Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
severe-weather.eu386 points by dgellow a day ago
386 points by dgellow a day ago
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.
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.
Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.
Futures significantly pre-date your link.
How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?
Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological.
If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.
Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
Nothing you said here actually answers their question, it’s just word salad.
The real answer is - because it would make them go bankrupt, because ‘act of god’ events impact too many people at once and screw up their math.
They figured this out after a bunch of them went bankrupt, so they put it in the contract in advance that they refuse to pay.