The Strongest El Niño Ever
164 points - today at 6:35 PM
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What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin
I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
A little known fact about Alan Kay is 17 years ago he was part of a group of "systems people" who published for the NFS about various systems including the climate. He helped write "Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems" (https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-12/Transitions-and-ti...). He wrote to me that "This, along with many other warnings from many other sources over many years, fell on deaf or disbelieving ears."
He agreed with my concern saying "And, yes, you are right that things will likely be really bad if the climate is allowed to crash past the tipping point."
But what he said following that shook me to my core. Kay said "If you think of a system as an upside-down coca cola bottle, it is easy to see that a little nudge can topple it, whereas considerably more energy is then required to put it back.".
What this means is to get CO2 back down to 350 ppm (we are at 428 ppm), we would need to expend more energy than we did getting it to 450 ppm. That means, we would have to expend more energy than humans have produced IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in the next 10-20 years just to put the system back to where it's safe. Thermal dynamics and entropy do not play games.
Ask yourself, where are we spending our energy right now as a species? On putting the system to a safe level or something else?
I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.