Well said. Generally speaking, most people I speak to about climate have a mental model for "climate change" as a dimmer switch. The planet gets a little warmer, littler warmer, littler warmer, and we get a bit more uncomfortable each time.
But this mental model loses the most important feature of the climate system.
It's not a dimmer switch. It's more like an ON / OFF switch.
We live in a stable climate today. Things are getting a little warmer. And we see some weird things. But still, even at a little warmer, we are in the same stable climate system, just a little warmer or cooler.
However, if we flip to "OFF" on a stable climate by getting a lot warmer, our climate system moves to a chaotic state unlike anything we've ever known in human history.
Nice dashboard. I have built a spreadsheet that I use for tracking weather that is fairly similar to this though I only have 25 years of data that I have collected so far. All of it was collected on my property though and I am up in one of the areas that could become pretty wet if this plays out like the other Super El Nino in 2015-2106. During that period, we almost matched our annual rainfall total between mid-October and 31 December, 2015.
An interesting thing to note in the chart is the projected peak of this El Nino. Their models project a single peak in about November. If this works like 2015-2016 then you can expect to see two peaks with the first occurring late this year and the second occurring by mid-March, 2027. There was a short period beginning in mid-November, 2015 when the ocean SST anomaly dropped from 3.1C to 2.3C before rebounding to 2.9C by mid-January, 2016 and it remained above 2C until mid-March, 2016. I don't see any allowance for a two-headed peak in those model outputs though it makes sense that winter mixing of Arctic waters could cool the eastern Pacific a few degrees without putting an end to the super El Nino conditions, with 2015-2106 being an obvious, recent analogue.
In section 5 the question of coupling appears to be answered in the affirmative in the data from the top left chart of Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and El Nino. There appears to be a long oscillation trend of about 12 years evident in the data. Perhaps one should see whether this correlates at all with sunspot cycles which have a similar period.
I can make another correlation from my own data that illustrates how the El Nino/La Nina cycle works here in NTexas.
Referring to section 4 - In Context you can see the flip to La Nina period around May 2010 and La Nina conditions held until August 2014 and it took until October 2015 for the rains to return. My records show that when it stopped raining in late May 2010 we were ahead of 20-year avg annual rainfall totals for that date. We ended that year and each year through 2014 with a rainfall deficit. By the end of 2014 we were firmly in a multi-year drought in NTexas with a cumulative rainfall deficit during that period of 31.1" (789.94mm) below 20 year avg annual rainfall. Interestingly enough, we ended 2015 with an annual surplus of 32.1" (815.34mm) here at my place. That erased all of the 5 year rainfall deficit (2010-2014) in the period between October 22 and December 31.
The drought broke in October 2015 as I mentioned at the top, after SST had climber to super El Nino levels, the highest on record to that point. The rains arrived about a month before the first SST peak in November, 2015.
Today I have a sensor array that tells me that soil temps in the full sun from a probe 4-6" (~100-152 mm) below surface reached 100 degrees about three weeks ago during this long, hot spell leading into what I hope is a wet period. Soil moisture there is under 30% and everything that was green in mid-June when the rains stopped is dry and brown today except the hardiest native grasses and small plants. We've had 1.5" (38 mm) of rain since mid-June which puts us almost 5" (127 mm) under the 20 year avg annual total for this date.
Luckily there are signs that the hot, high pressure dome that has dominated our weather since June is moving out of the area and the rains that have been falling west and north of us will be falling on us in a few short weeks.
Thanks for posting this dashboard. It fits so well with my own data that it allows me time to plan for winter gardening. I grew carrots last year and if I can do that again it will make it two years in a row. That would be cool.
EDIT: I took a look at the trend of sunspot numbers found here [0] and there is good correlation with peak sunspot numbers being near the zero-crossing on Section 5 - Is it Coupled chart of SOI. Since we are on the declining side of the sunspot cycle heading into solar minimum, still a few years away, it fits well with this being an El Nino period. Adjust the chart using the slider so that it covers the period from 1990-present like the chart in the dashboard. From that data, the strongest El Nino so far in 2015-2106 occurred during the weakest solar cycle in recent history.
Interesting about the dual peaks. I'm still getting up to speed on El Niño, as of a few weeks ago it had not been something I dug into before.
Zeke's multi-year comparison chart (#1) ends in December, but the forecast chart does show through July 2027 all the different models. I don't see any modeling a double peak, though that NASA-GEOS-S2S-2 line peaks in February.
25 years of data, any other impacts you've seen from carbon dioxide rising? (~370 ppm in 2001 to 420 ppm this year)
In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.
One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)
Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.
Strange timeline indeed but Stripe is a big backer for climate solutions and climate research, including a $2B carbon dioxide removal initiative called Frontier: https://stripe.com/climate
Reading Frontier’s website it’s very unclear how much they’re going to remove and how they’re going to do it - though there’s a lot of mentions of biomass
Trouble with techies is they tend plumb for techie solutions like carbon capture aka ClimeWorks rather than low tech options like trees or seagrass
Trees and seagrass don't really address the sequestration side though, do they?
The carbon they latch onto and temporarily hold onto is still within the land / sea surface +/- a few metres layer.
The current largest scale carbon capture projects are catching a small amount of vented CO2 from LNG projects and pushing that back into the subsurface fields - they only capture 10 ton by releasing over a 100.
We're in need of readily powered true air capture of CO2 then sequestered deep underground.
Things like www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992602269X have promise.
Trees and seagrass can address the sequestration side.
You can find examples here on Frontier's site of companies that are taking biomass (plant stuff like tree waste) and sequestering it in mines or other storage deep underground.
When thinking about sucking carbon from the sky, I find it useful to separate how I think about grabbing on to carbon dioxide from how to store carbon dioxide, rather than thinking of it as one step. I find it's easy to get lost and either over or undervalue things otherwise.
Plants and trees are excellent at grabbing on, for example, and with a good process they can lead to very cheap methods to store/remove carbon dioxide for a thousand years.
I appreciate the response and note that it's precisely because I already separate both the acquisition of CO2 from the sky and direct acquisition from industrial processes well apart from the storage side that I correctly stated trees and seagrass aren't storage methods.
How it's stored (and the energy used to store) matters. As you know - there's not much to argue about here, just a nod that it's best to be careful with words.
As a further question, what's the most effective Direct Air Capture method actually working on your books so far, in terms of greatest tonnages, and where is that captured CO2 being stored.
Thanks I’ll have a proper read of the paper when I’m on a larger device
Generally I’m skeptical of Carbon Capture and Storage schemes (and Hydrogen) as it’s a way for oils and gas companies to delay the transition to cleaner energy
IMV hydrogen does have something of place in industrial processes e.g. reduction of iron ore, and maybe fuel cells but not for general combustion
Let's say I take it that whatever post you're referencing is slimy, built on disaster capitalism, and downright bad. And your being jaded is totally understandable.
To that I remind you: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing"
What could you do to do drive the world in a different direction? (see my other posts for projects if you want help out with our El Niño Ready dashboard)
> In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
Yes, much better supply chains and infrastructure are examples of how growth and innovation make us more resilient.
For anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of the 2026 El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet and what we can do about it.
One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/
Is anyone here good at building lists of contacts? We're sending out a "Q&A about El Niño" to everyone organizing events at New York Climate Week, with the goal of having them spent 2 minutes talking about El Niño at their event.
It's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?
For anyone here looking to "do something" about global warming...One thing we're working on is how to avert the worst impacts of El Niño, and use that as a way to break open a new conversation about the warming planet.
One thing we need help with today is finding any other events at New York Climate Week that are about El Niño to feature on our site: https://elninoready.earth/
If you're going to go networking in New York, maybe see if anyone is interested in running a study / pilot project on pushing carbonated water into ultramafic rock to kick start self powered (via hydrogen) carbon capture.
But this mental model loses the most important feature of the climate system.
It's not a dimmer switch. It's more like an ON / OFF switch.
We live in a stable climate today. Things are getting a little warmer. And we see some weird things. But still, even at a little warmer, we are in the same stable climate system, just a little warmer or cooler.
However, if we flip to "OFF" on a stable climate by getting a lot warmer, our climate system moves to a chaotic state unlike anything we've ever known in human history.
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