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

severe-weather.eu

341–350 of 401 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) We saw already around 2020 or so that specialists opinions didn't really matter. Feelings and politicians opinions were more relevant... so "nobody in planet modelling" means nothing if Politicians and Activists tries to create this link.. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, and António Guterres, i think last month, tri…

I can't speak to what former US vice presidents and UN politicians may or may not have said, I've not seen Gore's movie, I don't watch UN speeches.

I have spent a few decades in exploration geophysics at world scale; gravity, tides, radiometrics, upward & downward continuations of magnetic fields, etc is more my speed.

I suspect you may have some confusion, trapped heat from the sun's visible light drives ENSO (a kind of delayed oscillator with noise) and so human added insulation trapping more heat drives ENSO harder (like pushing a kid on a swing harder) but human activity didn't create ENSO - the atmospheric climate cells and swing sets were already there long before humans first planted crops.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ignorin…

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

My assumption was that it was written by several separate prompts and then stitched together.

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

#343
post #120
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

> 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.

Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.

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

#344
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that program still exist in the way we expect it to or has it been DOGE’d like the USAID program?

It was cut for Yemen, the Congo, Niger, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, and Madagascar. Ultimately, USAID is massive vehicle for subsidizing US agriculture so a lot of cuts related to that got restored. It's also a massive benefit to the competitiveness of US agriculture because a huge influx of "free" (sorta) foreign food is a great way to bankrupt domestic markets. See Haiti for example: https://publicintegrity.org/accountability/haitian-farmers-u...

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

#345
post #51
post #33

[flagged]

Okay Karen.

Oh dear.

The site has .eu domain. Every freaking site in the world has to annoy 8bn people to accept or reject cookies because EU passed a a law that can cost you a lot of money if you ignore that.

Someone needs to take things easy Karen...

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? It’s still multiples more than other places.

So, what exactly does "getting one's shit together" mean, if not a reduction in per-capita usage over time?

A nationwide fossil fuel tax high enough that would have brought carbon emissions down to at least Europe quality of life levels.

But we all know the voting majority wants to consume. It doesn’t take decades to come down to still being 2x or more than other developed countries.

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

#347
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't engage with people who aren't willing to be honest with what the data supports. OK, whatever. But what was I dishonest about? Cite the figures. Should be pretty easy. ...oh, and by the way: > You acknowledge that the downstream consequences of El Niño effects is amplified heatwaves, presumably. In some places , sure. In others (i.e. the western pacific), it leads to regional cooling. Let's at least get our…

[flagged]

Yeah, I know. I didn't expect these to be popular comments. There's a hardcore contingent of people who have an absolutely unshakeable conviction of apocalypse that borders on religious faith, coupled with next to zero understanding of the actual data. To these types, simply telling them what the IPCC reports say, verbatim (what I've done here), is tantamount to heresy.

It does bug me a little that their knee-jerk response is always insults and censorship (of course my comment was flagged...no wrongthink allowed here, even if it does come from the IPCC!) but every time they do that, it shows normal thinkers that there's a reasonable center ground, and the doom-and-gloom crowd isn't even remotely being rational.

...but then again, that's probably why their first impulse is censorship.

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

#348
post #301
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In other words, average temperature is higher is mostly because cold days are shorter and warmer a lot more than hot days is hotter?

I don't know about "shorter", but basically, the cold days are decreasing faster than the hot days are increasing.

This is still a problem! But the people who run around screaming about heat waves causing mass casualty today are simply not credible commentators. Far more people die of cold than heat in any given year, so a reduction in cold days will tend to net out to a gain in human life, not a loss.

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

#349
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identif…

I'm just pointing out the logistics of delivering aid is difficult with one example terrorist group doing so and that was the first one to come to mind. There may not have been evidence of systematic aid theft but that's not the same thing as aid theft. Nevermind that not finding evidence isn't the same thing as something not happening. But anyway, they do interfere with aid [1]. Them doing it a single time ever prov…

> I'm just pointing out the logistics of delivering aid is difficult with one example terrorist group doing so

The IDF has done far more, larger terrorist acts for far longer.

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

#350
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. * https://ehammurabi.org/law/48

We've made a couple advances in food production, storage, and distribution in the decades since Hammurabi last walked the earth.

And still we are subject to bad harvests, floods, droughts, pests, and diseases. Any given farmer still has to deal with the consequences of this, even if a nation, or humanity collectively, is better insulated.

Futures contracts are themselves also more developed than what was in those laws.

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