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This claim appears to be false. According to this article's own source, the probability of an El Niño of any severity forming is over 95%, but there is still "substantial uncertainty" about what that severity is going to be.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/e...
I'm living in a New Mexico forest that is full of dead pinyon pine trees after a beetle blight caused by a long term drought. The wildfire danger is extreme. A super El Nino would be an answer to our prayers. I wouldn't choose it at the cost of millions dead, but for us it would be a gift from above. Not a pardon, but maybe a reprieve.
My concern is that even if it would temporarily alleviate the local drought conditions for some areas, it wouldn't reverse the long term trends towards hotter, drier conditions.
We tend to make very optimistic views of weather cycles, then plan for best. Where he works in California, a large portion of the total rainfall occurs during El Niño cycles, which means once a decade or so, they'll get a year or two with several times the rainfall of the other years in the rest of decade. They take the average of the whole decade, and plan that as the baseline. This means that under normal weather cycles, they expect most years to be far wetter than data shows they will be, and the remaining years are treated as extreme rainfall, despite it being regular and predictable.
On top of that, they only have ~200 years of data, but most of the data points only cover half that time. They use the newer data to create their models, because it has more data points, despite knowing the whether was much worse in some of the earlier data, with extremes like a hurricane that hit San Diego in 1858 and the worst-ever-recorded flood in 1862.
The only way to handle weather extremes is to design around future expected variations when building infrastructure. Whether we tried to use all of humanities resources to change course, or there were no anthropogenic effects at all on the climate, the glaciers would be melting and lakes would be drying up. There's nothing we can do to control these weather extremes in any meaningful way, but we are pretty good at figuring out what extremes to expect.
To put in in perspective, in the Late Pleistocene era, glaciers covered almost the entire US/Canada boarder and all of the great lakes, but California, Nevada, and Utah had their own great lakes. At the other extreme, before that ice age started, there was liquid ocean at the North Pole. This cycle occurs over hundreds of thousands of years, so infrastructure for any given lifetime needn't be planned around it. At the other end, we also have weather cycles that occur multiple times within the design life of any given piece of infrastructure, and we should design for those.
There’s been so much climate alarmism since Al Gore decided to pivot to ‘hero of humanity’ that it barely registers for me now. I still have frozen rice and beans from covid. Hope they’re still good.
Did Al Gore make a stupid prediction about arctic sea ice loss? Yes. Do you know who criticized him at the time? Climate scientists. Did you know Al Gore isn't a fucking scientist?
I fucking hate Al Gore. You know why? Because he made himself the face of the climate crisis and now every partisan fuck on the right can't see past that. It's overwhelming their rationality.
Stupid question: how do they know with such fidelity what the water temp was in the Pacific in 1877? It’s not like solid land where there are strata and whatnot that leave a geological record? Or is it?
It's one of those things that is much more precise than accurate, which means that the data on the 1877 map is all plus or minus a range that most of the data falls into. It's like election polls that show candidates a percent or two ahead or behind, but the data is all plus or minus a larger percentage. It gives a general idea of the state of things, but isn't useful for specifics, so it could tell which types of candidates are winning, but is useless at guessing whether any individual candidate will win or lose.
Just imagine how much energy is required to produce that band at planetary scale.
Suppose the area of the equatorial oceans is about 100M km².
That's 2.41e21 J/day potential of hitting oceans, but not entirely absorbed. Put another way: about ⅓ the energy of all natural gas reserves as solar radiation per day.
There’s been so much climate alarmism since Al Gore decided to pivot to ‘hero of humanity’ that it barely registers for me now. I still have frozen rice and beans from covid. Hope they’re still good.
also has nothing to do with possible covid food shortages
The seriousness of whats written is drowned in the fact that its written by AI.
There’s been so much climate alarmism since Al Gore decided to pivot to ‘hero of humanity’ that it barely registers for me now. I still have frozen rice and beans from covid. Hope they’re still good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over enough of the Pacific to be able to say this with confidence? They might have... but I doubt it.
Oceanic science has has been happening for quite a long time. You may wish to have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_and_American_voyages_...
cntrl-f therm: zero matches.
I know voyages have been done for a long time. There weren't many undiscovered islands by then. There were a bunch of species found (my ancestor did a fair amount of that).
But how good was the temperature map?
How do they know what the water temperature was, across the whole Pacific, in 1877? At what resolution do they know it?
dlcarrier's answer (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202959) says that they are using the data that they do have to derive the temperature, with "more precision than accuracy". They don't know that accurately, and what they do know, they don't know from "someone sticking a thermometer down there".