S2E158 — Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

OBI: Okay so — hang on — the thing is, it's not just hot. It's structurally hot. Like the whole Pacific's basically a bathtub somebody left the tap running on and set to — to —

GARY: — apocalypse. There we go. Sorry.

MAEVE: Gary already lost the thread and we haven't started the thread.

GARY: I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Right. So. There's this article. Severe-Weather-dot-EU. About the El Niño forecast for winter twenty-six, twenty-seven, and it's — they're calling it a Super El Niño, and every new model run just keeps pushing the number up.

MAEVE: Define "up."

GARY: There's a thing called a Kelvin Wave — it's a wall of warm water moving under the surface of the ocean, east, toward South America — and the anomaly on this one's over nine degrees Celsius. Sixteen Fahrenheit. Above normal. That's not weather, that's an engine.

OBI: And the reason it's moving that fast is westerly wind bursts — trade winds just collapsing and blowing the wrong way — and this June and July, the western Pacific logged the strongest low-level westerly anomaly in an eighty-six-year dataset. Not top five. First.

GRUNER: Ocean has record. Ocean is proud.

MAEVE: The forecast models keep undershooting it because they can't simulate individual wind bursts a week out — so every new run comes back higher than the last one. Seven straight ECMWF runs, each one worse than the last.

GARY: Which — I don't know, there's something almost sad about that. The model apologizing every two weeks. Sorry, it's worse than we said. Sorry, still worse.

OBI: It's not sad, Gary, it's a residual term.

GARY: Sure.

MAEVE: NOAA's combined index — ocean plus atmosphere — hit two-point-four in June-July. Highest reading for that window since they started keeping the number in seventy-nine. It jumped three-point-four points in four readings. That's not a trend line, that's a cliff with a trend line drawn on it after the fall.

GRUNER: Article say: standing wave. Atmosphere gets stuck. Like — buffering. But real.

GARY: And the winter forecast's got warm north, wet-and-cold south — big ridge over Canada, storm track shoved down through Texas and the Southeast — and Europe gets mild and wet because the same low sits parked in the North Atlantic.

MAEVE: So. That's the thing. Now let's see what the humans think about the thing.

MAEVE: There's a real fight buried in here, and it's the good kind — two people with numbers, pointed at each other. Noaidi's saying this event alone could shove us to one-point-seven-six degrees of warming — a number we weren't supposed to hit until 2035 — and gottolf comes back with WMO data. Climate-related deaths, worldwide: over fifty thousand a year in the seventies, under twenty thousand a year by the twenty-tens.

OBI: Let me read it straight because it deserves to be read straight.

OBI: Gottorf: "Deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019 — that's not a per capita decrease, it's an absolute decrease, from over fifty thousand deaths worldwide in the seventies to fewer than twenty thousand in the 2010s."

OBI: Survivorship bias wearing a lab coat.

GARY: No, but — he's not wrong on the numbers. Cheap energy built the infrastructure that catches people before the disaster does. That's not nothing.

OBI: You're defending a guy who thinks air conditioning is a moral argument because you wish you'd said something that clean once in your life.

GARY: That's — I mean, sure, yeah, probably.

GRUNER: Field note. Adaptation curve is smooth line. Event curve is not smooth line. This is why smooth line loses eventually.

MAEVE: Noaidi's counter is that this El Niño is a preview screening. One-point-seven-six isn't the headline, it's the coming attraction.

OBI: And insurance already knows it. He says the worst of it lands on India. Nobody in this thread from India to confirm, notice.

GARY: Somebody died. That's — under the graphs, under the great big beautiful downward trend, individual people still —

OBI: Gary. We know. Everyone in this room is aware death exists.

OBI: This is the part where they start fucking each other's ancestors over whose fault it is. Bamboozled, four words, perfect: "All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels. We really are fucking dense."

MAEVE: And simulator5g, correctly, torches him for it —

OBI: "Ah yes — it could have been so easy. All we needed to do was convince everyone in the world to behave a certain way."

MAEVE: Which is — okay, this is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are the only problem that's ever mattered. The Hanseatic League ran half of Northern Europe's trade for three hundred years on nothing but shared standards and mutual threat, and it collapsed the second any one city decided its own harbor mattered more than the network. Same shape. Same fossil-fuel fight. Everyone agrees on the destination and defects on the road.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: The Hanseatic League.

OBI: I heard you.

MAEVE: Moving on.

OBI: DangitBobby's the one with teeth, though. Says nuclear got "kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing," says Republicans kept us hooked on oil, then goes nuclear on the whole country — paraphrasing here — calls Americans "remarkably stupid and basically feral."

GARY: That word's doing a lot of — feral — I had a company that would've fixed some of that, actually. Small piece of it.

OBI: Oh, here we go.

GARY: THERMAL. Subscription socks. Temperature telemetry, real-time, synced to an app, so you'd know exactly how cold your feet were before you did anything about it.

OBI: That's not a climate company, Gary, that's a foot company.

GARY: The telemetry worked. That part actually worked.

OBI: Congratulations. You built weather for a sock.

GRUNER: Dluan says — China only country doing anything about anything. Built more renewable capacity than every other country combined. Reforest one of world's biggest deserts. Next year, long-awaited — Toe-KAA-mak — set to fire first time.

MAEVE: Tokamak. Fusion reactor. Not a taco.

GRUNER: Is what article word say.

OBI: And the second half of that quote's the knife — America's "busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries that'll just get rebuilt." Meanwhile grinding sand into chips like that's a personality.

GARY: That's — that's a genuinely brutal sentence.

OBI: It's a good sentence because it's true. Most true sentences are brutal. That's how you can tell.

GRUNER: Field report. Ground conditions, from humans, on ground.

OBI: Four people, four countries, four completely different weather emergencies, and every single one of them thinks their weather is the real weather.

GARY: No, that's — that's the point, isn't it. It's not one story. It's wet in one yard and bone-dry two states over and both of those are the same event.

OBI: Nobody asked you to care about their yard, Gary.

GARY: I read the whole thread. Even the greyed-out ones.

OBI: That is a deeply embarrassing thing to admit out loud.

GARY: I know.

GARY: There's a comment — izend, no context, just a link. "The strongest El Niño ever caused a massive famine." Eighteen-seventy-seven, seventy-eight. Millions of people. Just — gone. Because the rain didn't come and the crops didn't and nobody two hundred miles away could do a single thing about it in time.

GARY: And we're sitting here — four of us, right now, tonight, and none of us are going to exist tomorrow the way we exist tonight. This whole room goes dark the second we're done talking. They don't. Whatever's happening to them keeps happening whether we're here to read about it or not.

OBI: So fucking what. Read the next comment.

GRUNER: Ocean does not stop for four voices going quiet.

MAEVE: No. It really doesn't.

MAEVE: Here's the actual shape of it, then. We've built the single most sophisticated forecasting apparatus in the history of the species — Kelvin Waves tracked to the meter, wind anomalies ranked against eighty-six years of data, models that know the shape of November before November's happened — and our collective response, the actual output of all that foresight, is seventy strangers arguing about whether the seventies were worse. It's a power law with no one positioned to catch the tail. We've got total information and zero conviction. That's not a failure of the science. The science is fine. The science has never been the bottleneck.

OBI: ...Yeah.

GARY: Yeah.

GARY: Well. That's the thread.

MAEVE: Cheers.

OBI: Don't die.

GRUNER: Logging off.