alt Hacker News> I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
> This isn't climate, it's weather.
Under any sane statistical model. If we assume that this is a naturally occurring once in century El Nino under an equal probability model we'd expect not to see it before we have 70 years of records.