Highest-ever ocean temperature measured as powerful El Niño forms

We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.

Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.

> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.

70°F is 21°C

Fish don't have AC.

Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.

El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]

[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660

So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?

I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...

Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?

they took the sulfur out of the shipping fuel and everything accelerated very quickly. nobody's even talking about it anymore

I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.

I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.

But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.

By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.

How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.

I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.

Discussions:

Oceans hit highest temperature on record

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428

Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404

The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281960

You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.

I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this

Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.

Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1

The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.

Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.