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Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

73 points6 hourssevere-weather.eu
dstanko4 minutes ago

Unrelated question, where do I report this site for not asking me if I want cookies or not?

izend36 minutes ago

The strongest El Niño ever caused a massive famine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...

gmuslera1 hour ago

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.

xrd7 minutes ago

I really tried to get through this. But sentences like this were confusing to me:

   In simple terms, the ocean surface anomalies are just the surface footprint of this massive subsurface warm core.
chasd0010 minutes ago

Looking forward to Fall rain in North Texas. Summer can’t get over soon enough.

mh-6 minutes ago

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"...

bix61 hour ago

Great write up but bummed to not see any info about the waves. It’s been a bonkers summer!

Noaidi2 hours ago

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.

lukeify1 hour ago

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.

gottorf29 minutes ago

> 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

anon700014 minutes ago

Look, I think you made some good points, but at the same time, humans have become better at handling the climate because we’ve been able to predict it and have found solutions to certain known issues. What happens when it gets less predictable, like when certain regions get much less water for an extended period, is very much unknown.

Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.

Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.

I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.

nx7716 minutes ago

Death is a feature and not a bug of the system, in my mind atleast. I come from a pretty dysfunctional/chaotic family which sometimes makes me think larger systems have this unpredictability and lack of control too. Do I spend my time studying the dysfunction? Beyond a point its exhausting. Ask anyone who comes from a trauma organized system. For us it is more a relief that there is an exit door out of such traps we are born into. Maybe the buddhist philosophy is a healthier way to think about it - over attachment to anything that is ever changing is the path to suffering.

jauntywundrkind51 minutes ago

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

WarOnPrivacy5 hours ago

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.

antonymoose3 hours ago

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.

camd323 hours ago

Yeah and the west is so extremely dry.

mathgeek2 hours ago

Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.

bamboozled1 hour ago

Come to Japan and say it

mapotofu2 hours ago

Oh thank god, the farms of the SE US must be ecstatic, and surely we will all benefit from the rainfall hitting checks notes… Purdue chicken farms.

Oh that’s not a plus and just another American centric knee jerk comment on nothing.

bamboozled1 hour ago

All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.

simulator5g1 hour ago

Ah yes it could have been so easy: All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way.

DangitBobby39 minutes ago

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.

parineum31 minutes ago

We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.

We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.

DangitBobby17 minutes ago

Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.

The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.

coldbrewed1 hour ago

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.

lucb1e52 minutes ago

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.

gottorf23 minutes ago

> Most people agree on basic values

This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.

lucb1e7 minutes ago

Bit of an easy claim without concrete examples as I gave. Would hold more water if you'd tell us which local or global culture does not have basic decency as a value / wants to cause any of the things I mentioned such as forced relocation

fragmede19 minutes ago

Yeah they do, on the really basic stuff, on a global level.

animanoir35 minutes ago

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