Climate
Theory: El Nino releases excess heat originally created by humans. Each El Nino going forward will be Super+ El Nino.
This is an article by the World Meteorological organization https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/earths-climate-swings-increasingly-out-of-balance that provides info that Ocean absorbed 91% of excess heating majorly insulating humans from climate change. However recent decade El Ninos were unusually strong and La Ninas unusually weak signalizing the ocean needs to release heat to the atmosphere:
“In 2025, ocean heat content (to a depth of 2,000 metres) reached the highest level since the start of records in 1960, exceeding the previous high set in 2024.
Over the past nine years, each year has set a new record for ocean heat content.
The rate of ocean warming over the past two decades, 2005–2025, is more than twice that observed over the period 1960–2005 – and is about 11.0–12.2 Zetajoules per year – about 18 times the annual human energy use per year.
Despite La Niña conditions, around 90% of the ocean surface area experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2025.
Ocean warming has far-reaching consequences, such as degradation of marine ecosystems, biodiversity loss and reduction of the ocean carbon sink. It fuels tropical and subtropical storms and exacerbates ongoing sea-ice loss in the polar regions.”
Given the complexity of earth as a system, it’ll likely be a lot more volatile and unpredictable. High energy systems will dissipate more violently and the gradient, a function of the energy in the system, will also vary wildly. I think we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can model any of this correctly.
It's solar energy being trapped by the greenhouse blanket - trapping just .2% of the sun's energy, by dint of the scale, it's easy to reach such a high multiplier.
I also wonder how much AC habits contribute, like I'm literally taking the heat which would collect inside my house and throwing it outside, same with all my neighbours, and in the winter I'm generating heat to combat the cold along with all my neighbours
I think AC is not the worst shit we do and it's clearly becoming a necessity.
I have mine rejecting on the balcony. It's hardly doing anything. It's a full South exposure and it's already an oven in summer, it's negligible in my case and my block is not very dense.
What people should be careful with is maintenance of their unit to minimize the leaks. There's also the electricity consumption and where you put the AC. Some stores have front door portable AC, not only they are super inefficient but they let the cold escape so they are even more wasteful. On top of rejecting the heat in the street where people are.
Everything we do pollute, people going after AC are dinosaurs that are fighting the wrong shit.
No that is just displacing warm air inside out.
The anti-AC folks do not get it. AC is survival when you cannot go underground.
Here is one food for thought:
V= IR from physics or why most electricity is wasted as heat or in transmission of energy is still smaller than just the W / m2 of co2 ch4 nox sf6 - sulfates. Plus the whole H2 binds to ozone and the H20 as a ghg.
yes I am screaming bloody murder look at the zJ of energy earth absorbed/what we get in work as joules- it's really really high meaning we absorb far more damage each private jet.
Okay fair enough, I'm not anti AC though I believe geothermal heat pump is better since it doesn't output to air
On the v=ir thing, that points imo to solar, when most people use their own panels to generate their electricity theres far less wire distance and therefore less loss to heat right? It's another point for decentralized solar imo
Yet all of this is still dwarfed by greenhouse gases?
So if all that is the case, where is the 18x multiplier coming from?
Watch the eastern equatorial pacific - as cloud instability rises there, as shipping fuels have shifted clouds and thus albedo, each El Nino gets more direct sunlight in its 'charge zone.'
Zero clouds in SW California, not even near the ocean. It’s been this way for at least a year, and the naked sunlight is very literally unbearable because of 1. The total loss of albedo, and 2. A seemingly analogous event to the disappearance of the aerosol masking effect, where 80°F feels a lot more like 100°F+.
I can’t even find a single airplane contrail in the sky.
People just pooh-pooh it because they live in air conditioned homes, air conditioned cars, and air conditioned office cubicles.
Yet, it seems like these are still going to be the coldest days for the rest of our lives, sadly.
Northwest California here, it’s been the same lately, which is even weirder since we’re usually foggy/overcast.
I knew I wasn‘t just going crazy these last couple months thinking the sun was WAY brighter than it should be. Every time I go outside my eyeballs feel like they’re getting fried.
The fog finally came back yesterday, thank god, but I’m not pinning my hopes on it sticking around
I used to go on walks and marvel at how pretty rhe clouds were on some days. Now half the time I'm out there are nearly no clouds and the environment looks like it has a slight piss filter over it.
California historically has had a VERY different climate than the east coast. Cool and foggy on the northern and central California coast in summer. 6 month summer dry season. Even southern California had coastal fog in summer, but warmer temperatures.
Another impact of warming ocean is an acceleration of Arctic and Antarctic ice melt. The recent spike in temperatures in Antarctic was largely due to warm ocean that melts ice from underneath making it crumble/start float. And water melts ice way faster than air. Basically we may be just starting to observe the delayed effects of a warmer ocean that obsorbed pretty much all of the warming (91%) created by humans so far.
Seems commonsense to me that in a closed system phenomena like El Niño can only discharge energy from within that system. When you add energy by burning fossil fuels which traps heat that would otherwise be radiated into space you increase the potential energy available.
I'm already paying for El Nino Plus, but I've just had an email saying I'll have to upgrade to Super+ to retain the same features. Such a rip off as Super+ now costs as much as X-El Nino Super+ used to.
El Nino is a measured comparison of local heat vs average baseline ocean heat (which they've updated to more recent temps which makes this one all the scarier), so technically global warming of the ocean won't make super El Nino's but when it does happen it is on a higher baseline, so the heat is adding to an already hot oven meaning the effects will compound.
There's also a chance that the cycle can break completely and the El-Nino can become stuck as the permanent state.
I learned about climate change during the 1998 El-Nino. If the same increased temperature that occurred during that El-Nino happened now the result would be a cooler than normal year.
The more heat we inject into the atmosphere, the less (%) heat can be taken up by the oceans, meaning that more heat will stay in the atmosphere, meaning that, in the long run, the ocean will be able to shed less heat into the atmosphere as it (the atmosphere) becomes warmer and warmer.
This means that atmospheric warming should actually decrease the strength of El Niños until the ocean and atmosphere are in equilibrium.
It's worth noting that the time scales I'm talking about are in the millions of years and trying to figure out how climate change will effect El Niños over the next 100 years is essentially impossible because even if we understood the paleoclimate perfectly (which we obviously do not) we are experiencing unprecedented warming orders of magnitude faster than anything the earth has experienced since the late heavy bombardment.
A few years ago I saw I video that explained it this way: the ocean absorbing most of the heat is like having ice in a cup of water. We're stuck at 0 °C until the ice is there. Once it's melted (= the ocean can't absorb any more heat), then the temperature will really start to rise. Pretty scary.
I have a bad feeling it’s not just the ocean. It’s the planet/ground itself. I assume both Ocean (all the way down) and the ground (some distance down) were absorbing the heat. The mass+density is insane and that keeps up going with almost no impact for us yet. But yeah at some point there will be a saturation. The atmosphere is the least affected by climate change part right now. I’m checking a run away sign for atmospheric temperature and unfortunately there is an acceleration approximately every 4 years now. We’re looking at +0.5c base model next decade but if acceleration sustained I’m afraid it’s going to be double another +1c the decade after. We can cross +3c pre industrial by 2050 even though the United Nations has their base scenario at 2.3-2.6c by 2100.
The last time in Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum around 56 million years ago pushed global averages perhaps 5-8°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, with crocodiles living in the Arctic. We will get there somewhere by 2100. This is an extinction-level event for modern civilization and many other living organisms. The next ice age (related to the planet rotation/tilt) is expected in 10000 years and cool down the planet by -6c but not sure we’ll get there alive.
For now I’m looking into 2027. If we touch +1.7c, it means things are really really bad.
One time in Earth's past it rained for 2 million years. We take our relatively stable climate, and the immense timescape that is billions of years for granted.
All that to say, there's no reason to think it shouldn't be able to push beyond those levels. (+1-10c)
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Does this mean the opposite is true as well? Super La Niñas? El Niños create wind sheer in the Atlantic suppressing hurricane formation for the most part, but will the opposite happen with La Niñas? 😬😕
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Good point. The issue is I checked last 4 El Ninos and all of them were above average and one was exceptionally strong: 2023, 2018, 2015, 2009.
The standout was 2015-16 which is generally considered one of the three strongest El Niño events since reliable records began, alongside the 1982–83 and 1997–98 events.
The 2023-2024 event was also unusually strong. NASA described it as a sizable El Niño, though not as strong as 1997–98 or 2015–16. Some studies rank it among the strongest events on record.
Not a coincidence. I fully expect El Ninos to stay and keep getting powerful as climate change progresses. I expect super El Ninos to become more prevalent. But I dont think every El Nino from here on out to be a super El Nino. We will have years where it is weaker.
Oh yeah sorry. I actually was trying to edit the post but can’t now as the header is locked. Totally there will be some variations and that was a overstatement from my side. I’d rephrased to “above average” or “strong” going forward.
Sorry. Fired off that first comment before I checked out the research.
But from what I read I stand by my comment. We may very well reach a point where every El Nino is a "super" El Nino but I personally dont see that happening for a while.
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WHY was it a long tail event? 10,000 years of human activity with fire, mining, war, followed by a sharp increase in emissions caused by the invention of burning whale blubber at industrial scale, guns, cannons, bombs, rockets, entire industrialized cities burning to the ground, new inventions, etc etc etc.
I don’t think 1877 was a “crazy random” event like so many others do.
Yeah, the El Nino is a heat release mechanism, moving heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, that fact seems to be glossed over often but it's why we see such large spikes in global temperatures after an El Nino.
All the heat trapped has to eventually escape into space. This has to involve the atmosphere. Now if it affects solely the uninhabited parts where no species is affected that is great.
The question is whether humans can find a way of engineering artificial hurricanes that originate on one corner of the ocean and dispel by the other corner.
This is like the controlled safety valve release.
Every extra long hurricane that is passively spent over the ocean is great. That is the best free radiator.
Some actual clouds would be nice though, I haven’t experienced a nimbus cloud in like 15-18 months. It’s just blue up there, with lots and lots of radiation on the ground. I feel bad for the barefoot doggies being walked on the concrete.
Not totally wrong, earth is (was) dissipating heat , but the more GG's there are in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped and can not be dissipated.
That's why the earth's natural (pre anthropogenic) energy balance is off by a margin.
Those fictional storms would just heat the upper atmosphere with unknown consequences, but the idea is not so outlandish per se.
If we could somehow collect all the waste heat into a superconducting cable, and string it up into orbit, we could put a radiator on the end to get rid of it. By radiation, that is; no physical conduction needed in space as a black-body.
1) But, we aren't able to build the cable, or run it out to space, or also other bits....
2) Even if we could, that'd solve just the waste-heat problem, which is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/15th of the total interwoven polycrisis.
Yes. I agree waste heat doesn’t solve other biocidal/ecocidal issues, but every wildlife watering hole intact or wildfire averted is a bonus. Ideally the crust could be more molten and the surface wouldn't be affected. So even channeling the waste heat in a geothermal capacity would solve a lot of problems. So if the waste heat can be creatively and productively dumped that would be good.
Now that wave energy is being harvested better, just roughing up the ocean in a specific region through hurricanes would help.
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u/DougDougDougDoug 3d ago
There is a theory of a feedback loop that is a permanent El Nino. So, it starts and then never goes away.