frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Strongest El Niño Ever

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-strongest-el-nino-ever
95•ndsipa_pomu•1h ago

Comments

giardini•52m ago
Great! Fewer Gulf hurricanes.
tired-turtle•43m ago
And, soon, brand new, never before seen waterfront property! Invest now so your children can enjoy sand where St. Augustine grass once flourished. \s
zippyman55•39m ago
It’s the down hill house racing contest this winter that you want to pay attention to. Be sure to take precautions.
e_i_pi_2•41m ago
Do you know if this balances out to a lower death count than the heatwave would have, or just better for people in that area? Even thinking just about the US south I'd imagine heat is a bigger risk than hurricanes
jameshart•28m ago
Let’s see…: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...

> widespread drought and famine in multiple countries, causing the death of more than 50 million people. Disasters associated with it include the Great Famine of 1876–1878 in India, the Grande Seca in Brazil, and the Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879.

chomp•20m ago
You don't seem to understand how this works. El Niño is one half of a 2 part cycle. You don’t get permanent hurricane reduction.
tjwebbnorfolk•10m ago
If/when the temperature differential between equator and pole decreases because of a warming arctic, we actually do get a permanent reduction in hurricane propensity and destructiveness.

Not everything gets worse if the planet heats up a little more.

NooneAtAll3•49m ago
I for one am impressed we get couple months of warning before it happens
echelon•40m ago
It's a massive oscillating system (millions of square miles), so we have plenty of lead time. It's easy to measure and watch evolve.
aaronbrethorst•45m ago
The buried lede:

What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s warming will land in 2027, which is now shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year and the warmest on record by a sizable margin

I’m certainly no climate scientist, but if I lived in Europe, I would absolutely be looking into how to get a solar energy system set up and at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer

inigyou•38m ago
And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius.

Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees.

All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.

fredski42•34m ago
Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
inigyou•31m ago
Well they seem to have switched to releasing stored heat. Isn't that basically the El Nino / La Nina cycle?

Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption

cogman10•33m ago
> Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario

No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.

We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.

karakoram•44m ago
Related: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/el-nino/
SubiculumCode•37m ago
Does this mean California is more likely to get mega flooding?
alephnerd•27m ago
We haven't had any significant flooding in past El Niños. Of course, it will probably be different this round, but at least El Niños tend to align with Mediterranean weather instead of droughts and wildfires.

We also have one of the more advanced waterwork system in the US to support Central Valley agriculture, so a lot of the worst aspects can be somewhat managed.

It's bad that such dramatic climate change is happening, but we're definetly lucky to live in the West Coast because we won't face the brunt of some of the worst aspects of the El Niño comparatively and have the infrastructure to deal with it.

Sadly, the brunt of climate change will be felt by the poorer half of the world.

jeffbee•19m ago
The costliest floods in state history were in the winter 1994-1995 which was a weak El Niño year.
alephnerd•13m ago
True, but a lot of that was due to a lack of integrated water management (IWM) in California at the time, and led to significant reforms as well as infra expansion to prevent that from happening again.

The Lima Prieta Quake and the 1990s floods led to a lot of future proofing in Californian infra. The last major thing left is transmission weathering, which PGE and Sac are fighting over.

Also, most of our infra is state funded which gives us a lot of leeway.

Like I said before, it's bad that we're in this position and it's only going to get worse, but we're in one of the better places that can survive these kinds of shifts.

chewbacha
gonzalohm•35m ago
What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.

We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.

jonwinstanley•25m ago
Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about
inigyou•24m ago
We've been seeing our own certain destruction coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.

Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.

buybackoff•29m ago
I've seen dozens of videos and articles about this strongest ever event. And I still have no clue if the next year I should evacuate from Paris for the summer because heatwaves may be even crazier than this year, or prolonged heavy rains are more likely and can make the city more livable.
croes•16m ago
Another thing AI makes worse because of all the energy consumption.

I hope we have something more to show than dozens of to-do apps when our children and grandchildren ask which important things made the massive use of AI necessary.

1over137•7m ago
Maybe Trump can tariff it? That should solve the problem.
tjwebbnorfolk•6m ago
If you give any regularly-occurring event that varies in intensity enough time, it is guaranteed to break the records of its previous intensities.
trentor•19m ago
El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
•
26m ago
Yes, atmospheric rivers all winter.

Next year a super bloom then the following year massive wild fires.

rain -> fuel -> fire

$550M in Medical Debt Only Cost $5.5M [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cimg-Xg043Y
1•foxfired•1m ago•0 comments

Wordsmith

https://segue.app/wordsmith
1•_continuation•2m ago•0 comments

Kimi K3 is not cheap

https://www.alexinch.com/blog/kimi-k3
1•ainch•2m ago•0 comments

New funding rules will make US research slower, costlier and harder to share

https://theconversation.com/new-trump-administration-rules-on-federal-science-funding-could-make-...
2•teaman2000•6m ago•0 comments

Look at Silicon Valley history from 360 degrees over the years

https://ValleyOfIdeas.com
1•chenpaul•7m ago•0 comments

Building Political Superintelligence

https://freesystems.substack.com/p/building-political-superintelligence
3•m-hodges•7m ago•0 comments

I've converted my website to grayscale

https://rz01.org/qmx/
2•exitnode•11m ago•2 comments

Optical Memory Link Could Boost AI in Robotics

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-robotics
1•jonbaer•11m ago•0 comments

Persistent Money Struggles Linked to Faster Brain Ageing

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/jul/persistent-money-struggles-linked-faster-brain-ageing
1•karakoram•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Punter.js – single-file JavaScript game engine for teaching programming

https://punterjs.org/
1•john-doherty•19m ago•0 comments

LLM Cliche Highlighter

https://tools.simonwillison.net/llm-cliche-highlighter
2•saikatsg•20m ago•0 comments

America's schools admit screens make students worse off

https://fortune.com/article/schools-abandoning-chromebooks-laptop-programs-as-screen-time-hurts-l...
1•jedberg•23m ago•0 comments

Kitty [terminal emulator] chases the mouse

https://lwn.net/Articles/1080821/#Comments
2•leephillips•23m ago•0 comments

In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains shift on Russia's war

https://apnews.com/article/laura-loomer-trump-ukraine-russia-interview-101852f6deab17e1d8d215fdde...
2•haburka•24m ago•0 comments

Please ship APIs, not AI

https://iamwillwang.com/notes/please-ship-apis-not-ai/
1•wxw•24m ago•0 comments

Illume Labs – Your 24/7 personalized health companion

https://www.illumelabs.ai/
3•parilatawa•25m ago•2 comments

OpenAI: A Bubble Bigger Than Dotcom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDtvrme-L-0
3•cable2600•26m ago•1 comments

Go server-less for projects that only need to scale from 2-200 users

https://seamside.com/docs/
2•akumpf•27m ago•1 comments

Iran used roaming systems, ad tech to track US troops in Gulf: Report

https://www.turkiyetoday.com/business/iran-used-roaming-systems-ad-tech-to-track-us-troops-in-gul...
5•billybuckwheat•29m ago•0 comments

BSD seq(1) on Linux

2•1vuio0pswjnm7•31m ago•0 comments

What Happened to Tagging? (2019)

https://daily.jstor.org/what-happened-to-tagging/
2•downbad_•31m ago•0 comments

OptMem: Plug-and-play infinite memory for any agent

https://github.com/VictorTaelin/OptMem
1•LightMachine•32m ago•0 comments

The bitter lesson for skills and coding agents

https://twitter.com/jim_dowling/status/2081455720336179313
1•jamesblonde•34m ago•0 comments

Doom running on nothing but regex find-and-replace

https://github.com/4RH1T3CT0R7/doom-regex
1•amichail•35m ago•0 comments

Learning two pointers from scratch after solving 100 LeetCode problems

https://leetcopilot.dev/blog/two-pointers-intuition-for-leetcode-beginners-step-by-step
2•alexwang24•36m ago•0 comments

I Made Open Source Adobe Acrobat – Windows 11

https://github.com/jonahgigi534-wq/PDF-Pilot
1•Jonathan_Gigi•36m ago•1 comments

We need to rethink tech stack

2•vivekk7190•38m ago•1 comments

Angels in Coptic Magic I: Introduction

https://www.coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/index.php/2026/01/16/angels-in-coptic-magic-i-intr...
2•jruohonen•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A QR code that plots where you scanned it from

https://3dqr.sshh.io/
1•sshh12•43m ago•0 comments

Writers set to share millions after $1.5B Anthropic settlement

https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2026/07/26/hundreds-of-irish-writers-set-to-share-mil...
1•afshinmeh•47m ago•1 comments