Any time this stuff comes up it's important to understand that this el Nino is occuring in the context of a global climate that is warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years. The risks inherent to weather and climate are growing all the time.
The important part to understand here is the childish reaction by major parts of the US populace to the outsize responsibility their country has for the catastrophic development of the global climate.
Instead of acknowledging the scientific facts and the ethical implications thereof, they engage in "catch me if you can"-tactics.
They let themselves be willfully utilized as a shield of ignorance against the financial restitution they owe. Not to speak of the implied loss of influence in the world economy after fossil fuels are phased out.
It's because carbon reduction has not been disconnected from material impoverishment. We need more stuff moving; we need more housing, we need more transport, we need more food, we need more energy, we need more children. Carbon reduction's story is one of denying/reducing these things in the name of saving planet earth. The answer needs to be doing both: reducing carbon and making more houses and food and energy and babies. Nobody really wants to be DINK pod-people who have little optionality in life activities, and that's what climate change warriors are selling them.
The idea of "unbounded capitalism", leading to incessant growth, while painting reductions as "impoverishment", is a capital error.
Reality doesn't allow for any such thing and wishing for it doesn't make it so.
Consequently, ignoring that reality will see you running into a wall head-on. With wildly devastating consequences: El Niño is just one immediate symptom, look at the AMOC. It collapsing will see about 70% or more of Earth's population wiped out. Along with the corresponding capacity for crop growth.
What you need to do is actually preventing foreseeable calamities, not complaining about people pointing you at them.
rustcleaner didn't say that his or her suggested solution is capitalism, though it might be.
People in communism, or nearly any other socioeconomic system, also want more housing, transport, food, energy, and children.
Reality includes public opinion, which even authoritarian systems have to account for to some extent. So even if the reality is that climate change will be so devastating that it needs to be addressed by any means necessary (I don't know if that is the reality, but let's say for the sake of argument that it is), that necessity has to be sold to people somehow.
And it's difficult to convince people to accept impoverishment if the truly major negative consequences of not acting on climate change are ones that will not happen for decades, as seems to be the case at least in temperate regions. I know very little about AMOC, but it seems the science about AMOC collapse timelines is not settled enough to convince the average person that something must be done immediately.
To get public buy-in in such a situation, it may be more advantageous to figure out how to be able to sell the necessary changes in a way that is not accompanied by impoverishment. That or ignore public buy-in, but then one still has to figure out how to do that. Voters punish economic decline. And I doubt that there is a realistic path to replacing Western democracy with an authoritarian system that has climate change as a top priority, at least in the near future.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I think they’re saying that the constraints of reality include, “If their answer requires lesser production, movement, and quality of life, then it never was a thoughtful answer.”
It’s not far from what I’ve always thought. We simply will not solve these problems with broad self-denial. It’s an absurd notion, even if the monastic sheen of it sounds nice.
US has reduced their global carbon emissions over the last 20 years. We were a peak of 55% of global emissions to less than 13% today, and continue to drop (we were 23% in 2000).
Even when adjusting for trade, it is down considerably over the last 20 years. Mainly due to dematerialization, basically a free market economy doing more with less (e.g. efficient packaging uses less materials and is cheaper).
US and the Western world can continue reducing carbon emissions and it won't make a bit of difference.
Try spending 5 minutes on google before you spout uniformed opinions
> Try spending 5 minutes on google before you spout uniformed opinions
See HN guidelines, and perhaps steelman their claim.
By "outsize responsibility" they likely refer to the fact that still today the US as a country has been the source of the largest per country contribution to AGW gases (burnt fossil fuels).
They might also refer to 1970s US capitalists (eg: Koch brothers) doubling down hard on climate denial after the papers of 1967 and actively funding think tanks to push civic development towards roads, away from public transport, and make bigger cars sexy.
To this day the cumulative total of fossil gases uplifted by the US still exceeds that of China - despite the smaller population of the USS.
This statistic completely ignores the fact that the US externalizes its' CO2 emissions by externalizing by sending our manufacturing to other countries.
How much of China's CO2 is a result of the products Americans buy that were manufactured in China?
If we look at CO2 as a result of consumption it would tell a truer story.
And yet despite that and having a much larger population the cumulative total CO2 uplift of China is still less than that of the US.
It'd better to avoid country V country pissing contests and focus on global efforts. In a real sense the cost of going solar, wind, renewable powered is Chinese emissions .. for now.
Telling them this will make them vote even stronger in the other way. Especially if you call them stupid, selfish, etc.
You have to show them how it impacts eg. the cost of insurance for coastal properties. But even so, this is hard to convey. The people voting aren't feeling it and are told by coastal elites what to care about - changing their opinion in the opposite direction.
Some countries are even going to benefit tremendously from warming, eg. Russia gets more arable land and access to the North Sea, which is fantastic for trade, energy, and defense.
I called them neither of that, I pointed out the infantile nature of their reaction.
Telling people the truth evokes all kinds of weird reactions, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
The preservation of our shared prerequisite for our continued existence isn't accurately captured by financial metrics. Pretending it was is a major error.
You start with protecting "people" (you are included?) against supposed accusations of stupidity, only to then go on and paint them (and yourself) as stupid and unable to judge connections and consequences correctly. And even stoop to pointing at whataboutisms of imaginary upsides.
If you "immediately tune out" the truth, you tune out reality. What does that make you?
When your child acts in such a way (imagine it trying to kill its pet, which it was tasked with sustaining), what do you do? Entertain its fantasies and accommodate its wishes?
The point here is, you enable people to act in such childish ways by inventing justifications for their behavior. Your own prior behavior might well be the cause of their actions in the first place.
It's gotten bad all over the western world. Here in Canada, just mentioning climate change and policies to restrict CO2 emissions puts you in the political doghouse and gets you crucified on social media. It's just apparently not a concern now. Carney has eviscerated all regulation, and enabling exponential growth of the oil export sector is now a national emergency justified by tariffs, nationalism, national unity etc. etc.
Sorry, great grand-children. Pipelines gotta pump.
I don't know much about climate change science, so I use epistemological heuristics and reach the conclusion that the spectrum of scientific consensus on the topic is more likely to be correct than denial that there is a problem is likely to be correct.
Despite this, I don't have the time or energy to really care much about climate change. I have more immediate problems. I have bills to pay. I barely think about climate change at all. Maybe it would be different if I had children, but I'm not sure. Children make people care more about the non-immediate future, but they also take time and energy. So it's hard to say.
I'm probably pretty representative of the average person in this regard.
> in the political doghouse and gets you crucified on social media
This is arguably the correct thing, even if you believe the situation is urgent, if you also believe that other things are more urgent. Suppose you think that fixing declining education or economies is absolutely prerequisite, and that until people are smarter or more comfortable or both, even discussing the climate too often weakens your chances of building effective coalitions.
Personally, I go back and forth when I weigh this sort of thing, I'm really not sure. We probably need to at least consider that this is a consistent/coherent perspective. Of course, it's not a invitation to make things worse as fast as possible with drill-baby-drill.. but an acknowledgement that there are many other ways to make things worse, such as pissing people off. Aggravating corporations is fine, but for people who are not ready to hear about this, we need real consideration and a real offer. However inconsistently, we have tried forcing an agenda they need to comply with already, so now let's try something else
The link between El Nino and extreme weather is breaking down. The last El Nino caused an extremely wet summer in Australia despite a century of data pointing in the opposite direction.
The current one seems to be doing the same as the old one.
Climate is filled with non linearities and drawing straight lines from the past is a fools errant.
Least we forget the Sahara only turned into a desert when it got less sunshine.
Is it important? The globe is warming and it’s the new normal. Explaining it one more time isn’t going to make a difference.
Those of us who want to see CO2 reductions need to find solutions that don’t lead to inflation in the short term. It’s probably going to be a technological rather than policy solution.
> The risks inherent to weather and climate are growing all the time.
Risk is subjective, so this doesn't mean much without quantifying what you feel is risky to you. Moreover, of all the risks we have heard expressed in the population, there is no unary growth value. There is a change in distribution, and some risks have grown, but some risks have also shrunk. If you are relying on the reader to bring their own idea of what the risks are, this is almost certainly going to be false.
I expect you say this with good intentions, trying to instil fear in the reader to convince them that climate change is something to pay attention to. But this kind of "absolute truth" that doesn't hold up to scrutiny is what actually turns people off paying attention to something that justifiably does warrant attention. Let's do better.
I thought risk was defined as probability times cost (or at least that is what you are trying to minimize in risk management) -- so if the probability of costs goes up, would not also risk? You don't have to enumerate each specific risk to believe that risks are growing.
I'd say more commonly we say consequence, but I think you can fairly use cost and consequence interchangeably here. They have similar meaning. However, consequence/cost too are subjective. Thus risk is also subjective. Something cannot be objective if its variables are subjective.
Costs are tangible, making them objective, even if they have underlying subjectivities. The cost of milk is objective, even if your purchasing habits are subjective.
You are correct that "cost" has more than one definition, but, as already discussed, the one we are talking about equates to consequence, not an amount of money. Your milk analogy doesn't fit. Whether or not a so-called consequence is seen as a consequence is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm well aware of the narrowing you imposed. Consequence in these terms still equates to an objective reality, even if the underlying source of it can be described as subjective. The consequences of rising milk prices is an objective reality, even if your purchasing habits are subjective.
There is significantly more moisture in the atmosphere now meaning the storms that el nino brings will have a greater capacity to cause flooding. The water the piles up on the west coast of north America will be in addition to the sea level rise that already occurred. Making coastal flooding worse. A drier winter in the Pacific northwest means less snowpack and therefore less water available in the summer with global warming this is exacerbated by the loss of mountain glaciers which help balance seasonal variability. Heating the western Pacific means el nino has always been bad for fisheries there, but layering it on top of global warming can increasingly devastate fish populations there.
Our infrastructure and agriculture are designed around a climate regime that is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. I think your attitude about this shit is nonsensical
The moisture is a side-effect of the additional energy in the atmosphere - warmer gases can hold more water vapour.
And that's the thing - our climate is a massively complex system of interacting systems, and now we've put more energy into it, and it'll show up in the variability.
If there is something you don't believe is a risk, who are going to file a claim with? Normally insurers expect you to arrange insurance beforehand, which requires identifying something you believe is a risk.
"Yeah, tens of millions died and hundreds of millions were displaced, but in the meantime we made a lot of value for the shareholders so it wasn't all bad."
I would be curious too. That said each pilot must avoid dangerous weather. There is a recent captain steeeve video where the pilot does that. ATC won't vector them around the storm (not sure why...) so they declare an emergency then they are free to fly as needed to avoid it.
Any time this stuff comes up it's important to understand that this el Nino is occuring in the context of a global climate that is warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years. The risks inherent to weather and climate are growing all the time.
The important part to understand here is the childish reaction by major parts of the US populace to the outsize responsibility their country has for the catastrophic development of the global climate.
Instead of acknowledging the scientific facts and the ethical implications thereof, they engage in "catch me if you can"-tactics.
They let themselves be willfully utilized as a shield of ignorance against the financial restitution they owe. Not to speak of the implied loss of influence in the world economy after fossil fuels are phased out.
It's because carbon reduction has not been disconnected from material impoverishment. We need more stuff moving; we need more housing, we need more transport, we need more food, we need more energy, we need more children. Carbon reduction's story is one of denying/reducing these things in the name of saving planet earth. The answer needs to be doing both: reducing carbon and making more houses and food and energy and babies. Nobody really wants to be DINK pod-people who have little optionality in life activities, and that's what climate change warriors are selling them.
Imagine that ... people warring against an existential threat to human civilization.
The idea of "unbounded capitalism", leading to incessant growth, while painting reductions as "impoverishment", is a capital error.
Reality doesn't allow for any such thing and wishing for it doesn't make it so.
Consequently, ignoring that reality will see you running into a wall head-on. With wildly devastating consequences: El Niño is just one immediate symptom, look at the AMOC. It collapsing will see about 70% or more of Earth's population wiped out. Along with the corresponding capacity for crop growth.
What you need to do is actually preventing foreseeable calamities, not complaining about people pointing you at them.
rustcleaner didn't say that his or her suggested solution is capitalism, though it might be.
People in communism, or nearly any other socioeconomic system, also want more housing, transport, food, energy, and children.
Reality includes public opinion, which even authoritarian systems have to account for to some extent. So even if the reality is that climate change will be so devastating that it needs to be addressed by any means necessary (I don't know if that is the reality, but let's say for the sake of argument that it is), that necessity has to be sold to people somehow.
And it's difficult to convince people to accept impoverishment if the truly major negative consequences of not acting on climate change are ones that will not happen for decades, as seems to be the case at least in temperate regions. I know very little about AMOC, but it seems the science about AMOC collapse timelines is not settled enough to convince the average person that something must be done immediately.
To get public buy-in in such a situation, it may be more advantageous to figure out how to be able to sell the necessary changes in a way that is not accompanied by impoverishment. That or ignore public buy-in, but then one still has to figure out how to do that. Voters punish economic decline. And I doubt that there is a realistic path to replacing Western democracy with an authoritarian system that has climate change as a top priority, at least in the near future.
>that's what climate change warriors are selling them.
Interesting way to frame the constraints of reality.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I think they’re saying that the constraints of reality include, “If their answer requires lesser production, movement, and quality of life, then it never was a thoughtful answer.”
It’s not far from what I’ve always thought. We simply will not solve these problems with broad self-denial. It’s an absurd notion, even if the monastic sheen of it sounds nice.
US has reduced their global carbon emissions over the last 20 years. We were a peak of 55% of global emissions to less than 13% today, and continue to drop (we were 23% in 2000).
Even when adjusting for trade, it is down considerably over the last 20 years. Mainly due to dematerialization, basically a free market economy doing more with less (e.g. efficient packaging uses less materials and is cheaper).
US and the Western world can continue reducing carbon emissions and it won't make a bit of difference.
Try spending 5 minutes on google before you spout uniformed opinions
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
> Try spending 5 minutes on google before you spout uniformed opinions
See HN guidelines, and perhaps steelman their claim.
By "outsize responsibility" they likely refer to the fact that still today the US as a country has been the source of the largest per country contribution to AGW gases (burnt fossil fuels).
They might also refer to 1970s US capitalists (eg: Koch brothers) doubling down hard on climate denial after the papers of 1967 and actively funding think tanks to push civic development towards roads, away from public transport, and make bigger cars sexy.
To this day the cumulative total of fossil gases uplifted by the US still exceeds that of China - despite the smaller population of the USS.
The current administration and withdrawn from the Paris agreement, UNFCCC, and IPCC.
Things might have improved from 20 years ago but the more recent governmental trend is not positive.
This statistic completely ignores the fact that the US externalizes its' CO2 emissions by externalizing by sending our manufacturing to other countries.
How much of China's CO2 is a result of the products Americans buy that were manufactured in China?
If we look at CO2 as a result of consumption it would tell a truer story.
Is that really true?
There are manufacturing processes that use a lot of energy, and the US does a lot of that (maybe more than China) because it has low energy costs.
Also, China's coal consumption is now larger than... the entire rest of the world's.
These people are not arguing in good faith.
And yet despite that and having a much larger population the cumulative total CO2 uplift of China is still less than that of the US.
It'd better to avoid country V country pissing contests and focus on global efforts. In a real sense the cost of going solar, wind, renewable powered is Chinese emissions .. for now.
It isn't really in "good faith" to retort something the parent didn't say. Try disputing something that was actually claimed.
Project much?
Catch-22:
Telling them this will make them vote even stronger in the other way. Especially if you call them stupid, selfish, etc.
You have to show them how it impacts eg. the cost of insurance for coastal properties. But even so, this is hard to convey. The people voting aren't feeling it and are told by coastal elites what to care about - changing their opinion in the opposite direction.
Some countries are even going to benefit tremendously from warming, eg. Russia gets more arable land and access to the North Sea, which is fantastic for trade, energy, and defense.
I called them neither of that, I pointed out the infantile nature of their reaction.
Telling people the truth evokes all kinds of weird reactions, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
The preservation of our shared prerequisite for our continued existence isn't accurately captured by financial metrics. Pretending it was is a major error.
You start with protecting "people" (you are included?) against supposed accusations of stupidity, only to then go on and paint them (and yourself) as stupid and unable to judge connections and consequences correctly. And even stoop to pointing at whataboutisms of imaginary upsides.
> Telling people the truth evokes all kinds of weird reactions, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Maybe it does mean that. If you want people to listen you need to avoid having them immediately tune you out.
If you "immediately tune out" the truth, you tune out reality. What does that make you?
When your child acts in such a way (imagine it trying to kill its pet, which it was tasked with sustaining), what do you do? Entertain its fantasies and accommodate its wishes?
The point here is, you enable people to act in such childish ways by inventing justifications for their behavior. Your own prior behavior might well be the cause of their actions in the first place.
Yes, it's a form of Murc's Law ... only those pointing out bad behavior have agency; those behaving badly don't.
It's gotten bad all over the western world. Here in Canada, just mentioning climate change and policies to restrict CO2 emissions puts you in the political doghouse and gets you crucified on social media. It's just apparently not a concern now. Carney has eviscerated all regulation, and enabling exponential growth of the oil export sector is now a national emergency justified by tariffs, nationalism, national unity etc. etc.
Sorry, great grand-children. Pipelines gotta pump.
I don't know much about climate change science, so I use epistemological heuristics and reach the conclusion that the spectrum of scientific consensus on the topic is more likely to be correct than denial that there is a problem is likely to be correct.
Despite this, I don't have the time or energy to really care much about climate change. I have more immediate problems. I have bills to pay. I barely think about climate change at all. Maybe it would be different if I had children, but I'm not sure. Children make people care more about the non-immediate future, but they also take time and energy. So it's hard to say.
I'm probably pretty representative of the average person in this regard.
> in the political doghouse and gets you crucified on social media
This is arguably the correct thing, even if you believe the situation is urgent, if you also believe that other things are more urgent. Suppose you think that fixing declining education or economies is absolutely prerequisite, and that until people are smarter or more comfortable or both, even discussing the climate too often weakens your chances of building effective coalitions.
Personally, I go back and forth when I weigh this sort of thing, I'm really not sure. We probably need to at least consider that this is a consistent/coherent perspective. Of course, it's not a invitation to make things worse as fast as possible with drill-baby-drill.. but an acknowledgement that there are many other ways to make things worse, such as pissing people off. Aggravating corporations is fine, but for people who are not ready to hear about this, we need real consideration and a real offer. However inconsistently, we have tried forcing an agenda they need to comply with already, so now let's try something else
The link between El Nino and extreme weather is breaking down. The last El Nino caused an extremely wet summer in Australia despite a century of data pointing in the opposite direction.
The current one seems to be doing the same as the old one.
Climate is filled with non linearities and drawing straight lines from the past is a fools errant.
Least we forget the Sahara only turned into a desert when it got less sunshine.
Is it important? The globe is warming and it’s the new normal. Explaining it one more time isn’t going to make a difference.
Those of us who want to see CO2 reductions need to find solutions that don’t lead to inflation in the short term. It’s probably going to be a technological rather than policy solution.
> The risks inherent to weather and climate are growing all the time.
Risk is subjective, so this doesn't mean much without quantifying what you feel is risky to you. Moreover, of all the risks we have heard expressed in the population, there is no unary growth value. There is a change in distribution, and some risks have grown, but some risks have also shrunk. If you are relying on the reader to bring their own idea of what the risks are, this is almost certainly going to be false.
I expect you say this with good intentions, trying to instil fear in the reader to convince them that climate change is something to pay attention to. But this kind of "absolute truth" that doesn't hold up to scrutiny is what actually turns people off paying attention to something that justifiably does warrant attention. Let's do better.
I thought risk was defined as probability times cost (or at least that is what you are trying to minimize in risk management) -- so if the probability of costs goes up, would not also risk? You don't have to enumerate each specific risk to believe that risks are growing.
I'd say more commonly we say consequence, but I think you can fairly use cost and consequence interchangeably here. They have similar meaning. However, consequence/cost too are subjective. Thus risk is also subjective. Something cannot be objective if its variables are subjective.
Costs are tangible, making them objective, even if they have underlying subjectivities. The cost of milk is objective, even if your purchasing habits are subjective.
You are correct that "cost" has more than one definition, but, as already discussed, the one we are talking about equates to consequence, not an amount of money. Your milk analogy doesn't fit. Whether or not a so-called consequence is seen as a consequence is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm well aware of the narrowing you imposed. Consequence in these terms still equates to an objective reality, even if the underlying source of it can be described as subjective. The consequences of rising milk prices is an objective reality, even if your purchasing habits are subjective.
There is significantly more moisture in the atmosphere now meaning the storms that el nino brings will have a greater capacity to cause flooding. The water the piles up on the west coast of north America will be in addition to the sea level rise that already occurred. Making coastal flooding worse. A drier winter in the Pacific northwest means less snowpack and therefore less water available in the summer with global warming this is exacerbated by the loss of mountain glaciers which help balance seasonal variability. Heating the western Pacific means el nino has always been bad for fisheries there, but layering it on top of global warming can increasingly devastate fish populations there.
Our infrastructure and agriculture are designed around a climate regime that is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. I think your attitude about this shit is nonsensical
The moisture is a side-effect of the additional energy in the atmosphere - warmer gases can hold more water vapour.
And that's the thing - our climate is a massively complex system of interacting systems, and now we've put more energy into it, and it'll show up in the variability.
"Risk is subjective" until damages occur to someone and it's time to file an insurance claim.
If there is something you don't believe is a risk, who are going to file a claim with? Normally insurers expect you to arrange insurance beforehand, which requires identifying something you believe is a risk.
If you have home insurance, climate risk is already priced in when they set your premium.
Yes, that’s the exact definition of subjective
"Yeah, tens of millions died and hundreds of millions were displaced, but in the meantime we made a lot of value for the shareholders so it wasn't all bad."
I find the Climate Reanalyzer graphs very instructive - at a glance one can see how extreme the situation is:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily
The anomaly map mode especially. Thanks for sharing. I made a toy site recently out of interest: https://elnino.observer
This video mainly covers how it works in the United States, here's one for Brazilian people in the HN, from Manual do Mundo
https://youtu.be/tWhcTTC-pyw
Here is one is French, very scientifically sourced, by a searcher of hugging face.
https://youtu.be/DutKGuQu4a0
France isn't very much affected, so it's not focused on any country.
Title: A short explainer on how El Niño works in US [video] (youtube.com)
Yeah. I opened it, saw that the map was centered on NA, and I closed it. I was hoping a primer on how El Niño works globally, given the title.
Yes, this was very US centric
Actual title is "El Niño Winter 2026–27: What Pilots Should Expect"
Not that the cause is known yet but I’d been curious how this El Niño would affect flying after that terrible Florida Leer Jet crash. Great video!
I would be curious too. That said each pilot must avoid dangerous weather. There is a recent captain steeeve video where the pilot does that. ATC won't vector them around the storm (not sure why...) so they declare an emergency then they are free to fly as needed to avoid it.