The Strongest El Niño Ever

I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.

So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon.

Seems pretty short-sighted to me.

El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.

> if not a heat pump

Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.

And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius.

Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees.

All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.

That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.

That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.

And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.

Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.

I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.

The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.

Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about

Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.

We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.

Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.

Given what I learned from "chaos" by James Gleick, the predicament we're in is that we likely cannot predict outcomes or the events themselves, rather what we know is that weather will become more unpredictable and more extreme.

So the answer to your question is it could be either or both or neither. Whatever happens is going to be on average more extreme than what you're used to.

It might end up like a covid situation where even if you have good AC in your home, you don't want to be in the area because the medical system is on its knees overwhelmed from treating all the cases of heat related illnesses.

I would bet on it becoming hotter for longer, with some really bad but short torrential rain in between.

So get some sturdy shade structure and an heat pump.

Water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect so I don't think rain is going to make it better.

No offense, but using air travel to avoid climate impacts is a bit ironic and part of the reason we’re in this mess.

No need to fix the root cause, I’ll just fly somewhere cold during the summer /s

I've got an excellent overview of consequences from Claude Opus 5. I'd post it here but there's a "no AI content" policy, so sorry, you neef to ask yourself. (Though for Europe specifically, apparently very little except for higher average temperatures).

Most of the most flood prone areas in CA have been significantly neutered over the decades thanks to massive water projects. There was a time when the LA river would destroy LA routinely. Now everything is channelized. At risk communities are probably the handful of remote ones that do not have great infrastructure, but I'm not even sure where those might be given how the state seems to be able to build thousands of debris flow cement storm drain setups in relevant areas.

Other states seem a lot worse off. Water table is closer to where people live, there's a lack of topology to actually run water out in a lot of cases, there's been little investment in managing water for stormwater for property damage abatement or power or irrigation like in CA where the topology really incentivized massive investment in all of that over the last century.

Yes, atmospheric rivers all winter.

Next year a super bloom then the following year massive wild fires.

rain -> fuel -> fire

We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.

We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.

It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.

Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.

It's a massive oscillating system (millions of square miles), so we have plenty of lead time. It's easy to measure and watch evolve.

Even if we don't do anything about emissions and climate change picks up, lives in 2126 will be unmistakably better than ours in all dimensions that matter.

More TDS redditors ruining any semblance of a healthy discussion on HN

Come on, Trump would never "tarrif" something called "El Nino".

He would first deport it a couple times.

Yeah like earthquakes, the top registered earthquake happened 66 years ago.

The fact that you see record breaking more often than log of time implies a drift in one direction.