The Strongest El Niño Ever
theclimatebrink.com148 points by ndsipa_pomu 2 hours ago
148 points by ndsipa_pomu 2 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well.
The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops.
Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.
Yeah, I wasn't planning to run the cold loops through the existing radiator piping. I just want the ability to cool at least 1 room by reusing the air-to-water system, even if that means the FPU requires its own piping from the outside.
In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?
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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Well that's a relief, glad I am a turtle then and so are most of my friends, and that our whole world economy and food system runs on turtles. So we should be fine.
You are right, it is an exaggeration.
I should have said "land life" as the ocean temperature doesn't shift that much with the above ocean temps.
And I'm sure there's some random bacteria and fungus that can survive and thrive at 40C web bulb.
What doesn't tend to do so well is the likes of humans, birds, cattle, horses, mice, rats, insects, many crops, native animal life that didn't evolve to handle high heat temperatures.
The last time earth will have been as hot as the 3C temperature was prehistorically.
I wonder if "but the turtles survived and I was right!" is the best way to look at it if humanity is close to extinction in the next century or so.
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.
Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
Well they seem to have switched to releasing stored heat. Isn't that basically the El Nino / La Nina cycle?
Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption
To vaporize 10^21 kg of seawater from ~4 °C to 100 °C would require ~10^27 joules, around 16 trillion Hiroshimas or ~2.5 seconds of the sun's output.
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.
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.
Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about
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.
Yeah, data-centers are definitely the worst thing happening to the planet. You got your priorities straight.
AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption, if that, and an even smaller fraction of the total energy?
Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.
In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
<https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...>
DC water consumption is a red herring. That water is returned back to its source but warmer.
If you think that every data center is now a closed loop system enjoy your propaganda.
Colossus 1 and 2 still use open loop systems. And with the case of blow down water that's "returned" it's not usable due to the use of concentrated salts (1,200 to 6,000 mg/L).
In your mind this is a closed loop system of clean water. It is not. And as DCs have less and less discharge there is more and more solid waste produced.
Your assertion that "water consumption is a red herring" is utter bull shit. I'd suggest enlightening yourself [0][1][2][3].
[0] https://genesiswatertech.com/blog-post/advanced-blowdown-tre... [1] https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21760 [3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/epa-writing-perm...
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.
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
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 neef to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).
Wow, this thing should be nicknamed "El Hombre"
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.
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
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.
True, but a lot of that was due to a lack of integrated water management (IWM) in California at the time, and led to significant reforms as well as infra expansion to prevent that from happening again.
The Lima Prieta Quake and the 1990s floods led to a lot of future proofing in Californian infra. The last major thing left is transmission weathering, which PGE and Sac are fighting over.
Also, most of our infra is state funded which gives us a lot of leeway.
Like I said before, it's bad that we're in this position and it's only going to get worse, but we're in one of the better places that can survive these kinds of shifts.
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.
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 really believe this is corporate propaganda. "Don't worry, we have the solutions".
You don't.
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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?
Yeah the clock turned out to be silly, but if you interpret it as risk level instead of time, it makes sense. Since the 70s we have been at a near-100% chance this would happen.
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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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe Trump can tariff it? That should solve the problem.
More TDS redditors ruining any semblance of a healthy discussion on HN
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.
Come on, Trump would never "tarrif" something called "El Nino".
He would first deport it a couple times.
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.