This is the time of year when we start prepping for winter — we put away the window air conditioner, I’ve got to go drain all the garden hoses, we’re just waiting for all the leaves to drop off the trees. Looking ahead to the winter predictions, I see that we’re expecting a mild winter, because it’s an El Niño year. Just an El Niño! Maybe we’ll be a little wetter, a little less frigid, it could be an easy winter, we hope.
Just this little El Niño, in an unexceptional year:
So far, that doesn’t look so unexceptional. That looks dangerous in unexpected ways.
The peak is widely expected to be about 4° C anywhere from November to February, the most powerful El Niño in at least a thousand years. It is so far beyond Super size that scientists are using highly unscientific terms for it: jaw dropping, mind blowing, Godzilla-like.
The boy child? No, this is El Niño Diablo, the devil boy.
Uh-oh. So what do I do now? I’m going to drain the garden hoses, is that not enough?
Plenty of articles offer estimates of how many people will die because of this due to heat, hunger or extreme weather events.
But the truth is that nobody really knows what El Niño Diablo will do.
We know what climatologists’ computer models predict, but it is going beyond what the models are designed to handle. If the models are missing some interactions anywhere—ocean currents, glacial melt rates, atmospheric water vapor load, cloud cover, anything—that leaves us more blind than we are accustomed to being with climate forecasting… and therefore less able to prepare for specific impact on us.
“What do you think of this El Niño?”
El Niño Diablo is a major turning point. I think we will regret it.
BUT WHAT DO I DO?
Dunno really but just .. Your best.
Be aware. Think. Be kind. Just do your best.
Because things seem likely to get real bad real soon.
Not only do we not know what will happen, but the Trump regime made our weather prediction systems worse.
They fired a lot of NOAA, the source of US weather predictions. They run the National Weather Service, the satellites, the weather models etc..
The US weather forecasts have gotten noticeably less accurate.
They also fired almost all the US climatologists, including my friend who works at a nationally known university department. She lost all her funding shortly after Trump took office. So did her whole department.
The idea here is that if we don’t see what will happen, it won’t happen.
I think there is something wrong with this idea but I can’t quite see why.
One thing you can do is vote. Vote the GOP out of office in the next election, which is in a month on November 03, 2026.
It won’t stop the El Nino but it will ultimately improve the climate forecasting models.
The global famine is going to be awful. Without the weather being bad, there’s also a couple of particularly stupid wars.
Grain prices will be high because there’s basically no grain export out of Russia and Ukraine due to the war, with a lot of Russian fields rotting away due to lack of fuel and storage, and thinking about reducing their winter wheat planting. The hardest part of a 3-day limited special military operation is when four years in, the invaded party destroys your military and merchant fleets.
At the same time, fertilizer and diesel prices are very high due mostly to the Iran war (with an assist from the Ukraine war). So rich-world farmers are seeing high prices and deciding not to plant all their fields, while poor-world farmers are planting without any fertilizer and thus harvesting less food.
So even if the weather were good, things would be bad. And instead we’ve got terrible weather forecasted.
Oh yeah, and the US typically helps keep famine from spiralling too badly via USAID. Which they disbanded and fired everyone.
El Niño is directly a phenomenon of the tropical Pacific, and that region will bear the biggest brunt with drought in the eastern tropical Pacific and deluge in the western tropical Pacific. But it’s true that this El Niño is completely unprecedented and we should expect the unexpected. I am a retired climate model developer and the models are mostly based on basic physics and not past observations, but we can be certain that some effects of this “El Niño Diablo” will not be predicted well due to the model physics operating in uncharted territory.
Errata: I wrote too fast and stated the opposite of what will happen. It should be drought in the western tropical Pacific and deluge in the eastern tropical Pacific.
El Nino has been AWESOME thus far in pretty much shutting down the Atlantic hurricane season. Good job on that. BUT as October and November approach the storm genesis tends to shift into the Central American gyre. I dunno what shear would do to storms generating down there and heading northeast instead of west.
ANNNNDDDD! There’s a bill coming due for the shear that’s currently shredding tropical systems. There may be some southern jet stream biasing and other factors I don’t really understand that results into tornadic target practice toward Florida early next year if not sooner. February will possibly become a shit show of localized deaths and destruction. February 1998 brought us Hell Night:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Central_Florida_tornado_outbreak
Still too soon! And there was this during an El Nino in April 1966 (before I was born):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_of_April_4%E2%80%935,_1966
Oh nice! 😳😳😳
So enjoying this lack of hurricane action until we pay the piper in late winter and early spring. Shear is a double edged sword. Kills hurricanes. Augments tornadic supercells.
Hemidactylus beat me to it, no hurricanes in the Atlantic basin this year and the season is winding down. Maybe one will develop in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico. We still do not understand how all this will impact the climates around the world. Hurricanes remove heat from the oceans, what effects will no hurricanes and minimal tropical storms in the Atlantic have? We are about to find out.
The aftermath of El Nino Diablo will go down in the records and one day we may learn from the results. Learning from those results and applying the knowledge to help with future El Ninos is a different subject.
Daniel Swain (Climate scientist), quoted in the Infinite Thread last month:
“El Niño directly affects local climate in places closest to unusually warm ocean waters, but can also indirectly influence climate of distant regions thousands of miles away. […] will likely contribute to regional drought & flood events.” and “My personal and professional advice to those in, near, and even (in some cases) outside of known flood zones is to seriously consider obtaining flood insurance”
The corporate uniparty wants to use climate change to kill us. We aren’t voting our way out of this one.
With global warming, how long until we have hurricanes forming in the Great Lakes?
There are worries that The Monterey Peninsula may become an island for short periods of time this winter if the expected heavy rains happen. Apparently this happened in 1982, according to the locals.
It could cut off our supply chain for food for a hopefully short interval.
Just in case, we’ve been stocking up on pantry items and filling our freezer.
Our solar panels and back-up battery tend to insulate us fairly well from PG&E’s frequent outages.
We live at the top of a hill, exactly a mile from the bay,and our house is snug, so we are relatively safe from flooding.
Our gardener already trimmed our two oak trees so that they can better handle high winds.
He always clears our gutters on the roof before winter, and he’s planning to address some loose areas of our fence this month.
I think we’re just about ready for it.
Almost forgot! We’re also stocking up on Scotch and plenty of wine. That’s an important part of being prepared!
beholder @9:
There is no such party in this particular reality, O alleged Marxist.
There are two major parties, instead.
One proposes beneficial climate policies, the other tries to dismantle them and pushes ‘beautiful clean coal’ and ‘drill baby drill’ policies.
What raven meant is this current administration, which was VOTED IN, has tried ever so hard to stop climate change mitigation measures. Perhaps not voting them in is a better option with better likely outcomes?
Quick summary:
Withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Repealed the EPA endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
Froze and cancelled billions in clean energy grants from the Inflation Reduction Act.
Rolled back vehicle fuel-efficiency standards meant to spur electric vehicle adoption.
Repealed carbon pollution standards and greenhouse gas regulations for power plants.
Issued an executive order directing the Attorney General to block state and local climate, ESG, and carbon laws.
Terminated the American Climate Corps.
Froze National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funding.
Omitted climate change from the National Security Strategy.
Halted offshore wind development while expanding fossil fuel leasing.
(Those were all put in by the alternative administration)
What do you do? Survive, that’s all any of us can do.
John @13: I appreciate your stamina in continuing to respond to execrable, obtuse numbnuts like beholder. Seriously.
You up in Minnesota do not have to worry about much (except the food shortages causing food price spikes). I live in the SF Bay area, we are predicted to have tides+sea level rise+ Nino-related ocean level increases of 4 ft. higher than ‘normal’. With the predicted heavy storms and precipitation, the storm-related flooding is going to be tremendous. There are many homes here built on filled-in tidal marshes, so we’re likely to see a big loss in housing stock. Our local freeway already gets cut during extreme king tides, and this fall/winter they will be at least 2 ft. higher.
I disagree with Morales and others that Trump has been a climate disaster. On the contrary, his war and his policies have created a world-wide permanent abandonment of fossil fuels (except for the petrol-states like Canada, the U.S., and Russia). A Democrat would have not accomplished nearly as much, especially with the Dem. party under business-friendly leadership. Just look at how Newsom has undermined solar energy in California in order to protect the profits of his friends at PG&E.
One result (for USA) is to demonstrate how irresponsible climate change denialism is. It will not affect the minds of the orange decaying blob and his cult but the rest of the population will see it, just as they see the fuel prices caused by the war.
daulnay, that’s basically the accelerationist argument. The worse things are made, the more incentive to change thingy.
The data shows otherwise.
What you call is actually a decrease in the rate of growth.
Latest figures from https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/global-trends
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Here, for you: https://stateline.org/2026/03/19/trump-is-forcing-coal-plants-to-stay-open-it-could-cost-customers-billions/
↓
In an unprecedented use of federal authority, President Donald Trump’s administration has invoked emergency powers to force a series of retiring coal plants to stay open.
Utilities, states and grid operators have said the aging plants are expensive, in bad repair and no longer needed to meet regional energy needs. But Trump’s efforts to save the dwindling coal industry have forced plant operators to continue investing in the facilities — a move that some consumer advocates fear could mean billions of dollars in added costs for customers in dozens of states.
Trump has long positioned himself as a champion of coal, making it a centerpiece of his “energy dominance” agenda. The emergency orders issued by his administration claim that the grid is at risk of energy shortfalls, and the coal plants are needed to ensure a reliable power supply.
Haven’t followed this guy enough to know if he’s authoritative, but he’s touting a looming scenario where the heightened Pacific tropical action doesn’t stay in its own lane and bleeds over toward the CAG and becomes Gulf of Mexico activity with an orientation towards…wait for it…Florida. Egads. Hope his speculation fails to pan out.
Morales should be happy I managed to get rid of the Youtube tracking thingy (I hope).
The Gulf of Mexico looks kinda warm right now so…:
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/ocean/cdas-sflux_sst_watl_1.png
The Youtube guy could be way off, but in October the action picks up with Gulf oriented storms.
I just hope Reed Timmer doesn’t decide to call Central Florida his home base in February. We seriously don’t want to see that guy here! Go hang out in Texas or the Midwest or something with your fancy armored vehicles.
Well, you can always go tell an ICE agent to fuck ’emselves
https://theicelist.org/index.php/Main_Page
And the Oregon exploding whale still exists
Those 2 always make me feel better
@ John Morales – 30th September 2026 at 4:19 pm : Applause and seconding that. Well said.
@15. Rob Grigjanis : Likewise here too.
@9. The Dishonest Trumpist Conspiracist troll “Beholder” : ”The corporate uniparty.. “
No such thing as already noted by John Morales upthread.
You are lying. Blatantly, obviously and spreading Bothsiderist bullshit of the exact sort that got us into this mess. Repeatedly in 2001, 2016 and 2024. That has made our global situation ever worse and far far worse.
You are doing real harm to real people and have blood on your hands. I think spewing that sort of disinformation should be a crime. Longer term rather than immediate but falls into the same category as shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre when there is none.
Does it not bother you that your lies have such catastrophic consequences? Do you have no regard for the truth or any shame? Are you a total sociopath? Oh but, of course, you are too much of a cowardly, bad faith troll to answer such questions honestly. Your conduct here reveals the answers however and those answers do not reflect well on you.
Why PZ allows you the privilege of continuing to comment here is beyond me.
”.. wants to use climate change to kill us.”
Another deliberate lie by “beholder.” Conspiracist bullshit unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. Of which there is far too much right now and which needs to be called out and rejected totally.
”We aren’t voting our way out of this one.”
Certainly not if you get your way. You’ve already worked to make sure of that by putting Fascists in power. Which means that whatever you claim you are, you have proven yourself to be a fascist or someone who supports fascism.
IF there’s an even remote chance of voting the Trumpists that the troll here supports out of power; it simply must be taken. The USAese could have voted a path out of this and into Climate action had they voted in Kamala Harris, HRC and Al Gore – we’d be living in a totally different, staggeringly better timeline with real climate action and Trump rotting in jail by now and have such a different SCOTUS and reality if they had.
Instead, we live in the worst timeline. Well, one of them.
VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO if you can because it is literally life and death and not just for those in the USA. Raven is correct. As usual when it comes to the Trump supporting troll “beholder” well, Luke Skywalker sums his crap up best. (5 secs long.) Albeit typical rather than amazing in this specific case.
@ ^ Broken link fix amazing every word of what you just said was wrong
I feel much better now thanks to the Oregon exploding whale. Thanks.
Doesn’t quite make up for elsethread encouragement that led to yet even more relitigation of the 2024 election that a regular here is single handedly responsible for, but 2016 and…holy shit…2000 too. Trifecta.
Hemidactylus @19: “Haven’t followed this guy enough to know if he’s authoritative”
YT bio says Mark Gremillion is a “a digital meteorologist still in school”
Wikitubia: “He identifies as a Christian and reads the Bible at the end of his videos.”
Evangelism doesn’t bode well.
He does it in the vid you shared. Calls his god Yahweh… and has the tetragrammaton in his YT banner?
That the logical conclusion offends you is neither evidence against its truth value nor grounds for a criminal case under U.S. law. You straightforwardly stated that without introspection on Blasphemy Day — think about that for a minute.
I succinctly summed up the bipartisan policy on immigration and 21st century weapons being used, for example, by Israel, to cleanse unruly civilian populations. Our ruling class knows what climate change means and where humans will want to go. They think the ensuing chaos can be managed like Israel manages its Palestinian population: with indiscriminate bloodshed. The more people are killed, the more resources are available for the wealthy elite as they hole up and survive into a new chapter of human history, or so they shortsightedly believe.
@15
Hey Rob, got anything to say other than petulant sniping? You sound like a StevoR alt.
Plenty of articles offer estimates of how many people will die because of this due to heat, hunger or extreme weather events.
And anti-US insurgent could destroy a few of the transformers surrounding a large city, right before a heat dome hits. Add to that, perhaps a few burning fuel trucks under overpasses leading from the city and you have an instant mass casualty event. Note: Iran is at war with us, and given our eager bombing of their bridges and civilian targets, I’d say that would be a justified response.
[meta]
behold the in its pomp:
Liar. This is what you literally wrote: “The corporate uniparty wants to use climate change to kill us.”
(see, bipartisan means something!)
—
The fratboys is the ruling class, or so you literally alleged just the other day.
—
What a moronic claim.
(Hint: golden goose principle)
—
<snicker>
Guilty person fleeth, and all that.
[meta]
behold the in its pomp:
Liar. This is what you literally wrote: “The corporate uniparty wants to use climate change to kill us.”
(see, bipartisan means something!)
—
The fratboys is the ruling class, or so you literally alleged just the other day.
—
What a moronic claim.
(Hint: golden goose principle)
—
<snicker>
Guilty person fleeth, and all that.
El Nino is a phenomenon caused by water sloshing around between South America and Australia. It doesn’t affect Minnesota, or France, or Norway, in any significant way. “El Nino is causing X” is the media’s new favourite way of not having to mention climate change.
@rorschach: Not true. El Nino is centered on the equatorial Pacific (not the Southern Hemisphere), but what happens in the equatorial Pacific does have far reaching effects.
@18 John Morales –
The statistics you quoted are from 2025. Since the war-caused oil shortage didn’t start until March 2026, how does 2025 data do anything to the argument that Trump’s war has done more for renewables than a Democrat in the White House would have? Sure, Trump did a lot of damage domestically, and a bit internationally, but it’s far outweighed by the disappearance of supply from the middle east and the long-term destabilization there that will continue to make middle east oil unreliable. The rest of the world is scrambling to move away from oil (as of this year). The countries that bet heavily on renewables earlier are chortling with glee. And we have Trump’s foolishness and stupidity to thank for waking up the non-petrostate world. I wouldn’t generally argue for accelerationism, but this mess was a nice silver lining to Trump’s election (and pretty much the only one).
The coming AI collapse will be another climate bright spot, since some of the energy buildup is renewables. It should be possible to retire a lot of coal and gas generation around the world when the energy demand from AI disappears.
Two points: they are the latest available (prove me wrong!) from the IEA, and they took place after the Trump administrations’ actions.
Well… here, for you, an example: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/bangladeshs-coal-turn-is-fresh-bad-sign-lng-exporters-2026-10-01/
That’s leaving aside the Biden administrations’ renewables measures this admin has tried to scupper, rather successfully.
A double-whammy, when money that was allocated to climate change mitigation and to renewables was diverted to drill baby drill. Told you already.
Here, you are in luck: https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-september-2026
(The 2.5 mb/d drop represents approximately 2.5% of total global usage, based on the total annual supply figure of 100.7 mb/d)
Mind you, you seem to have forgotten just how much oil has been burnt in the Ukraine war and in the Iran war.
It all contributes, you know?
<snicker>
Which are those?
So you concede that is what you are doing. Tsk.
Wow you are clueless!
Kiss your wrinkly old ass goodbye. Or enjoy the fine fall weather and seasonal change you’re on the brink of.
Here, the geese are flocking up, with large patches of sky blocked by big “V”s of heading every damn way except south. LEAVE DAMMIT! About 40% of the leaves have changed colour. I’ll enjoy that…
As an individual, even one in one of the largest CO2 spewers, you will have no impact. Well, maybe your president might.
As the video I am currently watching says “if this is the end of the world, I’ll watch it on TV.”