardless of what we do. It’s a matter of timescale. Plagues, wars, political unrest, asteroids, geological events on the continental scale, super volcano eruptions, poles flipping, the Earth coming closer to the Sun and then moving farther away, iron core rotation slowing down, the Sun swelling and dying. Unless we find a way to evolve into something capable of leaving this planet for good, we are going to go extinct. No carbon taxes and offsets are going to change anything. We are boiling as the proverbial frog, and everything we do is just ”feel good” measures.
You may tie this in to climate change in general to prove your point, but this is a discussion about El Nino weather event and it is important to remember the current situation is not unprecedented.
This El Nino is expected to be worse than that based on the El Nino 3.4 temperatures we are already seeing. This is why most weather people are talking about it so much.
We do not have the same data for the 1877 event that we do for the last strongest El Nino in 1997. And this one is much stronger than that by far:
It's hard to rationally discuss this with non-experts as you will immediately be labeled an AGW denying crank and downvoted to oblivion.
Yes, AGW is real. Yes, extreme weather and climate events have occurred before AGW. No, I am not saying that AGW is incapable of making these extreme events even worse.
For instance, California has experienced megadroughts lasting decades or hundreds of years in the relatively recent past.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
What is your point? What system are you taking about? Also I don't want to judge but I hope you don't use your past trauma as an excuse for indifference. You can be indifferent but just say so. The fact that you have trauma doesn't give you a leg to stand on. There are plenty of people with trauma and have come out of it. It just sounds rather angsty.
Meanwhile West Antarctic ice shelf barely clutching on.
No direct link, but click the "anomaly" map button just underneath the map. Hello all these similar 10+ °C anomalies that have sat around. Some colder spots too that have hung around! But yikes.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
I at least think of El Nino kind of running into South, building up in the Pacific. But the heat cuts across, then down, and pools in Antarctica here, is how I read it.
It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.
And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.
Car temperature sensors tend to be inaccurate because they're often in the Sun or some other place affected by baking a car not in a garage.
Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.
I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.
Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.
It's 96 ℉ / 36 °C @ 60% humidity every day for 5 months in hill country with no rain in sight. The El Niňo rain may not get here until November. We're right at the 100 meridian west so it's between hot semi-arid (BSH) and humid subtropical (Cfa), and most storms seem to bypass us to the north by about 20 miles. It was growing zone 8b but changed +3 ℉ to 9a in 10 years.
You're unhappy this site doesn't track you and needs not beg for permission to do so? I can't see anything being stored in cookies, localStorage, or sessionStorage. Let us know if you find that it tracks people in another way that requires consent up front
One positive is that solar (and probably other renewables too) prices are plummeting and are now the cheapest way to generate power - so in economic terms, I hope this trend continues and accelerates even more to the point where even fossil fuel addicts can't resist putting a solar panel on their roof.
In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.
Meanwhile, the US is paying the German energy firm RWE $1.2 billion to stop a off shore wind farm that was already under construction. Total payouts are over $4 billion to _stop_ adding electricity supply.
> the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar
But at midnight last night it was generating 0%.
It is a well known issue that renewables can never provide 100% of the grids requirements because of peaks and troughs, and inefficiencies of storage.
Everyone who states this idea that solar is the saviour never seems to mention the manufacturing chain which requires a TON of energy and chemical processing, and the waste when the panels are no longer efficient enough or past their useful life. Every house in the world suddenly having having solar panels and every ICE vehicle being replaced by electric will cost us untold amounts of physical resources, energy, and create massive amounts of regular waste which cannot be recycled, forever.
There needs to be a managed decline and long term transition which manages both manufacturing and waste pipeline effectively or the shift will just increase the climate change rate.
Im not saying we shouldnt be moving to renewables ASAP, but people need to realise its not as simple as chucking a solar panel on every roof.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
We wanted to exploit all natural resources to maximum extent using our science and tech without any regard to the side effects. The advantage is free. It helps our business. Business gains are human progress. Tech is wonderful. What are you talking about?
Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
Actually private equity have been accumulating stakes quickly in renewables lately. Makes sense. Talk bad of a future tech to own most of the cake early for cheap...
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
The argument that small countries don't matter in the equation is silly.
There are ~200 countries, of course on average your country will be less than .5% of emissions. Thinking .5% is small enough to do nothing is exactly the kind of thinking that leads us to inaction.
So yeah, china and the US need to get their act together, but so does every other country.
There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
By far the biggest source of carbon emissions is coal. The others make an impact too, but if we're not addressing coal, there's almost no point addressing the others.
China currently emits a third of the entire C02 generation of the entire planet per year, you taking the bus is going to do nothing.
What we need to do is all stop buying next day delivered pieces of plastic produced in Chinese factories. Boycotting Temu and Amazon and shopping at your local stores is the one massive thing the average person can do to help the planet.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
In the plus column, we've had a healthy rainy season in the SE US. And while storms seem to move slower than before, we're not yet overwhelmed by stall+flood events.
As for this seasons storms in WCFL, every week I see storms that barely move - often just sitting in place for an hour or more. It's a change from the historical lines that marched across the state.
The strongest El Niño ever caused a massive famine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
To be fair, we didn't have the World Food Programme in 1877 which lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
> lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.
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Does that program still exist in the way we expect it to or has it been DOGE’d like the USAID program?
When did the WFP eradicate famine?
another excellent agency for mr. president to target
That is the question I am trying to get from the article. Will this new "keep growing" strongest ever be as bad as the one in 1877.
But it keep explaining what El Niño and Super El Niño and how it develops without giving me any context of how strong it will be.
Yes, AFAIU it is far and away the biggest in recorded history. That said, the 1877 one also lined up with one or two other meteorological events by chance that made the famine worse, and it’s my understanding that we don’t know if those will be present this winter or not.
It’s gonna be a weird one…
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A modern 1877 scale event would probably immediately fuel (pun intended) a furious climate change debate, even though attributing the existence of the El Niño itself to fossil fuels would not be scientifically justified... or maybe was the 1877 El Niño caused by fossil fuels (so many Wars happened in those years) ?
Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exists because of fossil fuel usage.
An extreme swing, here and there, has always been part of its nature.
The observed change is more and more extreme swings, greater amplitude, higher frequency.
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We've been on and off with water service because of it, we've got a bit of rain the last few days but the resovoirs in Puerto Rico were looking real skinny last week. Nothing humbles you like coming inside from doing yard work in the August Caribbean sunshine to realize your shower isn't running. RIP to my tomatos.
Can you get water from your air conditioning unit, or is it just too dry there?
Yup! I have a line running from it to water one of our beds, it's been raining so it's about as muggy as it gets today.
Remember that this is just a piece of the complex system that is the global climate. And over it, there are more systems affected, including human ones like food production or economy. Something this extreme may cause from a severe disruption or a permanent instability in those systems, specially considering feedback loops in all of them.
I found myself moved by this recent interview with Prof. Kevin Anderson on the topic of climate change (and associated politics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFos_T7cT0
He paints quite a bleak picture of the situation we are in (I tend to agree), but there's also a glimmer of hope in there.
This was a really great listen, thank you!
We're expecting a dry and hot spring and summer this year in Australia (and our winter has been milder than average to boot). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-31/nsw-el-nino-weather-e...
I really tried to get through this. But sentences like this were confusing to me:
I don't find that sentence confusing, but I definitely found the article poorly written. Here's the sixth nearly identical map and now let's repeat the exact same thing already stated five times or more while including one new sentence of detail. The density of actual information in the writing is so low that it's hard to follow.
The article is so repetitive and padded out with empty prose that I found myself ignoring whole paragraphs. It's like the author decided to describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, then describe the possible consequences of a super el niño, then describe what an el niño is, then describe what an el niño is, and finally describe what an el niño is.
Given the repition without new information, random bolded words and consistent paragraph length, I'd say this is probably written mostly or entirely by an LLM
The author is saying the surface of the ocean (where it's easiest to measure temps, so we do that the most) is the 'footprint' or the full colum of warm water below it. Additionally, like a footprint the surface area it represents might be smaller too as warm water continues to rise.
Area vs volume.
If these are the temperatures on the surface, think of the depths. There is a whole additional dimension to multiply (integrate) across.
The added energy is far greater than you might think simply by looking at the surface.
There's a few AI tells in the article. The overuse of bolded text throughout - and the confusing sentences.
I stumbled across this too but going back to the picture made the sentence easy to understand. Maybe the sentence would have worked better if it was located before the picture. (The picture shows a ramp going up to the right deep under the ocean surface - the subsurface warm core)
To use an extremely inappropriate metaphor, they’re saying the warm temperatures at the surface are just the tip of the iceberg.
Yea, I will admit my imagination started to go off as I read that
"In simple terms" should not preceed that sentence imo
It seems quite straightforward.
Great write up but bummed to not see any info about the waves. It’s been a bonkers summer!
I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.
Here is an article about the heat wave in Europe: https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/excessive-heat-...
I think you might be on to something: I am by no means a weather enthusiast or expert, nor do I live in California: the El Niños building up in 1997 and 2015 had similar seasons, 2023 not, the current fast onset and wave seasons (durable good surfable waves in winter) match especially well with 2015. 2023 was the exception but also slower onset. Also La Niña winters also had good winter conditions, but not as durable. So good surf conditions in NorCal outside of La Niña winters might be a visceral leading indicator for fast onset El Niño.
Check out stormsurf001 on YouTube. He’s been tracking the development of the El Niño for months now.
I (SoCal) kinda hate El Niño. Seems like it always means way more weather (blown out days) and most reefs around here are maxed out beyond overhead. It’s nice to get lots of groundswell but I’ll take 2-3 and high pressure over 6-7 and rainy any day.
Lima, Peru... daytime and night time temps are +8-+3 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) degrees celcius, usually should be like 18-16 celcius daytime, it's at 26-21 (single day, might be the coldest of the year) with +6-+8 being the most common... already past mid winter and there hasn't been a single "cold" day yet.
Pelicans are mass starving so are sea lions as cold based fish have left the shores, no long sleeves or sheets needed to sleep, it's been summer prety much all year... never seen this in 31 years of life... supposedly 98 was bad although this one is projected to be worse... summer temps might hit 39-34 celcius on average if things keep going this way when normally you have 31-27 degrees during summer, considering most houses don't have air conditioning I can definitely see a lot of heat related deaths happening and a potential food crisis forming.
I am also up in the mountains. I confirm it's the warmest summer for four consecutive times. Something happened in 2023. We may call it a tipping point. Although I enjoy milder winters (goodbye skiing), the summers are not mild anymore.
People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.
But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.
But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2 shows it another way:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
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Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat. So you could make a good argument that weather events save more lives than they cost by increasing the temperature of marginal zones where people otherwise freeze.
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> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564
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Ministry for the Future ch. 1 scenario?
https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanl...
Our future is extinction regardless of what we do. It’s a matter of timescale. Plagues, wars, political unrest, asteroids, geological events on the continental scale, super volcano eruptions, poles flipping, the Earth coming closer to the Sun and then moving farther away, iron core rotation slowing down, the Sun swelling and dying. Unless we find a way to evolve into something capable of leaving this planet for good, we are going to go extinct. No carbon taxes and offsets are going to change anything. We are boiling as the proverbial frog, and everything we do is just ”feel good” measures.
Even if we leave the planet we're going to go extinct anyways, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to slow it down.
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> But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally
Lets not forget there have been bigger and hotter events than this in local past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
You may tie this in to climate change in general to prove your point, but this is a discussion about El Nino weather event and it is important to remember the current situation is not unprecedented.
This El Nino is expected to be worse than that based on the El Nino 3.4 temperatures we are already seeing. This is why most weather people are talking about it so much.
We do not have the same data for the 1877 event that we do for the last strongest El Nino in 1997. And this one is much stronger than that by far:
https://xcancel.com/BenNollWeather/status/208864941472211787...
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It's hard to rationally discuss this with non-experts as you will immediately be labeled an AGW denying crank and downvoted to oblivion.
Yes, AGW is real. Yes, extreme weather and climate events have occurred before AGW. No, I am not saying that AGW is incapable of making these extreme events even worse.
For instance, California has experienced megadroughts lasting decades or hundreds of years in the relatively recent past.
The global average temperature was about 1.5C lower back then.
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The future will be much worse. Some effects take years or decades to manifest and we wont see them during a relatively short event like El Niño.
Eg: the severe disruption of the jet stream or the collapse of the AMOC.
Plus all the long term feedbacks like methane etc.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
The solution to climate change is definitely not more gadgets and power use.
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You don’t get to be unattached to the lives of others; only your own. What ugly thinking to cloth in Buddhism!
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What is your point? What system are you taking about? Also I don't want to judge but I hope you don't use your past trauma as an excuse for indifference. You can be indifferent but just say so. The fact that you have trauma doesn't give you a leg to stand on. There are plenty of people with trauma and have come out of it. It just sounds rather angsty.
Meanwhile West Antarctic ice shelf barely clutching on.
No direct link, but click the "anomaly" map button just underneath the map. Hello all these similar 10+ °C anomalies that have sat around. Some colder spots too that have hung around! But yikes. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
Sorry, just below the graph, just above the map.
I at least think of El Nino kind of running into South, building up in the Pacific. But the heat cuts across, then down, and pools in Antarctica here, is how I read it.
Needs a TLDR Canadian winter generally: less snow, milder, above normal temp South ontario/quebec more snow.
Looking forward to Fall rain in North Texas. Summer can’t get over soon enough.
I'm in Waco right now and the car said it was 107 today. If one more person says "but it's a dry heat"...
It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.
And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.
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My reply to that is usually “the inside of an oven is a dry heat too, it’s still incompatible with life” hah.
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It's just wet heat.. humid here. Just back-breaking humidity. London has been terrible, 40c (104f).
You step out of the shower and within minutes you're stepping back in for another.
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A little south from you. Car said 102. Some of that depends on where you are. Parking lot, vs say, at the lake or rural areas.
That’s practically our city motto here in Perth, Western Australia.
But it’s true, it’s easier to move around in 38C here than 31 and wet in Singapore.
Of course you don’t want to be caught in the sun, and those 44C summer days really are something else
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Car temperature sensors tend to be inaccurate because they're often in the Sun or some other place affected by baking a car not in a garage.
Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.
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I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.
Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.
https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq
https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/dps/hurricane/
It's 96 ℉ / 36 °C @ 60% humidity every day for 5 months in hill country with no rain in sight. The El Niňo rain may not get here until November. We're right at the 100 meridian west so it's between hot semi-arid (BSH) and humid subtropical (Cfa), and most storms seem to bypass us to the north by about 20 miles. It was growing zone 8b but changed +3 ℉ to 9a in 10 years.
Someone pin this and keep it mind for the actual weather patterns that happen later this year and compare the two.
What in the content farm is this linked website!?
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You're unhappy this site doesn't track you and needs not beg for permission to do so? I can't see anything being stored in cookies, localStorage, or sessionStorage. Let us know if you find that it tracks people in another way that requires consent up front
It only has to ask if the cookies are used for behaviour not relevant for the site (like specialized ads), so it probably doesn’t have to ask.
It doesn't set cookies so it doesn't have to ask.
It sets several cookies. Did you mean to say it doesn't set the kind of cookies for which permission is required?
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Okay Karen.
The Internet police.
All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.
One positive is that solar (and probably other renewables too) prices are plummeting and are now the cheapest way to generate power - so in economic terms, I hope this trend continues and accelerates even more to the point where even fossil fuel addicts can't resist putting a solar panel on their roof.
In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.
Check out https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live - it shows the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar, which is incredible.
Meanwhile, the US is paying the German energy firm RWE $1.2 billion to stop a off shore wind farm that was already under construction. Total payouts are over $4 billion to _stop_ adding electricity supply.
I hope it continues but I hope we make it too.
> the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar
But at midnight last night it was generating 0%.
It is a well known issue that renewables can never provide 100% of the grids requirements because of peaks and troughs, and inefficiencies of storage.
Everyone who states this idea that solar is the saviour never seems to mention the manufacturing chain which requires a TON of energy and chemical processing, and the waste when the panels are no longer efficient enough or past their useful life. Every house in the world suddenly having having solar panels and every ICE vehicle being replaced by electric will cost us untold amounts of physical resources, energy, and create massive amounts of regular waste which cannot be recycled, forever.
There needs to be a managed decline and long term transition which manages both manufacturing and waste pipeline effectively or the shift will just increase the climate change rate.
Im not saying we shouldnt be moving to renewables ASAP, but people need to realise its not as simple as chucking a solar panel on every roof.
Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear, but no.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
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Nuclear plants are being switched off because the droughts.
We wanted to exploit all natural resources to maximum extent using our science and tech without any regard to the side effects. The advantage is free. It helps our business. Business gains are human progress. Tech is wonderful. What are you talking about?
Solar and nuclear are also tech you goof.
Not true. El Nino (increases CO2) and Albedo (long term - it's decreasing) are problematic issues in this area. If it's settled science why bother to even consider other factors? Doubtful if humanity would survive the catastrophe resulting from a global interdiction of the kind you suggest and we're not dense for understanding that. Greening of the planet (plants need carbon to grow) which has contributed $trillions to world productivity would also taper off. Moreover the related sulfate emissions actually mask warming - reductions in these emissions is related to some of the recent temperature increases. So you could likely get a temporary spike in warming. All that said, there are sensible routes to reducing human influence on the planet.
I’m a capitalist, but the only conclusion I can arrive at is that neo liberal capitalism makes it impossible to « do the right thing ». What we have is the logical result of the incentives at play
Actually private equity have been accumulating stakes quickly in renewables lately. Makes sense. Talk bad of a future tech to own most of the cake early for cheap...
https://www.cfainstitute.org/insights/articles/private-equit...
I have come to the same conclusion, but let me ask you, how can you still be a capitalist having had that insight?
Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
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If only China and US could get their shit together....
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
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The argument that small countries don't matter in the equation is silly.
There are ~200 countries, of course on average your country will be less than .5% of emissions. Thinking .5% is small enough to do nothing is exactly the kind of thinking that leads us to inaction.
So yeah, china and the US need to get their act together, but so does every other country.
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https://apnews.com/article/wind-solar-energy-china-climate-c...
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
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Per capita CO2 emissions in the US are down about 36% from their 1973 peak (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions).
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There's way more to climate change than fossil fuels: consuming less and changing diet.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
By far the biggest source of carbon emissions is coal. The others make an impact too, but if we're not addressing coal, there's almost no point addressing the others.
China currently emits a third of the entire C02 generation of the entire planet per year, you taking the bus is going to do nothing.
What we need to do is all stop buying next day delivered pieces of plastic produced in Chinese factories. Boycotting Temu and Amazon and shopping at your local stores is the one massive thing the average person can do to help the planet.
What are fishing boats doing that could cause so much emissions in a single day?
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Ah yes it could have been so easy: All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way.
There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.
Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
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It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
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Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
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individual people don't matter, they're peanuts. otoh the single biggest consumer of fossil fuels is the US DOD. and why is that, really?
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In the plus column, we've had a healthy rainy season in the SE US. And while storms seem to move slower than before, we're not yet overwhelmed by stall+flood events.
Have we? Most all of South Carolina is in a drought. We experienced an exceptionally dry Spring and have had good but not sufficient rains all summer.
Yeah and the west is so extremely dry.
Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.
> Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.
We're defiantly in the rainy side of the scale. https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/products-services/data/statewi...
As for this seasons storms in WCFL, every week I see storms that barely move - often just sitting in place for an hour or more. It's a change from the historical lines that marched across the state.
Come to Japan and say it
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As a New Zealander - oh no please stop threatening me with a warm dry summer.
Fantastic, might mean I get to golf all winter up here in New England if it stays warm enough thanks to this.