NY Times: A Powerful El Niño Is Forming. If History Is a Guide, It Could Hit Hard.

The biggest episodes of the past have altered the course of human events, according to researchers. An emerging one is drawing historic comparisons.

#climateemergency #famine #elnino #climate #warming #disasters

persuasion.community/p/rip85

".....I’m not even a little bit relaxed about #climate change. Here’s why.
"In reality, we’re likely to come in at below 6 watts per square meter in added trapped energy, which likely puts us on track for 2.5 to 3 degrees of global #warming."
'"But there’s an old saying among Earth System #scientists: “nobody lives at the global mean temperature.” Nobody actually cares about cumulative global averages. People care about the weather in the places where they live: the #floods and the #droughts, the storms and the sea levels and the #fires. And while Earth Science has made pretty good progress in connecting the #pollution we emit to likely global radiative balances and temperatures, it’s on much shakier ground when it comes to relating those averages to the actual, on-the-ground conditions people care about."
"And there’s another, subtler, reason to hold off on those victory laps. It’s now clear that anthropogenic carbon emissions are not likely to bring us to the kinds of catastrophic scenarios RCP8.5 implies. But talk to Earth System scientists and you’ll find plenty of other ways we could end up in other catastrophic scenarios. The Earth System has many poorly-understood, hard-to-measure, hard-to-model feedback loops that could drop us right back in RCP8.5-type scenarios."
"The one you hear about most often is Siberian permafrost: it could be that it thaws quickly enough to emit masses of new methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. But that’s just one; there are plenty of others."
.....
"Could there be an #Earth-changing feedback loop out there nobody’s identified yet?"
.....
"The maddening reality about climate change is that Earth System #science is not really up to the task of quantifying the risks for the worst outcomes."