65 pointsby dgellow6 hours ago8 comments
  • izend21 minutes ago
    The strongest El Niño ever caused a massive famine:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...

  • gmusleraan hour ago
    Remember that this is just a piece of the complex system that is the global climate. And over it, there are more systems affected, including human ones like food production or economy. Something this extreme may cause from a severe disruption or a permanent instability in those systems, specially considering feedback loops in all of them.
  • bix6an hour ago
    Great write up but bummed to not see any info about the waves. It’s been a bonkers summer!
  • Noaidian hour ago
    People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.

    But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.

    But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.

    • nx772 minutes ago
      Death is a feature and not a bug of the system, in my mind atleast. I come from a pretty dysfunctional/chaotic family which sometimes makes me think larger systems have this unpredictability and lack of control too. Do I spend my time studying the dysfunction? Beyond a point its exhausting. Ask anyone who comes from a trauma organized system. For us it is more a relief that there is an exit door out of such traps we are born into. Maybe the buddhist philosophy is a healthier way to think about it - over attachment to anything that is ever changing is the path to suffering.
    • lukeifyan hour ago
      It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.

      People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.

      • gottorf14 minutes ago
        > People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.

        The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.

        All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.

        If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.

        [0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564

        • anonymarsa few seconds ago
          > If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself.

          I'll take that bet

          > You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.

          ... because Europe never used to need it, because the climate wasn't hot enough?

  • jauntywundrkind37 minutes ago
    Meanwhile West Antarctic ice shelf barely clutching on.

    No direct link, but click the "anomaly" map button just underneath the map. Hello all these similar 10+ °C anomalies that have sat around. Some colder spots too that have hung around! But yikes. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world

  • WarOnPrivacy5 hours ago
    In the plus column, we've had a healthy rainy season in the SE US. And while storms seem to move slower than before, we're not yet overwhelmed by stall+flood events.
    • antonymoose3 hours ago
      Have we? Most all of South Carolina is in a drought. We experienced an exceptionally dry Spring and have had good but not sufficient rains all summer.
      • camd322 hours ago
        Yeah and the west is so extremely dry.
    • mathgeekan hour ago
      Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.
    • bamboozledan hour ago
      Come to Japan and say it
    • mapotofuan hour ago
      Oh thank god, the farms of the SE US must be ecstatic, and surely we will all benefit from the rainfall hitting checks notes… Purdue chicken farms.

      Oh that’s not a plus and just another American centric knee jerk comment on nothing.

  • bamboozledan hour ago
    All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.
    • simulator5gan hour ago
      Ah yes it could have been so easy: All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way.
      • DangitBobby24 minutes ago
        It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
        • parineum17 minutes ago
          We couldn't have stopped using fossil fuels heavily until nuclear power was widespread and implemented, around the late 70s or 80s.

          We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.

          • DangitBobby2 minutes ago
            Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.

            The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.

      • coldbrewedan hour ago
        Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!

        Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.

      • lucb1e37 minutes ago
        Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.
        • gottorf9 minutes ago
          > Most people agree on basic values

          This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.

          • fragmede5 minutes ago
            Yeah they do, on the really basic stuff, on a global level.
  • animanoir20 minutes ago
    [dead]