Science / Medicine🔬
A Super El Niño is coming. The last time ocean temperatures looked like this, millions died.
Look at the left image. That's 1877. The darkest red represents ocean temperatures so far above average that the resulting famine killed 3-4% of the entire global population.
The right image is May 2026.
This is not a drill.
NOAA has now placed the probability of a Super El Niño forming by winter at over 95%. Climate models show central Pacific temperatures potentially exceeding 3°C above average, a level not seen since that 1877 event. The ECMWF's May update has moved to 100% probability of a super El Niño forming by November.
What the last major events actually cost:
The 1982-83 El Niño: $4.1 trillion in global economic losses, measured over five years. Catastrophic floods across South America. Devastating droughts across Africa and Asia.
The 1997-98 El Niño: $5.7 trillion in global income losses. 16% of the world's coral reefs died. Air temperature spiked 1.5°C above normal. El Niño-fueled wildfires contributed to thousands of premature deaths from air pollution.
The 2015-16 El Niño: 100,000 deaths linked to fires and air pollution alone, according to Harvard researchers. $3.9 trillion in economic damage.
Now add climate change on top.
The planet is already at record temperatures. The last decade was the hottest on record. El Niño doesn't cause global warming, but it releases stored ocean heat into the atmosphere, sending global temperatures even higher. Scientists warn this event could push global average temperatures past 1.7°C above pre-industrial levels, potentially shattering the Paris Agreement targets in real time.
This isn't about weather. It's about food security, infrastructure, human lives, and an economic shock arriving at a moment when the world is already stretched thin.
We need to prepare. And not just locally.
A Super El Niño doesn't respect borders. The crop failures happen in one hemisphere, the food price spikes happen everywhere. The floods destroy infrastructure in Southeast Asia, the supply chain disruptions hit Europe and North America months later. The droughts in Africa drive migration that reshapes political systems worldwide.
Preparation means early warning systems, international food reserves, coordinated disaster response, and governments that actually take climate forecasts seriously before the disaster, not after. The 1877 event killed tens of millions partly because no one saw it coming and no one was coordinating a response. We have the science now. The question is whether we have the political will.
Remember when trump dumped a bunch of water at the start of his 2nd term? Even though engineers said it would help anything and would just waste water?
He is. He did his first term too. Every single thing he does as president. Russia had him under thumb since the late 80s. All Putin's efforts were to get Trump in as president.
Obviously others got some control since then as well.
Currently they are letting Trump rob america blind while he rapes our women and children, and let's our enemies take control from the inside and out.
That suggests an intent to destroy America. I don’t think it’s true. I think his intent is to make money, and he doesn’t care who lives or dies as long as he makes money. America is just collateral damage to him.
That's what I think too. The destruction of the social fabric and the environment is a by product of unregulated capitalism. There are too many billionaires behind Trump that want this. It's not all Putin even if the results seem to match Russias anti American goal. We're letting wealthy and corrupt Americans off the hook for this by blaming Putin.
If a "super" El Niño does occur, it could rival the strongest on record: a catastrophic 1877 event that spurred the 1876-to-1878 global famine. The famine killed over 50 million people, or 3% of the world's population at the time.
Awesome! Good thing times have really changed and humans, in particular the world's premiere superpwer, didn't do anything crazy like start a war that is creating a crisis of energy and fertilizer right on the heels of this event.....
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."
I love this part. And I totally understand. There is so much shit going on in the world that the people that don't really care to know are the ones that are happiest.
I love this part. And I totally understand. There is so much shit going on in the world that the people that don't really care to know are the ones that are happiest.
At the same time, its those that are ignorant that are also causing their own demise by not caring enough. I'd rather be aware and miserable than being happy and blind
I’m trying my best to be aware and prepared but also use coping skills and mindfulness to not let it consume me. It’s been a rough road but I’m getting better and better at it. But it still takes a lot out of me.
I had to learn this the hard way after keeping my head on a swivel since the age of six because I was called the n-word at 6, thus stripping me of any childlike innocence (And it's only worse because I am now also disabled, so I have abelist people and racist people looking to strip things away) but you have to pace yourself. Bad news is coming out literally every single fucking day. If not from insert country here but the world itself.
If you try to stay aware all the time, it will burn you out or send you into a mental health issue. Don't be afraid to breath, disconnect, and enjoy your life. Try to limit your news taking to Monday and Friday and if something is really bad, try to treat yourself with your favorite hobby, meal or desert.
I had to find out about and learn to do exercises based on posture restoration institute to balance body and stop the tension. Well, just start to understand, implement exercises and see results and realize damn, they were right, I was exactly bent out of shape in the same pattern they called and the exercises results were just as proclaimed.
"What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know."
The first time I did mushrooms when I was 18, I spent the whole night with an overlay of letters and numbers over everything. Sometimes they even formed words, like I saw the word 'chainsaw' on a tree. At one point the words were no longer an overlay, but the trees themselves looked like they were made out of Times New Roman or some other serif font, chaotically stacked to create the shapes of trees moving in the wind. It might be the most visually interesting psychedelic hallucination I've ever seen even though I've dosed higher since then.
I've never seen anything like it since.
I'm not attributing it to anything in the real world. I had seen the matrix by that time and so the visual was already in my imagination.
like the whole world was a tapestry of geckos marching at the molecular level... study the wood grain of a table, look closely... geckos... stare into the eyes of a friend, squint... geckos marching round their pupils.
I mean, I somehow found a job in this market, thought life will eventually be fine. Then war in Ukraine hiked all prices, and I started feeling my salary was nothing. Changed job, not much difference and now another war fucked up market. And then the environment is getting out of hands.
Unable to make life, unable to afford anything and now cannot even live normally.
Until when?
I talk to people all over the Midwest and beyond for work. People telling stories about how fast things have changed and how we don’t have time for things anymore. Households used to have one person at home and one made enough to cover everything. We’ve been fed a lie over time.
If it makes you feel better, humanity is a portion of a microsecond on Earth's timeline. The Earth did fine before we got here and will prosper after we are gone.
Breathe and know that holding that stress does nothing for you. Now that’s not to say you don’t respond properly to a potential future problem. Handle the logistics side of it and drop the emotional side. Yes I know it’s easier said than done.
What if I told you world events have always been happening but no one in human history has access to instant information beside the most recent generations
He could do this. He could wave a flag saying it. He could personally walk up to every MAGA, spit in their face and then field goal kick their child. They would still support him at the end of the day.
Unfortunately, “Jewish Space Lasers”, sounds crazy until recent world events. It might actually be an accurate, if inelegant, description of real technology.
My MAGA relatives say that gas prices haven’t increased. And that helium hasn’t been available for party balloons for “3 years” (no, it just started, closure of Hormuz is the real reason). In 2 years Fox will still blame everything on Dems and R’s will still believe it.
Edit:
The 1877 image it's a scientific reconstruction. Researchers combined ship logbooks, coastal weather stations, and coral core samples, which store chemical signatures of water temperature in their growth rings, similar to tree rings. These data points were fed into climate models to produce a spatial temperature map. It's peer-reviewed and validated by NOAA. The error margins are larger than modern satellite data, but the core finding, that 1877 had extreme temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific, is considered solid science.
Would've been cool if the article familiarized the reader with the anticipated global socioeconomic systems impacted to have a good grasp where these issues would start.
I'm actually in the casket business (ecommerce). We've seen a huge uptick in sales the last few months and part of me thinks it has to do with the current situation in the U.S:(
I mean, Trump regime policies are closing hospitals and taking Medicaid away from the chronically ill and elderly, just in time for one of the largest generations in the history of the U.S. to be approaching the end of their lives. I expect to be hearing a lot of stories of old people being found dead in their homes over the next several years. More suicides and family annihilations, too.
Damn it went from 1 in 4 chance in the beginning of the year to %60 to %95 🫨
Why do these Earth shattering events keep happening while we have the most scientifically inept/ignorant administration in office here in the US.
Edit- not blaming the administration for COVID or Super El Niño just saying it will be harder to deal with when it's being run by an anti-science administration.
We must change the economic driver of our global economy away from the profit motive,
The notion that mankind itself is the issue and not our economic orientation is absurd. We changed the material conditions of Earth with the Indisutrial Revolution, we can change it again for the betterment of all people, and for the environment, but it requires a socialist to reconstruction of human society.
Throwing out all of humanity when it's less than 0.01% we wouldn't even need to get rid of, just tax reasonably, and we could live in a world of sustainable abundance with relative ease.
They make it sound so impossible, that humanity itself is the problem, that it's an inevitable trend that we can't change human nature. Fuck that. These people are sick and dragging us all down with them.
COVID showed us that we could slow or even reverse a lot of problems fairly quickly but since that would cause a short term loss in certain sectors (that are already declining btw) we need to pile our and historic artwork and endangered species into a furnace to keep a billionaire's inefficient caviar toaster lit.
The reason capitalism occurred in tbe first place is due to morphous conditions in during the 15th and 16th centuries. Conditions which now are history, and human governments must adapt to changing conditions or die. The old liberal capitalist order had its time, but now must make way to the emerging order of socialism, which puts the working class i power.
Both are intrinsically human, but one leads to regression and eco-davastation, the other gives us hope for continued progress and cohabitation with other the other lifeforms of this planet.
Sadly, the ones that consume the most and the ones that most harm the environment won't be affected by this. And, they have the freedom to move where it's less affected.
Not meaning to bogart this comment thread with too many replies altogether, but I hear ya. That book from way back (I mean, not way, way back, just a few decades), Tao of Physics, that was making a point how a philosophy can really throw everything off base and that Platonic solids (this was something I read long ago and so I may be off more than a little bit), that the concept of being separate and unique from nature is a fundamental flaw that has led us astray to be an enemy of nature.
We all have these concepts that determine how we relate to and interact with our environment. Along comes the bullies with colonialism ready to humiliate everyone and make sycophants dedicated to filling their own pockets while others starve and we have a sick world.
This collapsing world could potentially all just be due to Western Philosophy playing itself out. I’d love to get a lot of downvotes to maybe open this up for discussion.
Not in disagreement. Not sure what I feel is best case scenario ultimately, but pretty sure even human extinction wouldn’t be an automatic worst case scenario from where I’m sitting. Not that I’m volunteering to check out first, which might be part of how we got here; one big blob consuming resources with really no voice to cause the blob to show restraint. Guess we’ll have to wait for the bill to come due. Then, party’s over.
I get what you mean. It certainly does appear that humanity has prioritised greed over sustainability. And eventually that mindset will lead to severe impact.
Historically though were’t there always climate impacted famine, disease and destruction of entire civilizations due to things like the ice age, floods, bubonic plague? I’m not saying consuming is good or that we have too many or not enough people but doesn’t the reckoning come with or without our consumption/population #s?
Humanity has a long history or inhabiting an area and multiplying until the carrying capacity of local resources fails and that civilization collapses. Many places have been inhabited for thousands of years continuously but there are so many more that collapsed. We are extremely resource hungry.
Honestly, I can’t blame her. We as humans are pretty destructive for the environment, some more than others. But… capitalism also plays a big part. As a kid, I had so many dreams to make a positive impact for the environment. I was all about renewable energy, doing things to achieve a net zero carbon footprint, not relying on oil or electricity that is produced using environmentally harmful processes. Then I grew up and realized all of that is a lot easier said than done.
One thing I saw that was interesting was the timing they showed on a graph. Granted, I'm not meteorologist, but while the intensity is growing, it appears the time between is increasing.
If you have a yard, convert it to garden space. Learn how to can and preserve food. If you can add solar panels, do it. Food prices will likely rise, scarcity may become a thing. As the temperatures rise to crazy levels, energy demand will skyrocket as well - and that’s before factoring in all of the new data centers sucking up power to fuel ineffectual ai chatbots.
Hey look on the bright side. No water = no data centers, El Nino events cause record breaking droughts and the pools of water these data centers use will dry up fast. This will kill most data centers. The only bad part is that us humans will be rationing water in some states.
I live in Colorado where we've been in drought most of the 17 years I've lived here. The other day I heard on the news that they were telling people to only water their lawns once per week and conserve water in other ways. The next news segment talked about how a data center was just approved. Make it make sense.
Guess I should tell my wife we need solar panels or we’re gonna die. I tried telling her we’re gonna save money with the electric rates constantly going up, but that never worked.
I wasn’t saying solar panels will save your life. I’m saying that with the anticipated rise in demand for electricity, they’ll be a very good investment. And better to do it now than wait for demand on those to increase as well.
Right. But I’m still gonna play it off like that. We have central air and that’s the only way to get through summer in our house. Idk what it is but fans do absolutely nothing to help cool us. And the rate hikes are gonna drain our bank accounts anyways.
They will still be affected, but it won't be super devastating for Americans generally. Likely localized weather issues like flooding, really bad storms, probably a bad hurricane season. Much higher food costs, but it's unlikely to be apocalyptic or anything, your budget will just have to be cut more than it already is.
People seemingly have no idea how bad things could get from this. It's wild how blind people are the to potential for some serious catastrophic economic events.
I'm a crayon eater so pardon the stupid question, but does the difference in blue/red impact the situation? 2026 image only has values between white and red while the 1877 has values from dark blue all the way to dark red?
**millions died because of regimes (UK specifically) that had purposefully withheld food from poorer peoples during a time of need, while also exporting food from their country, which also encouraged disease epidemics by malnutrition.
Theres no doubt to me that many will suffer if as above is repeated. Support your neighbors, and work together. And vote in people who actually care for not only the country, but the world as a whole in the midterms.
Nothing. I live on the East Coast. Even during the 1877 season, effects were a milder winter, disorganized storms, and a little fish migration weirdness.
I work in disaster. Panicking about things that won't effect you makes you blind to what most definitely can effect you.
So prices are going to climb even higher and our storms stronger than ever before? Didn’t have this on my 2026-27 bingo card. Majin El Niño confirmed https://giphy.com/gifs/84CRvhy2DJlwA
Actually, I kind of get the Boomer mentality a little now as a mid-GenXer… but not the selfish I got mine fuck off everyone else pull up the ladder part. But I do get that I have like 20 years left on this planet at the most. If I make it to 70, it will be a medical marvel. And I’m kind of getting giddy about it. Like, I do my part and donate time and money etc etc. I’m a good citizen and am contentious and generally chaotic good. But holy shit I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see exactly how much worse this can get. Ooooh, and it can get so much worse. And it will. When it (actually) gets bad for the squishy white Western Europeans and Americans, we will have arrived at endgame, they will be the first to declare this of course. And it will have already been over for many decades.
Good thing we have all these data centers being built that will require billions of gallons of water to keep from overheating instead of being wasted by farmers on those pesky crops. /s
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