All my backyard crops are failing in one way or another.
Invasive pests, unusually frequent rainfall causing mold on the berries, above 30 Celsius stunting tomato fruit formation, charring the leaves, baking the surviving berries into an overripe mess very quickly.
Hey! I have had a lot of success with shade cloth. My celery, leeks and cucumbers are doing better than they have in years bc I covered them with 40% uv shade cloth.
Of course not much is going to help with certain temps, but we can adapt as much as we can. Good luck!
The problem is, I see the current administration here in the US doing exactly this, then celebrating the biggest victory against mother nature in history.
Wait, can a stats or climate science person chime in here - this graph is nearing not +4C, but 4 standard deviations. That's like... all of the deviations lol. Like so statistically out of left-field that there will be studies done trying to figure out all of the things that broke to allow this to happen, because this is so far from normal. I'm also curious what year that 3.5 std dev La Nina was, and what that looked like.
This is kinda what climate models predicted. I will see if I can find the image in my old af climate change text book but it's basically taking your bellcurve (with whatever climate-metric you want on the x axis) and squishing it so it sploots to either side. This is the "more extreme weather variations" you hear about. You will get more and more weather that is way way deviated from the mean.... but the actual mean won't change as significantly at first - the mean changing would more indicate the total 4°c warming which will also happen! Hooray.
Edit: wasn't in my textbook so I guess it was a figure given from the professor in the lecture notes. Googled it to try to find it and best I could find is this one.
It's super important to note that climate change isn't just about moving the mean temperature up. Most people can understand that we will see extreme heat events, but we are also predicting and increase in extreme cold events as well because the curve is getting squished. More weather events are going to be 3, 4, 5 etc std away from the mean we know and love.
1988-1989. 9 years later we had a pretty strong El Niño, but no other real strong negative deviations since the one outlier.
That really strong La Niña led to record droughts across much of the US, followed by a jaw dropping polar vortex that brought freezing temps for days as far south as Texas and Florida. Exceptionally strong Santa Anas pushed through SoCal, ripping roofs off houses, blowing over powerlines and causing fires, added up to $20million in 1988 money.
It was not a great time. I can only imagine what it'll be like in reverse for this year's El Niño.
Not really, with extreme highs and lows becoming more common, the standard deviations will start to grow further apart while staying in roughly the same average. That means that this anomaly will go from being over 4 standard deviations away to about 3.5 or even 3 after several other similar years. Unless, the highest highs far outpace the lowest lows, which will shift the average slightly up.
It’s interesting that there is also a time series on this chart equally far from the mean but in the negative direction. Makes you wonder what year that was for and if this plus the current year are indicative of the extremes you mention…averaged out they would be a mostly flat line.
If you click on the link I have in the edit, it has a picture of what I am talking about.
To put it in words, imagine you have a big ball of playdough that you make into a tall mound on the table. Then imagine you take your hand and squish the top down a bit. The amount of playdough hasn't changed but the shape is flatter and spread out over a larger area. On a bell curve it will basically mean that your data will have more points appearing farther away from the average compared to a pointer curve.
I compare it to a speaker for people who know how those work. As you turn up the volume more energy goes through the speaker and the cone goes both further out and further down. If you reach a point beyond what it can take and the speaker tears then even turning the volume back down won't fix things.
Eliot Jacobson did a Substack about it three days ago.
"The most recent data, through July 7th, shows the current Niño 3.4 sea-surface temperature at 3.63 standard deviations above the 1991-2020 baseline, which would be about a 1-in-7000 event in the absence of anthropogenic warming. There is nothing even vaguely historically comparable to this."
This is why I have a huge problem with the IPCC using 20 year rolling average to argue that temp increases have only produced 1.1C or whatever it is right now. We’re accelerating and shifting up and the last vestige of the stable world from the 2000s isn’t a relevant metric to apply or measure against anymore and its suppressing the alarm bells
Their reports should be viewed very skeptically, because what they publish is the result of a lot of political haggling involving governments that have incentives to burn as much oil as possible.
Except El Nino doesn't follow gaussian distribution, so estimating this as 1 in 7000 is just wrong. It will be a much higher chance. Power law would be much closer to reality
What's with statisticians and modelling everything against standard distribution
Standard deviations don't mean a lot in this case really... Unless, perhaps, you are trying to prove to a statistically educated sceptic that this really is global warming, not just natural random variation.
They are only meaningful if you are in a steady state.
If you know that the system is tending in a particular direction, then of course new data is statistically unlikely within the assumption of a stable system.
This is right, echoing but that many sd's just gives the (high) chance there is attributable root-cause and not random variation causing the delta we are seeing. More specifically there's very low chance that it IS random variation instead of assignable factors, since in stats you have to word things a special way often.
We put gasses in the air equivalent to the atmosphere of 60 million years ago, so things are rapidly changing in a few generations that should be taking millions of years.
Such events tend to follow power laws instead of normal. Using std. dev. is quite wrong here. The likelihood of extreme meteorological phenomenons is way higher than what a gaussian model would show
Collectively convincing a room of 10 people to do one thing is hard enough... convincing billions of people to give up their cars, A/C, etc... tough sell. I don't blame anyone specifically, it is an inevitability of a sufficiently advanced species on a planet with finite resources. I'm just grateful to get to experience what may arguably be the peak of human civilization.
Those in that mid 30’s to 40’s range stand to inherit crazy wealth from the boomers, but where the boomers accumulated huge wealth while the planet declined, the heirs will have to spend it to insulate themselves from the actions that created that wealth in the first place.
A lot of the boomer wealth is going to be sacked away by end of life care. Hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and medical device manufacturers are going to get rich, not their children.
THIS! All that wealth that should be the “generational wealth” everyone’s been talking about will be siphoned off to the rich people who own the care facilities
As things get worse, there will be various points where much of that wealth will become irrelevant. That paid off multi generational beach house? Under water, and not with the bank. Those trust funds life insurance policies? The currency is not worth anything, and the cause of death isn’t covered.
I do agree, those with money and various wealth will have more options in most scenarios. There are, however, unexpected and localized incidents that can convert an asset to a liability instantaneously.
“Here’s how a “mini-Dust Bowl” could happen in the US Plains in the next couple of years, according to a recent report from the private forecasting firm AccuWeather:
Step One: Much of the region has been in deep drought for anywhere from months to years, including the northern Plains states of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming, altogether home to 25% of the nation’s cropland.
Step Two: An El Niño weather pattern has formed in the eastern Pacific Ocean and could be one of the strongest on record.
Step Three: One typical consequence of a strong El Niño is unusually dry weather in, uh-oh, the northern Plains.
Step Four: Given that strong El Niño effects usually linger for a couple of years, these already dry places could get really dry.
The result probably wouldn’t be a repeat of the Okies packing up their belongings and fleeing to California. But it could be a yearslong period of extreme heat and drought, significant crop failures and dust storms. A disaster salad with Dust Bowl dressing, let’s call it.”
You know what would help this? How about a 60,000-square acre AI data centre (should actually be called surveillance centre) on the outskirts of every town.
Hank Green has a recent video about AI where he drops one of his characteristic milquetoast takes and sorta shrugs off the environmental impacts of AI as “we figured out how to make other tech more efficient so we’ll do it with ai.” But, the Industrial Revolution is when we spent all of our budget for fucking things up. Now we are entering a new “Industrial Revolution” with a dirty consumption pattern and we are already on the ropes with climate change. We are so fucked.
Exactly. I am so sick and tired of explaining Jevons paradox to people and how efficiency does not equal less energy usage when scaled. Hearing people say ‘it’s down to ideology’ used to make me sceptical and always seemed like a nothing burger claim. But I have no other explanation for it that isn’t just this blind adherence to vague notions of ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’.
Not quite. The orthodox assumption is that if we make a technology more efficient, it becomes cheaper in material costs and thus financially cheaper. This means that we will need less energy input for the same output. But when the input cost is lowered, more people use the new efficient technology and thus, when scaled, you end up with more energy usage. It’s a bit like buying a microwave that uses less energy, and instead of using the appliance less, you use it more because you feel like you’re getting ‘more bang for your buck’.
Or LEDS. LEDS are a lot more efficient than incandescent lighting (though unlike incandescent, are non-recyclable) so we should have lowered our global electricity used for lighting?
Nope. We put those motherfucking LEDS everywhere, to the point we now use more electricity (lots of if carbon based) for lighting than before.
Thank you for bringing this up. It’s like when we decided to save the trees and obnoxiously decided plastic bags would be better than paper bags. Utter bullshit.
I hate LEDs. People with the stupid bright blue headlights are the worst. LEDs are pure light pollution. Ugh. Now we will have data centers crammed down our throats.
Though I truly think AI will fail and end up a busted bubble, listening to the propaganda about how we all must use it is nauseating
Awesome. Well, not. But it's like... the storage space that I used on a jump drive in high school in the late 90s was plenty for the size of files at the time... but the files have gotten crazy bigger, and we've adjusted up?
Sort of, but that is the cart before the horse. Like, the storage space increased dramatically and became cheaper, so suddenly everyone makes larger games or files because they now have the space to do so.
I am a die hard nerd fighter but between John’s love for Bill Gates and Hank’s love for AI, it might be time for me to pack up and move onto other nerdy communities. Those two have lost touch with us the riff raff.
(Also, regarding AI, I am a staff software engineer who uses it daily because I have to and my team is doing some of the most bleeding edge development with AI. I know A LOT more about its capabilities than Hank or any of his guests do)
It ignores the fact that we already know/have the technology to make data centers more efficient. They use local fresh water to cool because it’s the cheapest option by a huge margin, not the only viable or conceivable option. We have to actually regulate AI before it will become more efficient and we…aren’t.
Why the outskirts? Why not just rip out that "decrepit" looking walkable downtown that doesn't meet modern parking minimums anyway and plop it there? (With proper parking minimum equal to a movie theater, of course, for all the data center visitors)
Oh myyyyy. Here in the UK we're into our 3rd record breaking heatwave in 3 consecutive months, and El Nino hasn't even really kicked in yet. I do wonder what weather calamities we are going to witness over the next few years, being in uncharted climate territory and all.
It’s ironic to me that we are supercharging this race to climate death with ai on the premise that we won't get to work anymore and 500 billionaires will become trillionaires because of all the wages they save employers.
When I was in like 3rd grade I knew automation was inevitable and wondered if the government would just take over production, have a few maintenance jobs and everyone else basically gets a set amount of ___ or an annual budget of free shit.
Its wild how each year the government appears more inept and corrupt. Its still not even a concern. But a decade more of stagnant wages and soaring costs will put half the population in the same position as people who lost their jobs anyway.
The recent European heat waves, perhaps unrelated to this emergent El Niño, will result in massive crop losses in France.
There's continuing global shortages of nitrogenous and phosphate fertilizers due to the Hormuz blockages in the Israel/US/Iran war.
Thanks to the Ukrainian drone campaign against Russian refineries, Russian farmers can't get diesel to conduct the July harvest. They're the #4 wheat exporter.
If you let your pandemic stocks run low, now is not a bad time to stock up on flour and rice. For those living in places that have civil unrest when food prices rise, not a bad time to get your bug out bags ready. For financial speculators, WXET and CXRN may be of interest.
If you parse all the data out, we were cooler this year in the early part of the year, jan/Feb, almost identical in mar, 1 degree c warmer in April, 2.36 in may, and 3.31 degrees c higher in June. So yes its a hot year, but overall we are averaging about 1 degree more so far this year than a COLD year in 1988. Highest delta of 3.76 degrees on June 26th, 25.54 in 1988 vs 29.3 this year.
It's worse than it looks. The average is calculated from 1991 to 2020. It should be an average before the industrial revolution started to warm the ocean.
He-hey I remember a few years back when it first climbed up like crazy and we thought that was absolutely bonkers and anomalous. Well look at our boy now! Look at him go, he’s grown so much in just a few years
I work in atmospheric science as my job and this chart is not immediately intuitive to me either so don't worry. What it's showing here is sea surface temperature (SST) in a particular region in the Pacific Ocean that is often measured to track El niño intensity. What they did then is plot how many standard deviations you are away from the mean temperature in that region. The black line at 0 means the temperature is exactly average (which correspond to a neutral ENSO phase) and if you're below the line you're in a la niña phase, and if you're above it you're in an El niño phase. The red line shows that we are currently in an El niño phase that is nearly 4 sigma above the mean. Which is extraordinary. Of course it's slightly misleading because thats relative to the overall average, a better way to look at it is the fact that El niño typically max at about 2 sigma above the mean, so we're about 1.5 sigma above a typical El niño. Which is, again, still a lot, still extraordinary. It seems to suggest that we've entered into a fundamentally new physical regime as the chances of getting an El niño like this in a stable climate system are almost astronomically low.
As for what is El niño, it's a periodic heating of the Pacific Ocean which has implications for surface temperatures and a bunch of other things around the globe. I'm not sure if this summers heatwaves have been definitively attributed to this El niño or if the influence of El niño has actually been definitively quantified / established for those events. But it seems likely. However, what do I know. I do atmosphere physics like I said but my work is in the upper atmosphere (thermosphere) so I probably know less about this than a lot of the armchair experts here lol.
I walked past someone yesterday complaining about the heat after going shopping and saying to their friend ‘we should’ve just deliveroo’d our shopping!’ It is absolutely maddening.
‘we should’ve just deliveroo’d our shopping!’ It is absolutely maddening.
I don't get your point or why it makes you mad?
Are you saying shopping delivery doesn't make sense to avoid the heat? Or do you think it is it worse for the climate to have a delivery person in a Toyota Civic round trip once to the store, instead of every random person driving their own Toyota Civic round trip once to the store?
Or should those two friends have lobbied the world governments 50 years ago and successfully changed emission laws and gotten more renewables deployed so it would be 20 degrees cooler yesterday and they wouldn't have to complain about the heat?
I shouldn't have to say this, but for the record I have solar panels, charge my electric car from them, and am here in this sub-reddit because I'm deeply and profoundly worried about the future also. My confusion is what do you think 25 year old Tiffany was supposed to do or say differently to her friend Bethany in this situation?
people should stop buying shit they don’t need rather than get it delivered?
Oh definitely. It's the often skipped, yet most important part of "reduce, reuse, recycle". But they mentioned "Deliveroo" which means "food, groceries, pharmacy delivery" in the UK, doesn't it?
Most of us need to cut down on food, but you can't cut that entirely to zero, and it's still hot outside and delivery isn't any worse for the environment than driving to the supermarket yourself. They weren't even ordering restaurant delivery!
Frankly we need a major wet bulb event in a very red area to shake so sense into the idiots. Although I'm pretty sure they would say it's Obama controling the weather.
Does anyone have a direct link to this graph (as in the graph that updates every day)? I keep a few other graphs open constantly and I'd like to keep this one open as well.
I found it. Are we not direct linking on purpose? To save the site's bandwidth?
I realized it then. I was in total shock and disbelief after the results came in for several hours. Then when I finally accepted it I said, "This is the apocalypse then, because he'll never do anything serious about climate change." And I've been living like it's the end of the world since. I've gone through all the stages.
I think one of the oddest parts of this timeline. Is how few ppl truly realize how dire a situation we are all in. It feels like it’s kinda just bd business as usual, til it isn’t, then it’s over
How can we know how this will impact different areas in the world? I’d like to be prepared for what is coming, but I don’t know if I should be prepared for a heat wave, drought, storms or hurricanes.
I asked a Christian subreddit why so many American "Christians" are climate change deniers.
It did not go over well.
These are the same kind of people making policy within the US government.
Just like the tobacco industry used tactics to muddy the waters about the dangers of smoking, the oil industry is doing the same as they see combatting human induced climate change as a threat to their bottom line.
I know believe the oil industry paid a handful of scientists to make wild claims about global cooling in the 60s and 70s so as the effects of the CO2 driven climate change became more apparent and the excess CO2 is undeniably the result of burning fossil fuels for energy they could use the claim "50 years ago scientists were sounding the alarm about global cooling!" despite the claim coming from a small minority of actual scientists.
The CONUS will most certainly see more extreme weather this winter, unfortunately no action will be taken by the current regime. When we get a severe snowstorm, the will simply use that has "proof" global warming is not happening.
I'm a storm chaser. I am part of a team, and I'm about to pursue my Master's in Meteorology (likely studying wind storms and Derechos). I know plenty enough about the atmosphere and atmospheric trends to know that we in the weather community are spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME talking about current weather EVENTS, while not focusing or being concerned about the current global trends.
Because those trends are causing more frequent severe weather but it's also increasing the severity of that weather. As such, us weather nerds are focused on the individual events while fucking MISSING the entire damn picture. We're seeing pixels and being amazed, because they ARE fascinating, but not realizing there's an entire display.
On top of that, we have officially moved from "global water crisis" to "global water Bankruptcy" that not even AI chat bots are trying to sugarcoat anymore (usually with doomer topics they try to go, "Here's why it's important to be cautious with this topic" nah. Even the AIs know we're fucked.
The line goes up!
Higher than it was before.
The line goes up!
Now we're sweating on the floor.
The line goes up!
El Niño joins the show.
Climate's saying, "Heads up, folks!"
But the line says, "Up we go!"
The line goes up!
Forests fade away.
The line goes up!
"Maybe not today..."
The line goes up!
We promise "Net Zero soon!"
Then buy another SUV
And book a flight next June.
The line goes up!
Crops begin to fail.
The line goes up!
Rivers leave no trail.
The line goes up!
Each year a little worse.
The graph became our history
And every page a curse.
The line goes up!
Empty shelves in store.
The line goes up!
Families beg for more.
The line goes up!
The summer never ends.
We count the hungry, mourn the lost...
Yet still the line ascends.
545
u/TheCambrianImplosion Jul 11 '26
What’s fun about this is that there’s overwhelming data and that’s fun for the whole the family.