Uncommon Courage

The Sh*t Show: what will this El Niño really deliver?

• Andrea T Edwards • Episode 207

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 2:18:41

Send us Fan Mail

 El Niño warnings are in the news every day, with some declaring a super or even Godzilla event is coming, and then someone else will say it won’t be that bad, while others declare that even if it isn’t a record event, an El Niño landing on an already overheated planet (it was just announced we had the hottest May since 2024) is not good news, regardless. It’s confusing, isn’t it? 

But the even bigger story, which is often reported separately, is there’s a double impact on our horizon, and this is where it becomes a polycrisis. We are moving into even hotter conditions at a time when infrastructure, energy systems, food systems, trade routes, and political systems are all under strain. It speaks to the essential truth that climate risk and geopolitical risk do not sit in separate boxes; they interact and compound. Yet the media keeps reporting it all separately, so how can we prepare if we do not know? 

The war in Iran will have a profound impact on our food supply. Farmers are either not planting crops because they can’t afford fertilizer or are paying much higher costs, which means we – the consumer - will experience significantly higher food prices and inflation. However, with extreme temperatures and extreme weather events (like extreme flooding) coming, how much food will even make it to market? Just rice, which more than 50% of humanity relies on as a staple, doesn’t grow above 40°C, and we’ve seen months above that recently in Asia – where most of the world’s rice is grown! It’s getting serious. 

We are very happy to welcome our very special guest, Jan Umsonst, the Earth System Nerd, and he’s promised he’ll join us this time! One of the great benefits of listening to Jan is he sees the whole system, starting with the ocean, and he educates on how the changes in our oceans ripple out and impact the world. He will provide an insight into what he is seeing developing right now, and what it means to us across the globe. Jan is an earth system consultant, and we encourage you to follow him on social media, as he is a great educator on the state of the planet, especially as someone with the systemic view, which is so critical right now. 

Please do join us this Friday for a not to be missed show. We’ll be going live Friday, 12th June 2026, kicking off at 8am UK, 9am EU, 11am UAE, 12.30pm IN, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 5pm AEST. Streaming across various locations, and no doubt about it, we’d love your support. 

The Sh*t Show is a Livestream happening every Friday, where Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin, as well as special guests, discuss the world’s most pressing issues across all angles of the polycrisis, working to make sense of the extremely challenging and complex times we are all going through, plus what we can do about it. Help us move the needle so we can change the name of the show to something more genteel when (or if) it is no longer a sh*t show. 

#TheShitShow #UncommonCourage 

You can find me Andrea T Edwards | The Digital Conversationalist and Welcome - Uncommon Courage - An Invitation. 

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage 

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar 

Unknown:

You know, I'm so glad I never got involved with you. I just would have ended up being some woman you had to get up out of bed and leave at 3o'clock in the morning and go clean your andirons, and you don't even have a fireplace. Not that I would know this. Why are you getting so upset? This is not about you. Yes, it is. You are a human affront to all women, and I am a woman. Hey, I don't feel great about this, but I don't hear anyone complaining. Of course not, you're out the door too fast. I think they have an okay time. How do you know? I mean, how do I know? I know because they. yes, because they, how do you know that they're really what are you saying that they fake orgasm? It's possible. Get out of there. Why most women, at one time or another, have faked it, or they haven't faked it with me. How do you know?

Dr. David Ko:

Because I know.

Unknown:

Oh. right, that's right. I forgot you're a man. What was that supposed to mean? Nothing. It's just that all men are sure it never happened to them, and most women, at one time or another, have done it, so you do the math. You don't think that I could tell a difference? No, you got it. Now, oh, are you okay? Oh, oh God. god, oh god, oh god, oh yeah, right there, oh, oh, oh. Oh God, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, oh God, oh. Oh, I'll have what she's having,

Dr. David Ko:

Joe. You, Steve said, what a start. I don't know what my favourite part was, but it was kind of disturbing at the same time watching those two characters, especially Netanyahu, but the Ayatollah

Andrea Edwards:

little cameo I thought was lovely. Anyway, well done, Joe. All right, welcome to the show. My name is Andrea Edwards.

Dr David Ko:

I am David Co.

Richard Busellato:

I am Richard Beslotto. I'm confined to the penalty corner of bottom left, as usual.

Joe Augustin:

And my name is Joe Augustine, and once again, good afternoon, and welcome to The Shit Show, the weekly gathering where we attempt to understand the world's problems before they become tomorrow's even bigger problems. Now, this week we're tackling El Nino, which is apparently not just a weather pattern, but increasingly it feels like an Amazon Prime subscription for floods, droughts, crop failures, shipping disruptions, heat waves, and fresh reasons to spread to stare blankly into the middle distance. Scientists call El Nino a climate phenomenon. The rest of the world call it a what. Now we're also be taking a scenic tour of the poly crisis, we have time, which is a wonderful, a wonderful academic term, meaning everything is on fire at the same time. Oceans are warming, glaciers are melting, parts of Asia already feeling like the inside of an air fryer, and somewhere out there, there's a climate scientist publishing a paper titled Actually We're Fucked, it's worse than we thought. Thankfully, we're inviting someone today who understands all of this, because you've watched the show before, you'll know that my qualifications extend roughly to reading what you find hopefully funny introduction, putting my mouth in my foot in my mouth on DEI, and occasionally understanding that weather is not the same as climate, our guest today is one of those rare people who can look at the oceans, atmosphere, currents, heat flows, and planetary systems and somehow make sense of the whole picture. He proudly embraces his status as Earth system nerd, which is. Fortunate because somebody has to do the homework while the rest of us are posting on social media and wondering why it's hotter and hotter every year. It's our pleasure here at the shit show to welcome the man who understands our water planet far better than most of us ever will, Jan Umsonsrenach.

Unknown:

I'm not so sure, but I'm working on an understanding part, for sure. No,

Dr. David Ko:

you said

Unknown:

nice to meet

Dr. David Ko:

you. Yeah, it's really great to have you here, Jan. So, we tried to get you on a little while ago, we got, we got the timing confused, so we're really happy to have you back, especially because just yesterday was when NOAA declared, and the El Nino has officially begun. Although I heard that bomb in Australia, the British.. oh no, what is it? The Bureau of Meteorology.. sorry, they wait for it to get to point eight degrees Celsius before they declare it. So it's not declared officially in Australia yet, but the rest of the world is now officially into a new El Nino, so yeah, it's not good news now. Before, before we kick off, yeah, would you mind? I'll put you off each year, but would you mind telling everyone the story of how you became the climate systems nerd, because it was, it was a choice, it

Unknown:

was a choice, I hear the year 2007 that the oceans are certifying from the new

Jan Umsonst:

EPCC report, and I realised what oceans are acidifying, and I was instinctively was clear that this is important. And then I wanted to understand, and so since 20 years I tried to understand the changes in the earth system, and always, if I encountered a new discussion, I did it via study section, not via YouTube videos or some articles from someone, but I did while the peer review process and studied the discussions to base my positions on the discussions on the observations, and what we find out, and with time and time I understood more and more of the systems that contribute to earth system changes, and so I developed an overview on the system with the ears, so it's highly fascinating, actually. How earth functions, and it's actually an oscillatory system. It oscillates, and that's maybe the most important part of earth. And El Nino is a ocean atmosphere oscillation

Unknown:

in the right, in the middle of the earth system, in the tropical Pacific, so it makes so important.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, all right. So, when I first, my, oh, there you go. When I first talked to you, which was December last year, you took us right back to that beginning point, which was the water planet, so you know, when, when we talked, you were talking about, you just couldn't believe how the, you know, we could acidify the entire ocean, and that was your, your 20 year journey that you didn't realise would take you 20 years, so, but let's, let's start there, because you published a piece on LinkedIn yesterday, it's, uh, I'll add it in the comments, a short of what it means to cool down a water planet, and I thought there were some really key points that you included there that people should understand this, because I get frustrated when I hear climate scientists, scientists saying, if we just do this, it will stop warming up, because that's not my understanding of what's happening, where we're in a, we might be able to bring things back, but it's not going to happen instantly. So, should we start there with the water planet?

Unknown:

Yep, I mean, the thing is, Earth is a water planet that changed the game. If we would live on a rock planet, totally different story of global warming, but if you heat up a water planet, it means you heat up the oceans. The oceans are like a heat storage device that accumulates heat from a sun. This means the energy involved are just waste. We are like ants to compare to his energies, which are involved in global warming. This means the oceans accumulate each year waste amounts of energy, and it's accelerating, so we have now, if you just take the mean values from 1958 to 1981 compared to the last heat increase in 25 we increase heat uptake by eight times, this means the mean value is about 2.9 setter shoes, the number of 21 zeros, and in 24 we reach 24 setter shoes. This means eight times the rate we had in the 50s to 80s, and that's an astonishing acceleration. And the question is, How will it evolve in the future? Also, the maximum heat uptake rates happen during a neutral to weak La Nina, but the maximum rates should happen during a very strong La Nina. These are the phases where the earth system takes up heat, it accumulates more because the trouble, tropical Pacific becomes colder, and El Ninius discharge the heat, so La Ninas lead to faster acceleration. El Ninos discharge the heat. This means the acceleration of ocean heat is strongly coupled with a linears, so they release part of the heat that was previously previously accumulated, and that makes these a linear so dangerous, of course, they increase the heat content in the atmosphere by increases in water vapour and condensation, which releases heat through the atmosphere, and this increases the kinetic energy in the atmosphere, though air currents and high and low pressure systems intensify, the whole system gets super charged by an energy discharge from the oceans to the atmosphere, that's an in-use, actually, but it goes a little bit on, but this was just short into an explanation why water planets are different and highly problematic if you heat them too fast. Just the last point, a union of concerned scientists just released a statement that we overheat the oceans and the oceans will not be ignored. This means union of scientists, concerned scientists, also hits now, or he hits now down on the subject, because we're heating the planet way too fast,

Dr. David Ko:

yeah. I'm just looking for the articles to share. So, first of all, is yours. So, when the one of the one of the things you were talking about, because what people don't seem seem to understand is what warming is, energy, right? So, it needs to be dispersed, right? So, you're saying that's what relates, but even if we drop warming, it's still going to stay high. Why is it going to continue to stay high?

Unknown:

One thing I mean, we can reduce the warming via aerosol dimming. We spread aerosol in the atmosphere, sun, incoming sunlight is reduced, let's say, by more clouds or by more aerosols in the structural sphere, depends on the method you apply, but the problem you still have, you have the energy in the oceans, and to cool down a water planet substantially, you need oceans to lose heat, and the only way the oceans can lose heat is via the atmosphere or through the atmosphere to space, and that's the problem, and it's by no way clear, and how far we can cool down the planet without the ocean starting to counter the cooling, because they start to release more heat, and first papers coming now out, and the discussion is slowly, slowly getting momentum, so it's fully open to what degree we can cool down the planet, because we have an ocean with too much heat, and it covers three quarters of the surface, so it's very easy to understandable that there could exist a problem. How large it is, we will see what papers will find out, but it's not so simple to cool down the planet just by reducing incoming sunlight.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, so David, you were nodding. Do you want to add something?

Unknown:

I was going to say, you know, the heat capacity of water is much greater than rocks, basically, so the amount of heat you have to warm up water by one degree is multiple times the heat you need to do warm up rocks by one degrees, so which means that when the oceans give the heat back out, you're going to find that for each degree of heat worth of heat you actually get multiple degrees of warming on the on the planet we live on, so that's that's the problem that you know Jan is pointing out. You have the fact that the massive store of heat is going to create multiple, multiple degrees more for each degree of of heat it gives out equivalently, so the fact that the oceans are warming is a real problem, because it says you're stalling enough heat there to boil the rocks, one number I can give highly interesting, they exist one one paper from, I think, was one university in London, they gave a paper on ocean warming in 2014 or 16, when they were at this stronger linear, and they calculated the heat uptake from the 50s to 2010 or something like that, would have been enough to warm the lower atmosphere by 36 degrees. I mean, that's numbers we are playing here with. They're tremendous, and this would never happen, but the oceans have the capability to heat up the atmosphere more if they release more heat, so just a fraction of it, and the problem is while the ocean, the atmosphere, the heating all the atmosphere is just one to 2% of the total heat accumulation, of which 90% goes in the oceans, and the heat content in the atmosphere increased via global warming by five jetta joules, just in 24 of 25 we increased by 24 zeta joules in the oceans, so five times what the atmosphere accumulated in heat through all these decades, so it's really waste numbers. You're playing here with so it's, it's, it's far from clear how the system reacts if we cool down the surface air temperature via solar demic, so this has to be, we have really to go into it. We need, we need high resolution models with historical heat uptake patterns to simulate how the system reacts. Actually, if we cool it down, to which point can we cool it down? Because it's clear that we cannot indefinitely cool it down via clouds, because the oceans will have to say into it. The question is, by how far, by how much? Where are the thresholds? And so it's far too early just to say we can, any, any time we can cool down the climate and solve the problem. It's not like that. So, yeah, yeah, it's a big,

Dr. David Ko:

big, so one of one of the things that I read that was in the Union of Concerned Scientists about the fact that the amount of heat would have increased temperatures by 36 degrees Celsius, so when we're talking about 1.5 they're talking about 36 Why didn't, why hasn't that happened? And obviously the oceans are part of that, but the heat and the energy is in there, so and more and more is being released, or it's getting hotter and hotter. So, what's stopping that 36 degrees?

Unknown:

I mean, the solid six degrees, anyway, just a radical number in practical events, never can happen nearly closed, because oceans store heat in the interior, so to this heat has to reach the atmosphere, and for that you need mixing processes, so it cannot happen that the oceans just release all the heats, impossible, but they can increase the rate of heat release via evaporation at the ocean surface, they need to water has to evaporate to water vapour, though the oceans lose effectively heat, and so it's mixing processes, and where the oceans store heat, that's the main issue here, and what we observe is the heat, the oceans accumulate heat across the mid latitudes, a very majority of the heat uptake happened there, and this heat uptake happens in the upper 300 to upper 700 metres, most of it, and you get warm blocks of water below the surface, which are growing and warming, and in part freshening. They get lighter, even because of saltiness changes. And in mid latitudes, you have you have the phenomena, you have seasons, you have summer seasons with no extensive marine marine heat waves, where the oceans accumulate more heat because you have no cloud cover, they evaporate, or how pressure systems remove cloud cover. Ocean surface heat up during summer, it's very strong signal we have now, but during winter you have the time of winter storms, and they use the heat in the oceans to get stronger. So the heat allows them to get stronger. They mix further down the water to the upper mixed layer and bring up heat to the surface, and we have now the first signals that the mid latitude winter seasons release no more heat to the atmosphere. It's kind of heat bank that's now starting, and the question is, How it will evolve in the future if we even accelerate more, and it looks not good if we continue our course, we get, we will reach extinction level territory, because water planets are to be taken seriously. It's not the game anymore, and currently it's not clear how the system will further react, because we have various vicious cycles now becoming operational in the system, and one of the main vicious cycles, which is not clear how strong it is, because it's all our souls play into a role, it's ocean surfaces heating up, and warmer ocean surfaces reduce cloud cover, which the. Leads then to a higher heat accumulations of the oceans, and this is part of the story. Why heat accumulation accelerates. Another problem is the acceleration takes part mostly the southern hemisphere, but the aerosol changes, which could also be responsible for it, take part mostly in the northern hemisphere, but does not really add up, and it's only difficult to separate natural cloud feedbacks driven by higher surface temperatures driven by circulation changes like storm tracks that move the poleward, or like intertropical tropical convex zone, that which construct contracts and produces stronger extreme precipitation events, and to what extent aerosols reduce cloud cover. It's very difficult to separate, but if you look at the spectral patterns where clouds decline, where heat waves are forming, and that is happening in both hemispheres, our main problem is likely that we trigger a self-amplifying feedback and not reduce our results, which contribute to this feedback. They masked it to some extent, but the feedback, that's the main problem we have. And this becomes not operational as it seems, and we have no idea in how far nonlinearities are involved because cloud feedback on over the oceans has a strong spatial pattern. This means we have low marine cloud deck regions, they are off the west coast of the continents, where the oceans have extensive cloud cover, low cloud cover, and in this region we see now the last years a massive heat wave developing, and these heat waves reduce cloud cover in these regions, and this leads also to higher energy uptake in these regions, which worsens the problem again, and these heat waves are very bad signals, because the news just another side aspect, we have the Planck feedback, which cools earth. The Planck feedback means you increase surface temperatures by a degree, and outgoing long wave radiation increases that reduces the temperature increase at the surface, or does not go up so fast, so high. But now we observe the last years that the Planck feedback, the outgoing long wave rotation to space, is not increasing as much as we modelled, modelled it, that it would do, and likely one reason is reductions in these cloud cover regions, because you get higher sunlight incoming was lower, lesser clouds, more heat accumulation on surface temperature acceleration, but compared to that, not a comparable increase in long wave radiation. So this is also not clear now. The last 10 years or last 15 years, how this signal will develop? Is it a short term signal variation, or is it also another feedback, or a reduced negative feedback because the blank feedback increasing long wave radiation to space is the strongest. It's the only cooling mechanism of Earth, and it's the strongest negative feedback that reduces surface warming. Also, just another tip in the scale, we are now, we have now so many question marks with high level discussions, which look very, very worrisome, worrisome, and now we have the prospect of a super head in you. Are you kidding me? I really hoped that would not happen, and I did not believe it, because I thought, no, that's not possible, because this would mean we enter now extinction level territory. This means the prospect often super El Nino this early was corrected to happen in decades from now, but not that's main thing we had in 2023 2024 Eastern El Nino, a strong one. The Eastern ones are the strong one warming pattern, mostly in the Eastern El Nino, spreading into the eastern Pacific, spreading into the central Pacific, and just two years later we have the possibility of a super El Nino. This does not fit the historical pattern. Central El Ninos, which are weaker, which happen in the Central Pacific, they should increase in frequency, but not the strong El Ninos. These shouldn't, but we have now this prospect, and this prospect of a super linear. Only reason just to finish it is because we have so much heat under the surface of the oceans, and in 214 this did not happen, but in 25 then big El Nino camp. Though this means the heat is there for super linear, it will happen likely the next years or this year, and that's just madness. It's climate madness.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, yeah. All right, so I'm gonna, you know, I like to ask stupid questions, right? So the first one is, I'll give you a break. So one of the things I've always said when I've been to. Of studying the whole climate and how it all makes sense, and obviously I don't understand it at the level that you do from a scientific perspective. I'm just understanding it as much as I can. Right, the biggest gap I've always seen is how much we don't know. So, there's what we do know, and there's there's all the what we don't knows, and there's a lot of reasons for the we don't knows, and it's government funding it, but it's also technical technological capability, or enough power to do, to do the research, and then we've got the Trump administration ripping up things like, you know, the ocean monitoring system, but the other thing that you were talking about, which I think would be important for people to understand, is why do we have less cloud cover? So the first question is, what's that status as far as what we do know and what we don't know, and why, but the other one is why do we have less cloud cover? Help people understand that

Unknown:

it's a mix of everything. One thing that's important to understand that the cloud feedback we started to observe it, studies started to observe it in the 80s when we still increased aerosol emissions, and also studies in the 2000s of the 2000 started to come, that we have a cloud feedback, and but also you have to aerosol emissions, so x emissions, sulphur emissions emissions, they increase cloud cover, they increase cloud nucleus, though these aerosols on which water condenses, so they increase these cloud droplets that leads to longer lasting clouds and brighter clouds and a larger cloud cover, this result we reduce climate warming via increasing aerosol emissions, but increase cloud cover that's inside the signal, and we started in the 70s, 80s SOX emissions were reduced by the industrial states, North America and Europe, and then later India and China and Asia started to accelerate their economic output, and they increased massively their SOX emissions. This led then from the 90s to the 2010 to again increase and aerosol emissions, but from the 2000 10s overall emissions declined actually by half, from 120 million tonnes per year to about 60 million tonnes, a little bit rising again. So we reduced our soul emission by half, and now we have a problem to separate them. What is cloud feedback, and what is the feedback via aerosols, or what, or to what extent decline in aerosol emissions reduce cloud cover? They did so in a substantial amount, that's for sure, because aerosol emissions are quite effective and producing cloud cover, but you have lots of other mechanisms that also contribute to reducing cloud cover, and this, for example, the circulation changes. We have storm tracks, they are moving forward. This means they contract, they get slimmer, and this reduces cloud cover. This one, the other one is that the intertropical convex zone, this rain band around the tropics, is also contracting, reduces also cloud cover. Other things we have is we have spreading droughts and heat waves and drying out continents, declining relative humidity over the continent reduces also cloud cover. Then we have the spreading of marine heat waves, a very strong temperature anomalies, they evaporate clouds, lower clouds, because the latent heat upward radiation from higher surface temperatures, they evaporate this cloud, these rain drops, these small cloud drops, because it's very simple. You take a heating device and have some water somewhere, you evaporate again, and so higher surface temperatures in mid latitudes reduce cloud covers by higher surface temperatures in the tropics. They lead to a higher agglomerate agglomeration of connective systems that get stronger and more clustered, which reduces the surrounding low cloud cover. Also, mechanisms that just comes now operational in the tropics, so we have a cloud feedback from the tropics to the mid latitudes, while clouds are increasing in the pole regions, where clouds contribute to the warming, but not cooling it, because in the polar regions we need heat to reach space, space, and then suppress outgoing long wave radiation, so we have a walls of the planet cloud feedback that warms, additionally the climate and big. 100,

Dr. David Ko:

so adding salt, it's not going to fix it. Question a little bit, but

Unknown:

yeah, we can bring down the temperature for sure, one degree, maybe one and a half, but when starts oceans to counter it is fully not clear, but there will be a connection, and the other thing is, we have no 1.5 degree of warming, you've been 1.39 was the latest, latest assessment and mean value, but the problem is now we have now a super ninny, a prospect, we have maybe also, in addition to reduce aerosol emissions, we have a cloud feedback. We have nonlinear expansion of marine heatwave over the oceans, very strong signals now as a vicious cycle, likely between upper oceans and atmosphere feedbacks driving these marine heat waves, and so it's by far not clear how the warming rate will continue, because that's the main point with this, with one of the main points of the super menu. We had global warming happens now, and temperature jumps after the hiatus from 2000 to 2012 Global temperatures were increasing slowly, and then we then came a large temperature jump from 2012 to 2016 with El Nino involved in later period, which increased the temperature in temperatures by 0.4 degrees from the mean values from the annual value in 2012 We had from 2012 jump at 0.4 little bit decline, and 220 again, same than 216 then three years of La Nina, little bit declining temperatures, and then 223 224 another jump by 0.4 from the temperature level 222 and now just two two years later we have the prospect of super El Nino. This means we can have another temperature jump, and that's crazy, crazy acceleration. It would mean, but here's something that's very important. In the past, a ninny, or the warming effect, purely via a ninu, where the main reason temperatures increased during a ninus, but this changed during 2012 2014 or 2015 to 2016 the El Nino, the extra El Nino component of the warming was growing, was mostly ocean temperatures and poleward heating that contributed to the El Nino warming, and in 2023 2024 this El Nino was, from a heat release perspective, a weak to moderate one, because in the central to Eastern El Nino, the heat release was not too large, but other systems started to contribute strong. This was very strong convection and heat release in the Western Pacific and the Caribbean Sea, which accumulated heat and a strong poleward intensification of warming and a strong drought and heat wave expansion, subtropical tri zones expansion also contributed to this warming jump during these times. Additionally, with this large jump in marine heat wave expansion and persistent and intensity in 2023 the ocean surface temperatures in the last six months jumped by 0.3 degrees. That's massive. Normally, we have a decoder increased by 1.1 degree, zero point 1.11 degree, 0.1 degree, and we had 0.3 degrees in just six months in 2023 and since then ocean surface temperatures would say should have did not decline, and this signal is very, very serious. Ocean service temperatures should decline after El Ninos. This is what we know, but they did not win. This means this feedback driving marine heat wave expansion, which drives now the sea surface temperature accelerations are now so strong that they are stronger than the Enzo cycle, driving as it stays dropping again, driving no, they persisted, and this is a regime shift of how the system operates now. What we observe now, and how these feedbacks will further evolve is is not really clear, but it seems to be non-linear feedbacks, which thresholds involve, and if marine heat waves jumped to such an extent, while greenhouse gases in the atmosphere also jumped in 2024 with 3.7 ppm degrees, just astonishing increase jump and whole ocean heat excel ocean heat uptake also accelerates to new max values. It's why should we assume that this marine heat wave expansion is long linear increase stops now we. Will be idiots, so we have to even further intensify, and this means we are now in extinction level territory. If the precautionarily a precautionary principle is applied, because we cannot prove it, science is not able to prove it.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, okay. And why can't, why can't science prove

Unknown:

it? Because it's too complex. We would need better models, and also scientific proof in a consensus principle means there are no studies saying no, no, it's still not right, it's maybe this or that. So all questions have to be solved, criticising or showing weaknesses in the theory that this is not the case, but the problem is this feedback operates via the surface oceans, via the upper ocean column, water column, via the atmosphere, via sea ice losses, polar changes, and continental changes, so with apostle connection, so this feedback is a planetary feedback with dozens of systems involved, and this makes it impossible to prove that it will gonna happen, the science kind of, so we would have to act as a pericardenary principle. You have to apply it, and to, we would have to act, but we will act if, and this will be likely the case, that global warming will further accelerate the next years, and we will know the system will show us, as we have here with vicious cycle, if so, it will further accelerate.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, all right. So, David, you want to

Unknown:

sort of summarise a bit of what John's been saying. I think I think the basic thing is that, you know, the ocean warm up the, the what happens out of it is that it's not uniform, it's not linear in a way, it kind of like bunches up, and you get this bunching of effects that happens along, so you imagine if your radiator got really hot, which is kind of like what it is, because inside the radiator is a lot of water, and you know you accidentally take your hand on it when it got really hot, you get a very different reaction to when it wasn't so hot, and if you go along and you bunch up in that way, you know someone may be standing by, you may bump along, and so on. And that's the problem about science, is that it's like, you know, supposing you had a group of people who can go into casino, and you kind of gave them a way in which they're going to cheat in that way. In the games, the casino is going to watch each game separately, and the only way they can really prove that there's this bunch of people doing that is after the fact, when they've already taken a lot of money. Way science works is that it has to, it can only prove it after the fact, which is pretty pointless, useless for us, which is kind of the precautionary principle. All

Dr. David Ko:

right, Joe Richard,

Unknown:

yeah, I get it. And you know, in my simple world, I kind of translate it into what I've spent the last 35 years doing, which is kind of manage financial risk and nonlinearity is not good because it really complicates matters, but most people, even and certainly in the financial space, always assume some form of linearity because it makes their life much easier, and then they're surprised and shocked when it doesn't happen that way. Non-linearity is just uniformly bad for risks, because it makes them impossible to measure or calculate,

Dr. David Ko:

and

Unknown:

have some kind of reasonable forewarning of what your worst outcome might be, because it's impossible to tell. Actually, you know what, Richard, you just reminds me what we are at is like a there's this thing called a reverse knockout La Nina kind of bet that you can have in finance world, and used to do a lot of those things, which basically says along the way you make money until you get so far that you completely go bankrupt, and this is the bet you put on because you can say, oh, it's never going to get there, basically in that way, and a lot of our effort is like that, we're actually increasing the heating in a lot of our efforts, by having more activities and more push and more urgency to do this and to do that, to try and fix it, but that's actually storing up even more heat in there, and it gets to a point where it gets to be at that knockout, and so we're reaching that knockout in that way, so it is like Richard, and the thing about. First, knockouts is they are horrible to risk manage effectively. The best way to risk manage those is don't ever get into them.

Dr. David Ko:

I just want to just before we go on to keep going with our new year, because I think let's, let's, let's, let's really go down down this path, and we will give people hope at some point, right. Even though I hate the word hope within this context, because I think it's hope without action, the required scale of action is just bullshit, as far as I'm concerned. But one of the big stories that's constantly in the news is the AMOC, and I know when you're sitting in the northern hemisphere, that's that's a popular story. It's still a 2100 story. It drives me nuts. Yeah, and when we spoke six months ago, you basically said don't worry about it. And couple of shows ago, I said with us, I said I'm not concerned about the AMOC, because I'm going to be long dead, but from extreme heat before that happens. Have you changed your mind on the AMOC, or this El Nino supercharging everything? I mean, one of the things that's happening in Pakistan is they're expecting another glove, a glacial lake lake outburst to collapse. There's like 33 at risk, and they're going through like 4647 degrees temperatures. So we're on the cusp of another one of those massive, massive floods through Pakistan. But are you changing your thoughts on it? Some of the scientists that are talking about a mock, they're bringing up much, much closer now. So just before we keep with going with the only year,

Unknown:

I mean, the airmark is a very important part of the system. It's the global camera allene circulation, which transports a lot of heat, nutrients through the oceans and forks and oxygen, and if it would stop, it would be a huge system change that works on the planetary level that would impact the whole system. It's very, very problematic. That's without question. But let's say if the AMOC would collapse really though early, or let's say maybe in five years, this would be just an indication of how sensible the system reacts to change, though the aim of wouldn't be the only one. So, our main problem is that the sensitivity of the system towards the increase in greenhouse gases is much higher than we saw, and the sensitivity is expressed in how the dynamical systems of the earth are reacting to the warming. Dynamical systems are mostly currents and vortices in the oceans and the atmosphere, but also snow covers, soil moisture, gradients, or the continents, melting events over the ice shields, and stuff like that. So, if the anoc would collapse so early, this would just mean the whole system is collapsing much faster than we saw. So, the collapse of the amok is would be just another indication that we are in real trouble, and so this makes the ammok not the main power, not the amok is collapsing, the whole biophysical earth system is collapsing now, and that is the story. Though the amok is a distraction from the real story, and I'm, I'm not convinced that the Emo will collapse so soon, but I'm not for sure, because the question is, how fast the warming will accelerate, accelerate, how far the magic magic will progress, so all these things can speed up fast, which is now very clearly shown by the prospect of a super El Nino, because it really changed the dynamic of the whole system, speeds it up, and in the past El Ninos were part of natural variability, so El Ninos were El Ninos were increase in temperatures, La Ninas were decreasing it, but now El Ninos becomes so strong and so frequent, and La Nina is not anymore able to reduce temperature so much that the changing El Ninos are contributing to the acceleration of temperatures, which means they're not anymore part of natural variability, but a part of force variability, thereby they become a feedback of global warming, which is best expressed by the super alien you, which we could not get. So, yes, that's this is that's the point. The whole system is the problem, not the end.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, and that's part of the media. A coverage issue that we've been facing, all right. So, so when it comes to the El Nino, we've got Bradley Warwick Brown. I don't know if you guys know him. The compounding point is obviously the impact of the El Nino, but then there's also the other impacts of geopolitics, war, fertilisers shortage, and all that sort of stuff. And we're going to get into that, but before we do that, you know, we've seen this extreme supercell season that's just coming in, landing in the US at the moment. What are the sort of impacts that we're going to be expecting to see around the world? I mean, I presume people in their own country understand what an El Nino impact is on their country. I know in Singapore we're going to get drought. I know in Australia we're going to get drought, and we're going to get fires in some places and floods in others, because that's what happens in the past. But what's what's what's your sort of perspective on that?

Unknown:

I read something that an article on an interview with Gavin Smith, one of the leading ex-climate experts out there, and he said that we cannot be sure anymore of the historic teleconnections, or the connection between the system we know of. God, the tele connections inside a system are changing. This means, in terms of value, we have no, I mean, we have no really an idea what the effects will be, because first it's the heating pattern. We don't know which heating pattern it will evolve, which impacts how the atmosphere reacts. If you have more warming in the Central Pacific or more in the Eastern Pacific, or long warming stretch all the way to Australia, we don't know. So just depends. So depends how the amino will develop. This depends. This determines the effects in the atmosphere. And then we have zero experience. What a super annu concern. So super annuities are new. We never observed one, so we don't know what the effects will be. I mean, we know principle the effects, that for sure, but not the special pattern, and where will happen, what, what we observe is the whole circulation becomes more chaotic. This means west east flows and east west flows get increasingly disturbed, and you get more north south air mass movements, which creates much more chaotic temperature and pressure gradients in the system, and abnormal movements of waste masses of air in the system, and these abnormal movements of large air masses can impact each region in a highly abnormal way. This means just a linear leads to massive drought in heat wave in region does not mean that you will, that you will drown in the course of two three days, just doesn't mean that it won't happen. So you have the chance of anything, and then comes though it's very important to understand what El Ninos do, El Ninos take out heat from the oceans via evaporation. This water vapour then condenses in convection, and the energy of the water vapour via condensation is released to the atmosphere. This creates upper level high energetic air streams with a lot of energy inside, and these air streams move powerwards and descend in high pressure systems, and it's these systems where you get very hot surface temperatures, cloud declines, the whole atmospheric air columns gets very hot heat tops, and this means the spectral window for outgoing long wave radiation becomes wide open in these regions where outgoing long wave radiation increases to exceptional values. This means during El Ninos, you have regions where extreme precipitation intensifies and produces or sets more energy free and releases into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere channels this energy into these hot and dry regions, which heat up, so you have on one side you have expanding hot and dry zones during a linear, on the other side you have contracting and intensive intensifying precipitation extremes, all in the form of mid latitude storms, mid latitude floodings. This means the increase in kinetic energy in the atmosphere does not stop at the tropics, it moves on and affects mid latitudes all the way to the Arctic, and this means the whole low and high pressure system intensifies during the linears, but not as a general rule, rule, you not really know where intensifies what, when it always highly variable the weathers system of earth, but you know that extreme. Teams will intensify to a high degree, depending on the region, on an event-based level, but super El Nino, and also very important to understand, you have, you had this Timmerman study, it was, I think, it was a study which had voiced its fear that in the future El Nino could stronger oscillate with La Ninas, and both El Ninos and La Ninas would oscillate stronger with other climate modes. Climate modes are often coupled ocean atmosphere systems. This means the Pacific climate oscillation coupled stronger with the Indian Ocean circulation, and they couple stronger with the met latitude circulations, and all oscillating to a higher level, and this stronger coupling between the climate modes could reach new levels during a superlinear, though. Also, there we have no experience in how far pressure centres will mutually reinforce each other, in addition to upper level and lower level flows. So the whole circulation system in the atmosphere is getting would become more energetic, but to what extent and where you have the most extreme amplification processes we will see, and also the problem is ocean currents in the oceans also accelerate during El Ninos. For example, in the Pacific, they do it polewards in the western part of the Pacific, and you have a marine heatwave intensification signal and other basins, a linears are strongly coupled with the Indian Ocean basine mode. This means you get an alineal, and then you get during the event the Indian Ocean going hot, you get tropical oceans going out, you get maybe North Atlantic Ocean going out, you get maybe North Pacific Pacific Ocean going on, depending on season. Also, Southern Hemisphere oceans are running hot, hot from time to time, and these signals could also intensify during this earlier, but I think it will not happen to such an extent, because ocean heat uptake into the upper 100 metres in 225 was they lost heat, a lot of heat, and normally we would need heat accumulation, especially in the upper 100 metres, but the El Ninos transfer heat into the upper 100 metres, but mostly in the Pacific, but also another part that happens, but we haven't a massive heat increase in 2025 in the 100 to two 300 metres range is quite large to increase, but which was negated by the loss of the upper 100 metres. So does not seem that the system will synchronise to such an extent we saw it in 2023 2024 when all the other ocean machines went hot with a linear, because it should happen now, but we have no experience with the super line you, and we have no experience that it cannot happen during the event, and fully synchronised and fully produce a large stump. So we are in new territory now. We can just watch. I don't think will happen, because from the ocean heat perspective, and from the current warming rates in the oceans, it should have started one or two months ago, ocean temperatures going hot and hot, and then the air temperature following does not happen until now, but maybe it happens now, so but we are not certain of anything anymore, the only thing we are certain, the pot in the game is massively piling up, so and the earth system,

Dr. David Ko:

right? No, no, so it's interesting. I'll give you, I'll give you a screen break, and I'll ask the guys if they've got any questions, but, but one of the conversations you and I had on LinkedIn, you shared something, and you mentioned to me that we're, we've also, you were talking about the different weather systems and how they interact, and you mentioned to me that we're moving into a positive Indian dipole, and that's obviously something we're very familiar with out here in Asia, at least the term, not what it does, but what does that mean, impact wise, I mean, there's so much, so much uncertainty. Can you? I'm just trying to see where we can find at least some certainty

Unknown:

from the scientific discussion. What we observe is that strong positive Indian Ocean Depot events cover stronger alien use. This is quite obvious in the time data, for example, doing with strong islanders, normally you have a strong Indian Ocean depot. One thing Indian Ocean depots are doing, they increase the latent heat release into the atmosphere, they contribute an additional heating of the atmosphere and. During El Ninos, tropical intensifying convection heats up the whole troposphere air column, also the upper troposphere, though the air column in the tropics heats up and expands in a way, but also dry zones expand. What positive Indian Ocean deep holes are doing, they increase the latent heat loss to the atmosphere, though the warming effect of a linears, they also increase or contribute to the basine Indian Ocean basine mode, they favour a warming of the Indian Ocean in the course of events, and also this means tropical sea surface temperatures reach maximum values during El Ninos, because in studies of North of 2023 2024 surface temperatures slow down, surface winds slow down during El Ninos across the tropics in a relative sense, and so positive Indian ocean deep holes connection with El Ninos increase the global effects on extreme events, because you have more convection, more heat release, and they intensify the reaction of the Indian Ocean, and I think they can prolong also El Ninos, but here I'm not quite sure, but there's also connection that Indian oceans, depending on when the deep hole have which signal can support El Ninos or support La Ninas, and positive Indian Ocean deep holes can support El Ninos, of course. A couple strongs, I guess it was also supporting El Ninos. Yeah, Indian Ocean Depot, though. If you, if we see during this El Nino building up a strong positive Indian Ocean Depot developing this happens during winter, we will see it starting in some months. If this happens, it's another indication we get a strong El Nino and a strong temperature jump with strong extreme event increases, so just adds to the stack of rules.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, so keep an eye out for that. Right? Who's got questions? David, I can guarantee David's going to have a question. I'm trying to.. I haven't asked Joe yet.

Joe Augustin:

I was gonna say, just, just listening in, right? I think what's interesting for me is you're speaking with such familiarity of everything, right? I still don't know what El Nino is. I just know that it's a big thing. I don't know what it, how it represents itself. Is it a weather? Is it a, is it a weather or climate phenomenon? Is it the, the actual currents that make El Nino, or is it, is El Nino the season? I'm actually also unsure about what makes a super El Nino, because we're speaking of it right now. As long as you know we're talking about it, like Godzilla is coming, and everyone knows, knows what Godzilla does. I don't. I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand why it was El Nino then, and why is it a super El Nino now? I don't have those things. I'm trying to understand where, where, and how it all works. Is it, is it about just the currents, or is it the entire phenomenon, is called El Nino.

Unknown:

I explained it. It's El Nino is a climate mode. Climate modes are essentially coupled upper ocean atmosphere circulations. This means upper oceans atmosphere work together to produce non-linear effects on non-linear build-ups, and with a linear, it's La Ninas and El Ninos is oscillations. They oscillate between the two, one leads to the other, and the other leads to back to La Ninas, and El Ninos are a discharge event of heat in the Western Pacific. A heat builds up another surface over the first 300 metres, and this heat accumulation under surface is during a linears transported to the East Pacific. This happens via wind forcing at the surface, which trigger internal ocean waves, which move this warm water to the east, and this warm water moving under the surface, which accumulated in the previous years to the east, is huge from an energy perspective, 3500 times more energy density than air, so this hot deep subsurface water this moves to the east, and that up welds in the eastern Pacific and across the aquata, and this hot upper water leads then to a strong precipice. Or convection increase over the tropical Pacific. This means huge amounts of water evaporate, which draws out the heat from the oceans, and this creates large amounts of convection and condensation, which sets free the energy into the atmosphere. Of course, you have evaporation, water vapour, and condensation gives back the energy which was needed for the vaporisation, so El Ninos discharge energy from the oceans which had been previously accumulated to the atmosphere, and this then leads to a heat content increase in the atmosphere that has global reach, we speak about very large numbers, and this makes an inno so problematic, and the super nino just a prospect, because I'm not sure that super ninu will happen, and I hope it won't happen, is it's this amount of subsurface heat, so we have exceptional amounts of surfaces surface heat accumulated, and this means that a super nino is possible suddenly, but it not means that it will certainly happen, because the atmosphere has the last say into it, but still the question, How much of it will upwell to the surface, how much will release to the atmosphere, but just that so much heat accumulated in the equatorial Pacific, that's the main story, not a super, that's just click by, but actually it's good that it brought to the public awareness, because it's there's a real possibility, so it's not a click by it without reason, and this is so ending us discharge heat, and they, they lead to the system to lose heat to space. So, during global warming, the energy imbalance of earth increases, means the whole system accumulates heat, and from time to time it discharges larger amount to space because it has to cool as a body is heating it has to emit more the heat to its surroundings and earth does it via its oscillation systems which suddenly peak and release more heat to space and this is what El Nino do from a thermodynamic perspective,

Dr. David Ko:

but the, but the, but the co in the atmosphere is also stopping the release of the energy into space, right, which is the reason it's getting warmer. Yeah,

Unknown:

well, that's that's a bit different, that's actually a bit, I mean, I mean, basically, you know, if you think about what happens when you get into a bath, water sloshes backwards, forwards, so, so the earth system is one big, you know, body of water, so it sloshes backwards and forwards, but if you ever get those moments where you filled your bath up with hot water, kind of, you know, initially in your bath tap is at the front of it, kind of thing, and then you put cold water on, then you're hot, you're hot, and cold waters in naturally different places, and you probably felt those before, and so what happens is that the heat itself can move around and slosh about in that way too, you know, the whole thing, so everything is constantly sloshing backwards and forwards, then in the oceans, and that's what the a mark and of those things are, that's what the term of all those dipoles are, they're just sloshing backwards and forwards, and and it's either the acid, either the salinity, the amount of water salt in there, they're sloshing backwards and forwards, or is the temperature that's sloshing the backwards and forwards, and the temperature means the heat in there, and if you think about Earth, and you look at it, the biggest body of water is over in that Pacific, so the Atlantic is a narrow channel, but the Pacific is a big body of water, so that's where a lot of that sloshing backwards and forwards goes, and of course, yeah, that that big body of water, the Pacific kind of moves across into the Asian oceans, and so on, that that you then get, and you get all those things coupled along, and you get the equator all the way through, and you get all the heat that accumulates in those ways. So, a new no, and now La Nina are the events of the heat sloshing backwards and forwards as a result, and a super El Nino is where you get a lot of that heat than the normal that you get now. These are the modes that you have. They're kind of the big current, the big type of behaviour that you can get. What happens then is how that affects you is through the normal bits of weather that you have, and the normal bits of weather is the way in which others dissipate back into your life, so if you get something like a big switch in a mode, it's like suddenly finding, you know, we've got the World Cup coming up, right? So different teams play in different styles. In Brazilians, it's very fluid in the French, basically just sit back and have this solid defence, and then they look for the opportunity. The Germans kind of. Pressing forward, and, and do that, and British, God knows what the hell the English do in that way. So, if you're used to playing in one, one of these different modes, being in one of those things, and it's suddenly switches to another, you're in trouble. You get lost. You don't know how the reactions of the players and things would be if you're in one of those modes and the mode gets to be stronger, then you get more pressure at every pressure point, and you get more kind of weakness at every, every one of those points. You're being tested more, but you know is the weather pattern you're used to, but you're just getting more extreme of it. But when the modes, which your whole weather patterns is not what you're used to anymore. You come from being like the UK, where you say, oh, well, you know, it's just a lot of rain and grey sky, to suddenly find a, you get intense heat and drought, and the country is just not built for that, and that's the problem when you have these events that switches the modes, and the problem with the Super El Nino, as Jan is describing, is you have all this energy being shifted, and it's actually shifting the modes. That's why it's such a big problem. That's why you can't really predict what's going to happen, because you don't know what is going into, you know, it's not like football, where you know the Brazilian team somehow got a German coach, more likely the other way around, and you can kind of anticipate what kind of coach, what kind of style they may now play, but is that, you know, you don't know any of that information, you just go on the field and it's different, and you now have to kind of say, well, what can I do, how can I, how can I deal with that, and if you just kind of think that you know you can behave exactly the same as what you used to before, then you're going to find all the pressures are coming in the wrong way.

Dr. David Ko:

So, can I, can I, can I, can I ask, so the the Enzo system, which is what it is, so the La Nina neutral El Nino route, and so the slushing back and forth thing, I get it, but is it because isn't the difference La Nina sort of pulls the energy in and stores it, and El Nino releases it, and it goes from one to the other, so it's not a, it's not like a, it's not like the A mop that takes 1000 years to go around the earth, it's, it's a back and forth, but isn't it? Isn't it the winds, winds that are changing patterns around the world? Isn't that what turns them back and forth?

Unknown:

So, the a mock is a deep water system. The water goes down into the bottom of the oceans, it goes around and it's basically pushed down because it gets heavier, you know, kind of versus lighter, so it's the salty content in that way, and it pushes water all the way through, and it takes like 1000 years, and it churns up all the stuff that's at the bottom of the oceans or stores it back down, and so on, as Jan was saying, El Nino and La Nina is on the surface, it's that interaction between surface and air, and air on the oceans is wind, is the trade winds, is a strong wind patterns, and it was noticed back in 1600s you know, kind of the time when the Europeans were sailing across the world and noticing the temperature and the wind patterns having these sort of oscillations, these sort of patterns that he was finding out, so they affect different sites in that, in that way, and of course you know the, you know, the shorter term stuff, kind of the heat really is the is that big issue, because that heat affects the amount of water in the air, amount of water in the air affects the amount of water in our homes, it comes back down, what goes up comes back down, the humidity and all the rest of it, and you talk a lot about that kind of heat index, right? The humidity component to add on to the temperature component.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah,

Unknown:

so that exchange of heat from the surface of the ocean, that's a few 100 metres surface, that's a lot of heat, basically a big kettle food was warming up for the radiator with the air through rain, through humidity, so that becomes a big issue, because humidity is what we live off, is the rain that we have, is the water we have, that that we end up back in our soil, and all the rest of it, that all that comes from the oceans, all that comes from this sort of, you know, El Nino La Nina type oscillations. Ultimately, there's a base level of that that it kind of governs, and when you get these super events, you get responses that get, you know, it's like I. Having a friend who you very, you know, very party with, and one day comes along and starts whacking you with a baseball bat.

Dr. David Ko:

I don't have friends like that to

Unknown:

find one. It's called our oceans,

Dr. David Ko:

all right.

Unknown:

What do Yeah, I mean, I mean, El Ninos, like the precondition that warm water accumulates in the Western Pacific, and if you have enough water accumulated, El Ninos can happen, and for that you need wind regimes to change, or it's called Western wind bursts. This is, for example, tropical depressions coming from the Indian Ocean, met in June oscillation, it's called, they move from the Indian Oceans to the Western Pacific, and they produce Western wind bursts, means air that moves from the west to the east of the surface, they trigger Kelvin waves, and they move, they deepen the thermocline, and that move leads to this water, warm water movement at the subsurface to the east, and so it's a, it's an ocean preconditions system, and the atmosphere triggers it, so like this, you can describe it, and and the chance we have is stochastic wind forcing, it's the scientific term, this means short wind changes, they can prevent an in your still, for I mean, not prevent anymore, we will get anywhere now on a linear, because we reach now anyway, a linear status, but it means if we get, for example, a strong eastern wind event, which happens in in June 2014 it suppressed the El Nino development, and no El Nino was happening, or not a strong one, actually very weak one, but the next year a very strong one happened, because the heat was in the equatorial Pacific, so the we have still the chance that no strong aluminium will happen, but this does not evaporate or removes the ocean, the heat in the oceans. This means what the system tells us, we will get very strong alines very soon, possible 2026 the first one, and then we will see how the system reacts, because a lot of nonlinearities are involved, where we cannot say really how the climate modes and how sea ice changes. Also, they can also be triggered by linears dropping sea ice levels. How all will interconnect, so we can just watch, and the main problem is actually the main issue is normally humanity should prepare now for possible super new in terms of food production, supporting more farmers, providing more fertiliser, making it cheaper, making food prices cheaper. What do we do? We are our system, and with all these egos out there, they produce a large war in the Strait of Hormuz, leading to oil and gas prices. Now, fast oil and gas price increases, fertiliser price increases. Farmers, they cannot produce any more food because they go out of this, out of business, and so on and so on. Though we do the exact opposite of what we should do as a species, if we would prepare, no problem, we can cope, but if we do it like now, we maximise the impact, social impact of this El Nino. If it gets in super LNU, we are at the worst possible place we could be with this war with Iran, US, and Israel. That's just unbelievable stupid.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, it certainly is. So, Jan, so in the, in the show, sort of introduction. In the first paragraph, I sort of said, you know, when we're paying attention to the media, me more than most, right? And I'm paying attention to how this is being talked about, and I just think for the average person, they'd just be looking at it, going, well, what the hell. So, from what I'm hearing, you're saying is there's still no certainty that it is a super El Nino. Some of the scientific literature I've been looking at is showing the heat is very big and extensive, but until we know if it's going to be centrally or easterly released, we're not really going to know the impact. So, what your message is, is just, you know, just everyone calm down, get ready, prepare yourselves as well as you can, but try not to be overwhelmed by the news.

Unknown:

Yeah, for sure. I mean,

Dr. David Ko:

yeah,

Unknown:

we are not in seven seven of depends who you are. I mean, if you are a precarious position, like lots of pure. What humans are on the planet, it's very, very bad. We have already 800 million people having to not enough food. We have a hunger crisis. We have about 2 billion people with just coming by with the money, so we are, although billions of us are in a very precarious situation, and for them it's very, very bad, and I would say try as a community to assess, assist each other, try to get active, try to get food, help, whatever, try to prepare as a community as good as you can do. Besides of that, normally we should help these people more with hubs, and if you live at, say, more in a better situation, it can affect you for sure. Prices will go up, maybe you have high food price spikes, you will have heat events, very maybe even be cross deadly levels in some place, but you have to escape them. The heat, you get very extreme storms, flooding events, which can really affect you everywhere where you are. So you have so far for not resilient communities of very vulnerable communities try to prepare as good as you can do, are able to do it, and besides of that, be careful of the weather, we'll re-watch the weather, what comes at you, because we have now these insane flooding events, insane heat events, and they won't become better during a linears, and we don't know where the peaks will happen, so expect to be to be that it is rough, because one of the main problems is we had already non-linear intensification of extremes worldwide the last years, studies still needed to really find out how strong signals are, but it looks really like nonlinearity, and the system is already on the move. It's already destabilised, and inside already destabilised system already on the move, a super and a new could happen with a lot of energy import input into the system that's just new territory, so we are now as a species deep in the red, and we should really react now, because we don't know if we can attend 1520 years if we are still able to mitigate it, because adaptation we won't be able to do just to rebuild our whole whole infrastructure, all the water control measurements, all the building, the city, how they are organised, how they are structured. We would need to restructure and adapt our whole infrastructure to extremes, not of the ones today, not of the ones in 20 years, best in 100 years. This would mean you need a much more, a much stronger adaptation to extremes that will come to make it really good. But for this, we don't have even the sand where comes to send all this concrete, we don't have even the sense of, we are in a very dire situation, and in my opinion, we need to reduce greenhouse gases if you apply the precautionary principle, because likely global warming put now spiral out of control, and possible superlinear is as strong a signal as you have, as you can get to underline or to substantiate this argument. yeah, I mean, one second

Dr. David Ko:

I was gonna say David, but if we spent as much money and attention and effort on data centres, we might have a chance, right, David?

Joe Augustin:

I think, I think you know,

Unknown:

was I had a thought earlier, along that it echoes kind of a lot of what Jan's describing, in a way, I think basically the point that Jans is bringing out is that climate change is not some average effect, you read the news and everything, it seems like it's some average effect, you know, gradually we get this, and then if we get to one and a half degrees, and you know, this sort of things may become like this, and so on. It's like, you know, what happens when the average impression of your car getting old is that, you know, it doesn't work as much, cost a little bit more maintained. The practical experience of your car getting old is that, you know, bits fall off, and then it doesn't work anymore, and then the bill suddenly gets to be really expensive, and that sort of thing, and that's the difference between thinking of as an average effect, very much a kind of insurance type approach of saying, well, you know, we spend so much, we cover that, and that's what it is, to the practical reality, you only have one. Planet that we're living on, we live along one timeline, not the simulations of 10,000 different timelines. We live along one timeline. Along that timeline, you're going to experience these changes, these dramatic mode changes. And the whole issue of the Super El Nino is not that it's a Suba El Nino, is that it may just be one of these mode changes. If it does, it completely changes, so it's no longer that average fact. You're now in a country which used to be, whether that's like this is now completely different, like that. That's what happens. So you need to be a lot more flexible in your mindset, you need to embrace the fact that actually your comfort zone is now a discomfort zone.

Dr. David Ko:

If

Unknown:

you try to keep it as a comfort zone, which is what the climate change story is, how we can just change the energy to clean, and then we can stay in our comfort zone, and everything would go on fine. You're going to find yourself entirely caught up, because you're going to be in you. You are, you're not going to discomfort soon as we usually do, and saying, "I'm moving to, you know, a different country to live, would have learned a new language and stuff. And that's my active approach to a discomfort zone. You're going to be discomfort, so because where you live is going to be uncomfortable. Yeah, without you

Dr. David Ko:

moving, and the stuff that you think you need to live a good life is going to be gone anyway, right? Well, whether

Unknown:

that's gone or not, it's actually more the case that even if they're there, and this is kind of Richard's comment from a was few weeks back about what happens to your money, is you're not going to be refined the use that you imagine you can make with

Dr. David Ko:

it,

Unknown:

so even if you stock up on all your money, you think this will protect me in that, that in that way, you're going to find that actually those are no longer choices that you will have,

Dr. David Ko:

yeah.

Unknown:

The Michelin star restaurant you're hoping to go to will be shut, even if you have the money, you can't go to it. So, so, so, that's the discomfort, is that things are taken away. So, if you rely a lot on that sort of security of what you can have, rather than in a sense, kind of a, again, one of the things that was said before, you know, kind of that preparedness is in the name change, climate change, you know, changes in the name.

Dr. David Ko:

Yeah, yeah, I'm just going to Richard, Richard, and Joe, do you want to have you got any thoughts?

Unknown:

Oh, plenty. I'm

Joe Augustin:

okay, Richard. Yes. Age before beauty. Okay, go ahead.

Unknown:

I mean, what you're describing, I think people have a quite strong sense of, in general, but they obviously are not qualified on a technical level to express it the way you are doing. I'm probably in that group, and I see the economic impact before I see the environmental impact, but to me it sounds like you have moved the timeline significantly closer than what is commonly being discussed in the news and the debate, where we're talking, like, yeah, if you're my age, bit hot, occasional flooding, but essentially, if you're pushing 60, you're going to be fine, because by the time you're checking out, you're still going to be on in a planet that is clearly inhabit habitable in a fairly pleasant way, if you got some economic means, but to me it sounds like you're talking timelines of just a couple of years. Let's say the possibility exists, I would say unlikely, but for sure the next 10 to 20 years, be certain that's so many nonlinearities coming, popping up, so many accelerations, so many surprises, so many new predictions, just unbelievable. So expect at the latest in 20 years that our globalised economy will come up because it's, it's not the warming per se, it's how the system reacts, how extremes intensify, and we made a mistake in the past, we thought extremes intensify because of mean warming levels going up was huge mistake. What we observe now is a global warming provides the baseline for stronger, more extreme extremes, which intensify downstream events. This means the first intensification of climate change of extremes just allows. Is downstream events to come even more extremes, and what we observe now is mutually amplification chains between extremes that build up, produce an abnormal insane event, and then crash down again, but this abnormal insane event in intensity area extend and persistent or even how fast I build up and how fast I switch to another extreme, they create strong tailor connections in the form of mass and energy, which allow other systems or coupled atmosphere surface systems to really new new astonishing peaks, which we did not have ever had before. This means heat waves that suddenly peak above values we never experienced before, one or two or four degrees. We have it now in the spring heat wave main thing, but maybe we'll also at one point happen with summer heat waves, you don't know, and we have it now with a drought intensity with thrust ways waves. Is it is called how the atmosphere gets very hot and humidity degrees to very low levels, which pulls out all the moisture out of plants and soils. This allows large sudden increases in massive wild fires, because you get such extreme dryness, which leads to this strong fire extremes we had in Canada and Australia. Amazon will follow for sure, rainfalls will follow, you get these large mill fire increases, will happen at one point, you get arctic burning at one point, and all these things are interconnected, like a strong and in your super linear could, for example, mean that in 2027 then it should be more affect the Arctic than now, because not build up now. The summer sea ice in the Arctic will be lost, which could lead to massive peak of Arctic burning peat soils and stuff like this. So this is great. Clack, clack, clack, clack, and you don't know how fast it can interconnect. So this means five year, possible five years, 10 years, I would say medium. Then you are really in trouble with our global economy and with humanity and stabilisation of our societies and stuff like this, and at best 20 years, and you cannot escape, you cannot

Dr. David Ko:

escape no billionaire bunkers. I read a story this week in the glaciers that are melting in the Himalayas. The way they're melting, so they always, they always interacted with the rocks, just because they run back and forth across the rocks, and they pick up irons and all the things, and it goes, you know, this billion, a couple of billion people relying on the water that comes from these glaciers. It's now melting so quickly they believe it's going to change the pH of the water downstream, and just, just, just that, as one of your examples, right? Just the amount of people, because that, that means no drinking water, no agricultural water, but also all the life in the rivers will, will die if the pH changes. But Joe, you got a point on this, and I want to talk, because I want us to move on to extreme heat. Joe,

Joe Augustin:

I was just going to say that Isa Maria, what's going to happen is we can't have nice things. I mean,

Dr. David Ko:

so we've got, yeah, that's true. We've got going south here. Who's been joining us for a few weeks now? Jan, you guys go back. He's in Greenland. You guys go back, right? Going south.

Unknown:

What do you mean

Dr. David Ko:

going south? He's never told me his real name. He's in Greenland. He's joining us here. He's just saying I've made it here live. You guys go back. He can tell you he's never told me his real name, but I want to share with you one article that was in The Guardian that I thought was, I can't remember who wrote it, but I thought it was a really good example of what's coming. So, of course, drought, we're going to see drought impacts, and what Jan was saying about the country, the parts of the world that are really going to be struggling, because it's not just drought from the El Nino, it's also going to be drought from people, just the drought will be from that, but then the food supply chain shock, which is from the fertiliser shortages, and we're already starting to see that, so potential famine, starvation, suffering, wildfire risk, as you just mentioned, excess rainfall and flooding, so that is obviously going to happen if you've got a house in a flood zone, get out of there. Higher coal use, and that's especially because of this war. We've talked about it before. They're turning the coal, you guys can explain it better, into liquid, more grid failure risk. I was just talking to the lady who's from the Philippines, who cleans our house, and I. Asking how her family back in the Philippines is getting ready, so they were talking about getting a generator. Electricity is astronomical, and I said, "Yes, get a generator, but also get solar panels. But at the same time, solar panels are at risk of being destroyed by the typhoons, and the typhoon season is expected to pump up. So I basically said, "Try and get both declining fish stocks, geopolitical risks, which we're already seeing, obviously more heat illness, heat stroke, deaths, and higher civil conflict risk. And this is where populism will start to rise, and people like Pauline Hanson start to become interesting to people. So don't do that. We don't need more tickets leading us, we need smart, sensible people leading us, but anyway, Joe, anyone else want to sort of, because I want to, I want to talk about the heat before we move on. Anyone got anything else on El Nino? I'm sure we'll keep going on it in other ways, but thoughts.