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The Strongest El Niño Ever

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61–70 of 370 posts

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#61
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#62

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.

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).

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about

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?

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#64
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?

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.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

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.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#66

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 u…

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.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

Yes for temperature but what about CO2 ppm?

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#69
post #31

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.

Re: The Strongest El Niño Ever

#70

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.

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.

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