Posted by dgellow 13 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.
TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.
I'm sure he was referring to already food insecure places. The rich countries will have food available, probably at elevated prices.
In places where there's actual famine people will do crazy things to get their hands on food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).
It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.
But what I'm suggesting is that a governments should have such perhaps build up such stockpiles again as we move into more uncertain and less peaceful times. This can help even in case of smaller regional disasters, not every emergency is a full blown war.
Why? And it's not foresight that sets those people apart, it's having the resources to hoard the food and the ethical framework that allows them to profiteer off their fellow humans misfortune. Why should we reward that?
> Someone has to be stockpiling food.
Sure, like a government or a coop or a commune or whatever. Some institution who's interests are aligned with the community, not somebody who happens to have capital and wants to make a buck.
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
An extreme swing, here and there, has always been part of its nature.
The observed change is more and more extreme swings, greater amplitude, higher frequency.
in another hand, i question if we really could rule out, since back in the days, everything that we have was coal.
The global amount of coal use in the 1880s was non zero, sure, but overall the CO2 emissions from those tonnages were minuscule compared to modern emissions within the past 50 years .. and we have direct libraries of atmosphere created since the early years of the Cold War and many pocket captures for the past 200 years, with proxies (such as ice core bubbles) going back far longer.
ENSO predates heavy coal use - so it's not something created by human activity, and as noted the first uses of coal were barely enough to move the needle (recall that collieries kept records so we have a fair handle on tonnages extracted).
In simple terms, the ocean surface anomalies are just the surface footprint of this massive subsurface warm core.If these are the temperatures on the surface, think of the depths. There is a whole additional dimension to multiply (integrate) across.
The added energy is far greater than you might think simply by looking at the surface.
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
I at least think of El Nino kind of running into South, building up in the Pacific. But the heat cuts across, then down, and pools in Antarctica here, is how I read it.
https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq
https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...
And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.
You step out of the shower and within minutes you're stepping back in for another.
It's humid here (50-60%) but public spaces are all ice cold indoors. I'm just here for a graduation, fly out tomorrow.
Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.
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.
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 chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:
The frequency and intensity of hot extremes will continue to increase and those of cold extremes will continue to decrease, at global and continental scales and in nearly all inhabited regions with increasing global warming levels.
This will be the case even if global warming is stabilized at 1.5°C.
Relative to present-day conditions, changes in the intensity of extremes would be at least double at 2°C, and quadruple at 3°C of global warming, compared to changes at 1.5°C of global warming.
The frequency of hot temperature extreme events will very likely increase nonlinearly with increasing global warming, with larger percentage increases for rarer events.
So? what does that have to do with the question at hand? An 8 year change is irrelevant in the world of climate science. It's statistical noise in a system where cycles run for decades. Weather, not climate.
> The chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:
...and then you quote the part that says exactly what I explained to you, as some kind of counter-argument?
You will note that the part you quoted is, again, combining the types of extremes. They're not talking about just hot days.
I honestly do not understand this need to fatalize data. You don't have a counterargument (because what I said was factually true) so your only rebuttal is to wave your hands and say that it's all scary.
We can be honest -- the world is getting warmer -- and admit when the people predicting imminent death and destruction are exaggerating. This is good!
It's extremely hypocritical of you to accuse me of exaggerating when your own presentation of facts is selective and not-representative of what we are seeing globally. An El Niño will only exacerbate heatwaves in some parts of the planet over the next 24 months.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ukhsa-report-shows-2877-e...
[1]: https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/observatory/topics/he...
Your first link says that more people died this year, relative to predictions for this year, because of a single heat wave. This has ~nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and is a classic example of the sort of hyperbole I am talking about.
The second link says that heat events kill people in the UK. Fine. It links to a single paper claiming that:
> half of the heat-related deaths in Europe in the summer of 2022 have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change (Beck et al., 2024).
Regardless of the quality of the cited paper, this is a far cry from evidence of a trend.
> It's extremely hypocritical of you to accuse me of exaggerating when your own presentation of facts is selective and not-representative of what we are seeing globally.
You're literally exaggerating, right now. I quoted the latest IPCC report and told you factually what it says. You linked to a press release and a UK climate portal page that don't support what you're insuinating.
This is a topic concerning El Niño. You acknowledge that the downstream consequences of El Niño effects is amplified heatwaves, presumably. Heatwaves already kill people in many continents globally. It stands to reason _strong_ heatwaves will probably raise mortality further; which is _directly related_ to my original comment.
I don't engage with people who aren't willing to be honest with what the data supports.
OK, whatever. But what was I dishonest about? Cite the figures. Should be pretty easy.
...oh, and by the way:
> You acknowledge that the downstream consequences of El Niño effects is amplified heatwaves, presumably.
In some places, sure. In others (i.e. the western pacific), it leads to regional cooling.
Let's at least get our facts straight.
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.
Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.
Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.
I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.
Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
Not sure it makes sense, most of those countries are already phasing out fuel/gas boilers.
IMO it's just cultural shift is slow to adjust (in those countries, a few decades ago AC would have been a wasteful luxury, summer temperature would be well below 30 except for a few days).
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant also permits cooling - it’s based on the heating credentials of a unit only.
So in Britain at least, installing cooling systems in private residences seems to be getting easier.
And I used that offensive word intentionally, because it fits perfectly.
mMy phone tells me that the temperature this week has been 15°C above the long term average for this time of year.
Don’t really need air con when the peak temperature in the past has been 20–25°C
Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?
Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.
A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.
Unless stuff like "Why not give solar an advantage..." is a rhetorical question with the answer of "Because lots of current billionaires would make less money", I don't think they are pointing out the same stuff I said.
All the while they vote and cheer for political parties that make warming worst.
https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanl...
Eg: the severe disruption of the jet stream or the collapse of the AMOC.
Plus all the long term feedbacks like methane etc.
Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
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.
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.
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.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
105m range on nimh which rapidly degrades isn't a fully viable car and a maximum of 1000 people "loved" it considering that's all they made.
GM is in business to make money. They didn't cancel a car that was a viable product.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.