Okay, These El Niño Forecasts Are Getting Ridiculous

723 points by malcolm58 a day ago on reddit | 104 comments

nonoose | a day ago

I love being in the middle of reading an article on a website just to have it reload after a few minutes and put me back at the beginning.

KingRBPII | a day ago

Click economy - ad impression hacking

Sylvanussr | 22 hours ago

That and Safari is barely a functioning browser on iOS.

asyork | a day ago

Even better when the reload eats up your one free article and then it's just gone.

itsmrmarlboroman2u | a day ago

Can't stand Gawker media. I refuse to give them clicks. I thought Gizmodo reported on tech, why is it reporting weather?

PeaceBull | a day ago

They’ve always written about whatever a person who likes gadgets would find interesting, not just gadgets.

Paratwa | a day ago

So four degrees Celsius hotter? Isn’t that like legit the theorized limit?

Edit : you guys are misunderstanding, what I’m saying and asking.

There are systems that impact each other.

4 degrees should be the limit before other systems ( rain, clouds, other shifts stabilizing the heat ).

Beyond that the theory is it could end up a permanent shift like during the Pleistocene era at 6 degrees

cityshepherd | a day ago

4°C so FAR…

Kaurifish | a day ago

We’re pretty sure we can’t make it to Venus-like conditions, but that doesn’t stop the corps from trying.

I_AM_FERROUS_MAN | a day ago

But muh next quarter! /s

quantumparakeet | 20 hours ago

We'll drain the Colorado before Christmas bonuses, my fellow CEO

Kaurifish | 10 hours ago

Or worse.

oroborus68 | a day ago

It's getting hot in here! Gonna take off all my clothes!🎶

TolMera | a day ago

🎼it’s raining men! Hallelujah! It’s raining men, amen! 🎼

Stu161 | a day ago

Haha, yeah...

Viktor_Laszlo | a day ago

3.6 roentgen - not great, not terrible.

spshkyros | a day ago

That line is wild. How any competent user could not notice they pegged their meter is beyond me - and Ive used a lot of Geiger counters in my life. This isn't like, a rare problem.

Sellazard | 21 hours ago

We have former purely bureaucratic bureau officials hiring anyone willing into masked militia with license to search, invade private houses and propertt, abduct, kill on the spot and racially profile tokens i to camps with no judicial warrants in 2026

Do you think falling in line with what the party wants was any different back then? Percentage of obedient dimwits is always persistent in the population

AliasHandler | 16 hours ago

The users know. But they're low level guys. They report to the bosses, who then try and paint a rosier picture by ignoring that that's the meter's max when they report to their political bosses. Then the political bosses take that information and report to party officials the low number without the context. The system in USSR at that time was all about looking good to your party bosses, and as a result there was a tendency to lie and obfuscate to make it look like you were doing a better job than you actually were, and incredible pressure from party officials to make impossible deadlines and accomplish impossible jobs with the resources available. Chernobyl essentially exposed this entire system and was likely one of the larger factors in the end of the USSR. The book Midnight in Chernobyl does a great job of breaking all this down and how such a failure like this could be possible, along with the human failures in the wake of the disaster that delayed the response.

rockytop24 | 14 hours ago

Just look around the current administration. The people using the meter absolutely know it's a fucked reading. But they phrase it carefully to their boss because they don't want to lose their job. And then the next guy softens it for his boss. And then his boss. And so on.

Same shit happened to Stalin when he was crashing the country and stroking out for over a day - when you're a cult of personality, all that matters is loyalty and not upsetting dear leader. Even if you have to manufacture reality.

2Throwscrewsatit | a day ago

No. It’s unclear if El Niño has ever been this severe during the human era.

TolMera | a day ago

I think it’s pretty clear that it has never been this severe

Please_HMU | 19 hours ago

It’s actually very clear it hasn’t

askingforafakefriend | a day ago

Theoretical limit SO FAR [Homer "comforting" Bart meme]

Igiem | a day ago

I've seen forecasts saying everything from a warmer winter to the end of civilization created by famine and failing yields. This Super El Nino will be interesting.

ThVos | a day ago

The western United States cannot afford a winter like this past one. Colorado got 9% of it's normal snowpack. It was 60+ degrees minimum with full sun and no snow from December through March. Everything downstream of Colorado is gonna be fucked for water unless it absolutely dumps for multiple years.

Temporary-Warning883 | a day ago

Where I live in Spokane Washington, we are in the 4th year of drought I think, we had maybe 2-3 days of snow this past winter, it used to be snow all winter and snowpack on the ground for weeks/months. Now we have something called “fire season” and half the state is on fire

QuiteCricket_78 | a day ago

Northern California, it breaks my heart every time I see a new community have to deal with fire season. Nearing 10 years out - still not "recovered". Our fire season starts end of May so far it seems to end in early November. More than 1/2 the year people are jumpy and stressed on a daily basis.

ThVos | a day ago

Completely agreed. Ours doesn't really end anymore in CO, like it used to. We've had a few pop up in January and February in recent years.

Mutapi | 10 hours ago

Same. In the past 11 years I’ve been in 5 major, destructive wildfires all while living in the same place. Three of them were in just the last 5 years. Not to mention countless smaller ones. I know way too many people who have lost their homes to fire, several of which I saw burn, myself.

Wildfires and the heaps of prep we do to minimize potential impact to our property are just an inevitable part of summertime now. It’s reshaped so much about how we live our lives here and every summer day comes with an undertone of anxiety. While I hate it for myself it’s also so devastating to see it happening in other places. The fire doesn’t just sweep through and that’s the end of it. You live your life bracing for the next one and the one after that.

Wishing you and your loved ones, as well as all of you on other affected or soon-to-be affected areas a safe fire season.

Lost-Platypus8271 | 20 hours ago

the arson doesn’t help tbh

Temporary-Warning883 | 13 hours ago

No it certainly doesn’t, the power company was preemptively cutting power to certain high risk areas that day due to fire risk, when someone intentionally starts a fire during a time like that, it’s going to be bad.

cactus22minus1 | 14 hours ago

Yea destabilizing society on every front doesn’t help with that either.

Acrobatic_Bike7925 | 18 hours ago

If this becomes the new normal, western states need to bump up their beaver populations so that every mountain stream gets damed and stores as much winter rain as possible.

eatingthesandhere91 | a day ago

Central NM here, we’re already seeing the driest era of the Rio Grande valley in over a century.

ThVos | a day ago

Which is wild to me, but not surprising.

I drove down to Albuquerque today and was stunned by how green everything is compared to back home.

brandolinium | a day ago

Very happy to see this point underlined.

I_AM_FERROUS_MAN | a day ago

I'm tired of interesting boss. Could we get a little sanity with a side of equitable and sustainable economic growth instead?

clksagers | a day ago

This. Please. Tired of living in such “interesting” times

FilthyCasual2k17 | 22 hours ago

When people don't pay attention to politics during "boring" times, and decades of corruption, neglect, and incompetence rule, then you get "interesting" times.

mrszubris | 20 hours ago

The quote is something like strong men make peace, peace makes weak men, weak men make war. Repeat ad nauseam.

FilthyCasual2k17 | 20 hours ago

It really is so jarring when you look at how Europe invested and stocked health equipment and medicine after Spanish Flu, then forget about it by the time that generation died and ww2 came, and then now same things happening because people who live through it are just so messed up by it they do everything to avoid it, and even those who were kids, but once all those people die out, it's like the rest of the population just thinks history books exist because people were stupid then, and we are much smarter now, and those same things could never happen.

skinnyraf | 19 hours ago

not for the next few centuries...

QuiteCricket_78 | a day ago

Just from what I have seen, so many articles fail to point out what is local to some and what it not to others. Likely to get heavy rain where I am but minimal flooding. I'm not a farmer and I don't live in direct line of destruction but my husbands coffee habit does.

NeverEndingCoralMaze | a day ago

This El Niño won’t go away. We won’t hit average numbers again after this one.

ChristopherRubbin | a day ago

It will be the coldest winter we will ever have going forward.

AnAncientOne | a day ago

latest prelim reading (Aug 5th) is +2.64C, by far the highest recorded at this time of year. For comparison 2015, the record year was at +1.54C at the same time of year, it peaked at +3C in the November.

immersive-matthew | a day ago

Meanwhile, my country of Canada is busy investing billions to extract and export even more fossil fuels while at the same time our forests burn down. Crime against humanity is likely how this will be viewed in the decades to come.

DC38x | 18 hours ago

>decades to come

I like your enthusiasm

rockytop24 | 14 hours ago

At this point it's feeling like accurate history and science books will become underground teachings that secretly judge our society as it implodes on itself to thunderous applause.

Voxil42 | 8 hours ago

Oh, those decades are happening whether we're here to experience them or not.

Pygmy_Nuthatch | 23 hours ago

Maybe release a model charting expected weather impacts in the region, because the bright red hypodermic needle we've been staring at for the last six months isn't helpful at all.

Kflynn1337 | a day ago

Ok you know that scene in The Core when the protagonist demonstrated the effects of losing Earth's magnetic field using a blow torch and an apple...

Yeah, it's like that, kinda,. and you know, with actual science.

BI_Moose | a day ago

God i love that movie. Even to my dumb ass the science is terrible, but its such a great terrible.

im-ba | 21 hours ago

Lol the perpetual motion based deus ex machina is the only reason why I remember that movie

ObsidianArmadillo | a day ago

EL NIÑO! SPANISH FOR... THE NIÑO

retro_sonic | a day ago

“El Niño is gonna El Niño so hard it’s gonna restart the PMOC, by mid-November”

ObjectivelyGruntled | a day ago

But I switched to paper straws...

NeverEndingCoralMaze | a day ago

We did that thing with the bags.

wigwamtree | 21 hours ago

Pshh I’m using paper condoms

septubyte | a day ago

This shit ain't fucking ok

Jake24601 | 17 hours ago

We will burn and nothing will save us.

sanyika9711 | 21 hours ago

haha sometimes

fancycatpics | 4 hours ago

r/collapse

KappaRossBagel | a day ago

We are in the end times

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Some of us plan ahead. My acre+ is roughly 800 trees, aged 3 to 25 years, specifically designed to aid absorbing water at rates consistent with the late 80s El Nino.

mastermind_loco | a day ago

Oh great we're saved

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Out of curiousity, what exactly are you doing besides commenting and bashing people on the internet? I planted 7 more trees today.

Kaurifish | a day ago

Our tiny place (1/16 acre) is slightly higher than our neighbors, who are all hardscaped. When we landscaped, we dug trenches in the heavy clay soil and filled them with wood chips to infiltrate water.

Even when atmospheric rivers hit, we had no runoff. It’s not rocket engineering.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

There are neighbors doing that crap on purpose, with courts letting them off for very weak arguments. I played an MMO with a W Palm Beach kid, his dad bought a second home, moved to it, had his home destroyed, built a "hurricane bunker" above the watertable, then rebuilt the home. Their yard had a 30° to 45° slope onto all surrounding properties. When storms flooded the area, he kept gaming and shared photos of the flooded neighbors & their dry garage. I think they argued, building it lower would have required a 24/7 sump pump.

QuiteCricket_78 | a day ago

But does it look nice /s - the arguments one of neighbors starts with people... The HOA can see into my back yard. I find this funny, I keep it wild for the bees and deer.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Deer, turkey, and all the critters come through each night after watering. Yesterday the vultures used the sprinklers for showers. If anyone bitches, I'm putting up a bat box (they visit each night anyhow).

Friendly-Chipmunk-23 | a day ago

Oh fuk off

somafiend1987 | a day ago

I take it you didn't live through the 1980s to early 1990s El Nino? It was weird $hit. Rain in Silicon Valley from November to March, we thought we were in Seattle. It's strange a phuck to be swimming laps and seeing coaches in shorts and Longshoreman's raincoat. The very next Christmas it was almost 90°F in San Francisco. It takes funding for 1 person to change the world. It only takes time, water, and effort to turn an acre into a forest. Keep it to native plants that wildlife won't eat that must be drought tolerant and massively reduce the chances of fire. In 2011, the fire department gave me the regulations. For 2012-2017 they gave pointers, now they refer people to my property for how to ensure fires won't spread to their homes. I'm the type to ignore 1:100 research and dig up the study involving 25,000.

QuiteCricket_78 | a day ago

I was just a wee one, but I do remember the flooding in my area that isn't prone to flooding. The much older kids got out a canoe.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

If you're in the bay area, avoid landfill areas. Foster City, Redwood Shores, Mill Valley, Fashion Island, Alviso, East Palo Alto, Hunter's Point, Burlingame, SFO, Palo Alto along the river, and a bunch of east bay cities all had issues last El Nino.

QuiteCricket_78 | a day ago

I moved to the foothills, only neighbors in the dips get any flooding. I'm a little concerned with erosion in one corner of my yard. I should probably get on that soon.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

The fastest growing drought tolerant I found is the Hopbush. My yard had 6 and a house about 1000' from the river has their entire backyard privacy fence made of it. It grows to between 18 and 25' tall and stops. The trunk never gets much bigger than 4 or 5" around. The leaves are purple & red when underwatered, and bright greens when overwatered. I'm using it to stop wind and as a firebreak. The fire department all agreed, they've never seen these burn. After 5 years in the ground, they jump from 6' to about 18' with watering. They put out seedpods that seem to have a 70% germination rate, so I have 20-30 potted at all times.

Compared to the invasive Eucalyptus, hearing that was musical. Hopbush, pine, redwood and Monterey cypress are my go-to.

2Throwscrewsatit | 14 hours ago

Elsewhere in this thread you said you plant natives. Hop bushes are only found in Australia naturally. You are planting a really invasive species

somafiend1987 | 12 hours ago

Plants don't grow overnight and soil needs help. Hopbush are around, the particular variety I have was listed as native to Florida. I've never bought any and they have only grown where I plant them. With their limited size, I've been using them to stabilize the areas the redwoods are going in. The Eucalyptus strips the land of moisture & decaying eucalyptus acts like borax, killing off insects & earthworms. The Hopbush makes a nice intermediary. Once the redwood are hitting 7', the hopbushes get cut and yanked. Putting the redwood & Monterey Cypress in with no support tends to just get sunburnt & eaten by gopher. I lost 12 redwood that way (only $12 each from my supplier). Surrounding them with Pride of Madeira (fairly robust, definitely not native but very anti gopher & deer) or hopbush provides enough shade to keep the bases of the redwoods moist but not wet. The growth difference is more than 4' over the first 3 years.

The only plants actually acting invasively are the eucalyptus & poison oak. The eucalyptus has even sprouted in gutters & crooks of spanish oak. When I purchased, the entire property was eucalyptus, 2 small pine (20-30 years old), 1 pine that survived the 1980s pine beetle infestation, and weeds. Now there's trees and shade.

The Dawn redwoods are technically not native either. There are fossils of them in the Dakotas, but are believed to have been extinct until some were found in a valley in China after WWII.

2Throwscrewsatit | 10 hours ago

Thanks for explaining. If you could dm me your supplier I volunteer at a couple volunteer gardens and beautification projects and we are looking for sources of plants for a new urban project

LordBalderdash | a day ago

That was no so friendly.

Groovychick1978 | a day ago

This El niño is looking to outpace the 1877 El niño that was responsible for millions of deaths.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

That part is harder to judge. People were still pulling 1,500 lb sea bass from California's Channel Islands, Sacramento spent nearly 3 months underwater, the Lake returned for a long while, and people depended on steam engines. I lack Musk's potential value and can't afford to build a dam or seafront. I do what I can, vote based on actions not words, and have a vastly negative carbon footprint.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

The 1800s El Nino flooded the Salinas River making Monterey, Carmel, and Pacific Grove into an island. The Salinas Valley flooded (Salinas to King City), the San Joaquin Valley flooded enough for the lake to return for a few years, Sacramento was under 6-8' of water for 3 weeks, and was still muddy a year later.

Those same results in 2026 would drown 70% of the country's lettuce, a good chunk of almonds, strawberries, artichoke, and more. Silicon Valley highways with low points would be useless, specifically anything near Santa Clara and San Jose north of 280/680.

Call it $3 trillion, but inflated to $15 by insurance companies. Lives? It depends on common sense.

dkinmn | a day ago

You are in a cult.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Of one.

dkinmn | a day ago

No, you are definitely influenced by nonsense.

2Throwscrewsatit | a day ago

1880s?

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Nah, that would mean my grandfathers read the New Zealand paper discussing CO². One was a teamster raising his 4 siblings after age 11, when his parents died, while the other was a door to door insurance salesman until he became a WWII X-ray tech. Neither was science minded, but in the 1970s a <3 me got crash courses in pollution, prions, and forest wellness. With that came a lifelong urge to leave to planet better.

Afraid_Cockroach_398 | a day ago

Wow, so they taught you about prions before they were discovered in the 80s? Truly great minds.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Do something, or sit back and complain. It is easy to tell which you do.

Afraid_Cockroach_398 | 14 hours ago

I'm not complaining, did you even read my comment? I'm calling you out for lying about being taught about prions in the 70s. This isn't an opinion, you're lying.

Do better.

somafiend1987 | a day ago

He didn't name them, but explained stuff traveling from dead bodies into the water. A 3 year old saw melting snow and a clear swift moving creek. I was told that there are bugs too small to see in feces, corpses, spit, pretty much everything. Then asked if I knew which type might be in the creek. Confused kid shook his head. We hiked up Mt San Francisco (Arizona) and he had me count the nasty stuff I would not want to eat or drink. At 10 fingers he told me tap or boiled water was the only safe water.

plshelpcomputerissad | a day ago

I mean that could be many many things besides prions, like regular ass bacteria

somafiend1987 | a day ago

Yeah, I've narrowed in my mind as what's the worst that could happen and for injesting, prions scare the f#$^ out of me. Swimming or using a neddie pot, it would be amoeba. Do I live scared, nah, but I always check bodies of water before jumping or diving.

costafilh0 | a day ago

Uhhh

Ohhh

Spooky 👻

different_produce384 | a day ago

Complete destruction. Hide your wife hide your kids hide your pets. El Niño is coming for YOU !

blue-mooner | a day ago

Yeah, bad planning means it’s coming for all of us