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.
I have a family member that works in the field, and it's pretty crazy how little attention we pay to weather extremes. Not only do we not plan on dry years, we also don't plant on wet years.
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.
> NOAA has now placed the probability of a Super El Niño forming by winter at over 95%.
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.
By playing with model inputs, to find a set of input conditions which will create outputs which that historic records.
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.
TLDR: Data sources include ships at the time that made records of temperatures as they traveled; coastal weather-stations kept pressure records indicating how strong the big weather pattern was; biological indicators from tree-ring growth, coral formations, and changes in agricultural output.
_________
I found a NOAA paper about the 1877 El Nino [0] and here are two quotes with lengthy references omitted:
> The existence of the strong 1877/78 El Niño event is supported by in-dependent data sources other than [Sea Surface Temperature], such as the Southern Oscillation index derived from sea level pressure, the drought indices derived from tree rings and corals, and records of famine or food production around the world.
> [...] However, there were few in situ [Sea Surface Temperature] observations at that time. [...] These
sparse [Sea Surface Temperature] records in the east-central Pacific were measured during 14–31 December 1877 and provided by Deutsche Seewarte Marine (ship ID 120) and Met Office Marine Data Bank (ship IDs 4238 and 4270).
IANAClimatologist and I can't guarantee that's exactly the research that went into the Washington Post article cited by the substack post... however I think it's "good enough" for your question about methods.
P.S.: While I'm usually a "data is toxic" person when it comes to private data and surveillance, this kind of data is the polar opposite: It's amazing when humdrum daily information becomes useful to someone decades later, and I can only hope we continue "paying it forward" with similar gifts to those who will come after us. They are literally irreplaceable, without some form of time-travel.
I'm imagining it as incremental amounts of a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that arrives daily on the planet from the sun.
I'm guessing the amount of energy is less of an issue than the cascading transformation chains the daily solar energy allocation bounces through, less of an issue than increasing insulation factors in the atmosphere, etc.
Well I was just thinking about how much time and energy it takes to warm a large building. This system is warming things up for thousands of miles. It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
Having a building heating amount as a base unit is likely an error of scale - not incorrect, just not particularly useful or enlightening when it comes to making a model of energy flows and cascades about the planet.
> It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
The entire US grid? Entire global electricity grid? Probably?
Have a shot at putting numbers and units to some of this ... Total amount of daily solar energy fall, total amount of daily energy radiation to space, daily residual energy at sea / surface layer, historic and current human energy consumption (broken into electricity, heat, ??) etc.
The Sun imparts about 7.6 kWh/m²/day at the equator.
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.
Btw, 100 years of forest fire elimination has left old growth trees vulnerable to death by scorching when forest fires do come through. The answer is a difficult one: for humans to move flammable litter away from the trunks of old growth trees manually; inconveniently, Rake America Great Again is partially correct, unintentionally. It's a problem that humans have created that nature cannot fix itself.
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.
Is it really alarmism when anyone alive for the last 30 years can clearly tell weather patterns are changing?
To me this is like claiming someone in 1901 was an alarmist for talking about how dumping chemicals into our waterways was destroying them and dumping chemicals out the back of plants was creating polluted toxic ground as they observe increasing numbers of dead fish. And they were right, there are endless numbers of extremely toxic superfund sites and even more that are poorly documented that we know are killing people.
I'm as big a doomer (realist?) as they come but I think the framing is misleading here - deaths due to natural disasters have gone down due to planning, infastructure, coordination, better warning systems, so merely stating that millions died last time feels like sensationalism
You really should revisit the absurd claims Gore was promoting that didn't age well like the north pole melting in 5 years (2014).
IMHO, the toxic chemicals comparison doesn't work.
For climate change, you have alternatives to raise people's quality of life more effectively and saying that you must prioritize fighting climate change over ... better healthcare, sanitation (avoidance of toxic chemicals!*), nutrition, workforce development, etc. is not really an easy sell because the other paths yield better ROI.
> You really should revisit the absurd claims Gore was promoting
Why? Absurd claims are absurd claims - I have zero doubts about the AGW outline and majority of case and data put forward in the IPCC papers despite never having seen the Gore film nor even living in the USofA.
These affluent countries torture themselves with terrible energy transition projects that jack up prices for everyone at the cost of more efficient alternatives.
Healthcare, nutrition, education and other programs do vastly more for quality of life improvements for the poor.
The earth is hotter than it's been in 125,000 years. Warming at a rate dozens of times faster than the fastest periods of natural warming. The oceans are 25% more acidic. The worlds ice sheets and glaciers are losing 1 trillion tons of mass per year.
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.
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.
I have a family member that works in the field, and it's pretty crazy how little attention we pay to weather extremes. Not only do we not plan on dry years, we also don't plant on wet years.
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.
the problem, as i understand it, is that an el nino will ratchet up the temperature and push us past the 1.5c threshold significantly
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/super-el-nino-climate-regime-sh...
> NOAA has now placed the probability of a Super El Niño forming by winter at over 95%.
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...
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?
By playing with model inputs, to find a set of input conditions which will create outputs which that historic records.
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.
TLDR: Data sources include ships at the time that made records of temperatures as they traveled; coastal weather-stations kept pressure records indicating how strong the big weather pattern was; biological indicators from tree-ring growth, coral formations, and changes in agricultural output.
_________
I found a NOAA paper about the 1877 El Nino [0] and here are two quotes with lengthy references omitted:
> The existence of the strong 1877/78 El Niño event is supported by in-dependent data sources other than [Sea Surface Temperature], such as the Southern Oscillation index derived from sea level pressure, the drought indices derived from tree rings and corals, and records of famine or food production around the world.
> [...] However, there were few in situ [Sea Surface Temperature] observations at that time. [...] These sparse [Sea Surface Temperature] records in the east-central Pacific were measured during 14–31 December 1877 and provided by Deutsche Seewarte Marine (ship ID 120) and Met Office Marine Data Bank (ship IDs 4238 and 4270).
IANAClimatologist and I can't guarantee that's exactly the research that went into the Washington Post article cited by the substack post... however I think it's "good enough" for your question about methods.
P.S.: While I'm usually a "data is toxic" person when it comes to private data and surveillance, this kind of data is the polar opposite: It's amazing when humdrum daily information becomes useful to someone decades later, and I can only hope we continue "paying it forward" with similar gifts to those who will come after us. They are literally irreplaceable, without some form of time-travel.
[0] https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/46581
It wasn't that long ago. Maybe someone stuck a thermometer down there.
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_...
https://www.whoi.edu/ocean-learning-hub/ocean-topics/climate...
Just imagine how much energy is required to produce that band at planetary scale.
I'm imagining it as incremental amounts of a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that arrives daily on the planet from the sun.
I'm guessing the amount of energy is less of an issue than the cascading transformation chains the daily solar energy allocation bounces through, less of an issue than increasing insulation factors in the atmosphere, etc.
Would that be about right by your reckoning?
Well I was just thinking about how much time and energy it takes to warm a large building. This system is warming things up for thousands of miles. It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
Having a building heating amount as a base unit is likely an error of scale - not incorrect, just not particularly useful or enlightening when it comes to making a model of energy flows and cascades about the planet.
> It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
The entire US grid? Entire global electricity grid? Probably?
Have a shot at putting numbers and units to some of this ... Total amount of daily solar energy fall, total amount of daily energy radiation to space, daily residual energy at sea / surface layer, historic and current human energy consumption (broken into electricity, heat, ??) etc.
It's a handy exercise.
The Sun imparts about 7.6 kWh/m²/day at the equator.
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.
Btw, 100 years of forest fire elimination has left old growth trees vulnerable to death by scorching when forest fires do come through. The answer is a difficult one: for humans to move flammable litter away from the trunks of old growth trees manually; inconveniently, Rake America Great Again is partially correct, unintentionally. It's a problem that humans have created that nature cannot fix itself.
The seriousness of whats written is drowned in the fact that its written by AI.
"Millions Now Living Will Never Die"
goated post-rock reference
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.
Is it really alarmism when anyone alive for the last 30 years can clearly tell weather patterns are changing?
To me this is like claiming someone in 1901 was an alarmist for talking about how dumping chemicals into our waterways was destroying them and dumping chemicals out the back of plants was creating polluted toxic ground as they observe increasing numbers of dead fish. And they were right, there are endless numbers of extremely toxic superfund sites and even more that are poorly documented that we know are killing people.
I'm as big a doomer (realist?) as they come but I think the framing is misleading here - deaths due to natural disasters have gone down due to planning, infastructure, coordination, better warning systems, so merely stating that millions died last time feels like sensationalism
You really should revisit the absurd claims Gore was promoting that didn't age well like the north pole melting in 5 years (2014).
IMHO, the toxic chemicals comparison doesn't work.
For climate change, you have alternatives to raise people's quality of life more effectively and saying that you must prioritize fighting climate change over ... better healthcare, sanitation (avoidance of toxic chemicals!*), nutrition, workforce development, etc. is not really an easy sell because the other paths yield better ROI.
*Edit*
> You really should revisit the absurd claims Gore was promoting
Why? Absurd claims are absurd claims - I have zero doubts about the AGW outline and majority of case and data put forward in the IPCC papers despite never having seen the Gore film nor even living in the USofA.
> I have zero doubts
That is a red flag, regarding almost anything. It's a blind spot.
LOL!
How do you reconcile arguing it isn't "alarmism" and acknowledging the claims are "absurd"?
You're definitely trying to have it both ways on the issue of whether people have been guilty of promoting alarmism.
If you are a rich Westerner, you'll probably be fine. It's the poor that take the brunt when these sorts of emergencies happen.
>rich Westerner
Not quite.
These affluent countries torture themselves with terrible energy transition projects that jack up prices for everyone at the cost of more efficient alternatives.
Healthcare, nutrition, education and other programs do vastly more for quality of life improvements for the poor.
No one is going to be fine.
Exactly
There is way too much noise, AI made what was bad worse.
Before, it was the main stream media sharing biased information.
Now we have the same biased media AND AI sharing slope left and right. The only option left is independent journalist, ignore everything else.
The earth is hotter than it's been in 125,000 years. Warming at a rate dozens of times faster than the fastest periods of natural warming. The oceans are 25% more acidic. The worlds ice sheets and glaciers are losing 1 trillion tons of mass per year.
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.
this reaction is a big part of the problem
also has nothing to do with possible covid food shortages
[dead]