alt Hacker NewsThe Strongest El Niño Ever
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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.
We all know we’re way past the time where we need to cut the carbon emissions, like it was 30 years ago. Why aren’t the governments investing money on research on carbon capture technology? That’s the only way left to undo massive carbon emissions due to industrialisation
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.
Other than "numbers go up" it's unclear to me what the consequences are, as I'm not extremely familiar with El Niño events. Hurricanes, maybe?
Wow, this thing should be nicknamed "El Hombre"
The weather in Japan has been completely wack I can tell you that. The rainy season is never ending in central and north Japan. It was actually declared over but it's back again. Never seen that before.
I wrote to Alan Kay over 8 years ago about my fears of global warming and how tech seems to dismiss it as a concern on the whole.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend roughly the energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years (30,000-45,000 EJ range) just to put the system back to where it's safe.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
Does this mean California is more likely to get mega flooding?
I for one am impressed we get couple months of warning before it happens
Maybe Trump can tariff it? That should solve the problem.
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.
If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
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 up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer