A SUPER El Niño is Coming - What You NEED to Know

[00:00:00]3 years ago, I made a video warning that a super El Nino was coming. And some of the predictions came true, others not so much. But we're right on schedule because it's back. Except this time, Noah is putting the odds at a very strong 81% of it happening. Not the 63% you've probably seen in the news because that number is old, old data. And it points to something that has only happened a handful of times since we started keeping track in 1950. A super El Nino isn't really about the planet getting hotter. It's about the planet's weather getting picked up and moved. The rain, the storms, and the heat all shifting off the places that were built around them and onto places that weren't ready for them. So, in this video, we're going to talk about what a super Elnino is, the likelihood of it happening, and what it might mean for you this year.

[00:00:43]I'm Ricky, and this is Tuba.

[00:00:47]This video is brought to you by E-Range EV Tires.

[00:00:51]It starts with the sun. The equator gets the most direct sunlight on Earth, so the air there is constantly heating up and rising, which pulls in air from the north and south to take its place. The planet is spinning underneath all of it, and that bends the incoming air sideways into a steady river of wind blowing east to west along the equator. Those are the trade winds, the same ones that carried sailing ships across the ocean for centuries. And they are the engine of this entire system. Here's what they do.

[00:01:19]Picture the Pacific as a giant bathtub.

[00:01:22]Day after day, the trade wind drags the warm surface water westward and piles it up near Indonesia until the side of the ocean sits about 8 degrees warmer and as much as half a meter higher than the water of South America. It is a mountain of warm water held in place by nothing but wind. And as that warm water gets pulled west, cold, nutrient-rich water rises up along South America to replace it, which feeds the plankton, which then feeds the fish. It's why the coast of Peru is one of the richest fishing grounds on the planet. There's an air component to the story as well. All that warm water in the west is constantly evaporating, feeding towering thunderstorms that soak Indonesia, while the cooler eastern Pacific stays dry.

[00:02:03]And that atmospheric seesaw is what scientists call the southern oscillation. Put them together, the ocean and the air, and you get the full name of this system, ENSO, or the El Nino Southern Oscillation. El Nino is what happens when the winds let go. When the trades weaken and the mountain of warm water slushes back east and when it reaches South America, it acts like a warm lid pressing down on the boundary between the warm surface and the cold water below. A layer called the thermocline. The cold water can't punch through anymore and the upswelling stops. The plankton vanishes and the fish leave and the system feeds on itself. Warmer water in the east shrinks the temperature gap across the Pacific.

[00:02:46]A smaller gap means weaker winds. And weaker winds means even warmer water in the east. Once that negative feedback loop begins, it's really, really hard to stop. And because it drags the entire wall of thunderstorms eastward with it, it bends the jetream and rewires the weather for billions of people thousands of miles away. Then a year or two later, the whole thing tends to overshoot the other way into its cold mirror twin, Ladinia. This entire occurrence is a pendulum. It's not a switch. Elino doesn't create heat or destroy water. It moves them. Picture that bathtub again.

[00:03:22]Water sitting below the brim, so no problem at all. But slide half of that from one end to the other, and suddenly one half is bare, but the other is overflowing. No new water was added or lost. It just moved. And that far more than any single temperature is what's actually coming. Peruvian fishermen named this centuries ago because every few years right around Christmas, the fish would simply vanish. And they called it El Nino, the Christ child. But before we get into that, I want to update you on a product that I've been running on my EV for over 2 years now.

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[00:05:00]You probably heard the dramatic version.

[00:05:02]Three tropical cyclones straddling the equator in early April, fusing together and reversing the trade winds. Now, when I looked into these storms, I couldn't find them. Two of the three names don't appear on any storm database I could check. And Noah keeps an official list of every deep pulse of warm water, every downswelling Kelvin wave that rolls east. across the Pacific. And that list shows waves in December, January, March, and June, but nothing in April. So, some of these viral videos you've probably seen are about an event that just didn't happen. The truth is less dramatic.

[00:05:36]Starting in mid-March, the winds over the central Pacific weakened just enough to loosen the grip and launch a Kelvin wave east and the heat began building under the surface. And then from late April to late May, it stalled. It actually started to shrink. For about a month, this El Nino looked like it might just fizzle out entirely. Then in late May, it surged back. A second Kelvin wave launched in June, and that's the one that shoved the thermocline down off South America. Today, the water below the surface out there is running more than 2 1/2° C above normal. There is one real monster storm in this story, and that's Typhoon Bobby, which peaked as a category 5 near Guam before hitting China on July 11th. Except Noah's own analysis shows Bobby dragging those winds the wrong way, actually working against the El Nino. So, that was a super typhoon that was fighting the very event that we're supposed to be talking about. Scientists track a patch of ocean called Nino 3.4. And the shortand is that about a 2° C increase makes it a super El Nino. Though, to be transparent here, the super is actually kind of made up. It's not an actual classification.

[00:06:44]The strongest label is very strong. So, what do you call something stronger than very strong?

[00:06:50]Super. Right now, Nino 3.4 is at 1.3° C and climbing. But look at the extremes on either side. Out in the central Pacific, the water is only about.5° CC warmer, while right against the coast of Peru, it's already at plus 2.6°.

[00:07:07]That's more than a 2° gap across a single ocean. And it's the same fingerprint we saw in 1982 and 1997. to the most destructive El Ninos in modern history. It means that this is loading up South America and it's happening now.

[00:07:21]Back in April, the European Forecasting Center said it was too early to assign high confidence. By July 9th, Noah was at 81%. 3 months from we don't know if this is going to happen to 81% certainty. And that's kind of shocking in science. Now, I've read the Noah discussions, a European ocean heat paper from last month, and a tons of fishing regulations from Peru and Spanish so that you don't have to. Now, I noticed that about 2/3 of you aren't subscribed.

[00:07:49]It's completely free and it really helps us to reach our audience and keep you apprised of all of our new videos. So, if you think we've earned it, we'd love if you'd hit that subscribe button. It's free and it really helps us out. Thank you so much. Now, if you're already typing a comment that some of these models are getting it wrong, don't worry. We're going to get to that right now. So everything so far is a forecast.

[00:08:07]This next part isn't. And underneath every one of these is the same rearrangement playing out in real places. Rain and fish and storms showing up where they don't belong and vanishing from where people were counting on them.

[00:08:20]Every year Peru sets a quota for anchoveta, a small fish that gets ground up into fish meal that feeds farm salmon, chicken, and pigs worldwide.

[00:08:28]This year they set it to 1.9 million tons, the lowest opening quota in a decade. And then in June, they've been shutting down fisheries because only 25% of that already lower quota is actually getting caught. And that's because a lot of the fishing nets are pulling up juveniles, baby fish that haven't reproduced yet. And that's what a collapsing food chain looks like from the deck of a boat. And it's already happening. On May 29th, India's weather service forecast this year's monsoons at 90% of normal and put a 60% chance on a deficient season, meaning they're not going to get enough rain. And this isn't a place where there's over a billion people and farmlands that aren't built for man-made irrigation to fall back on.

[00:09:10]But it's not all bad news. El Nino cranks up wind shear over the Atlantic.

[00:09:13]It's a change in wind speed with height that tears storms apart before they can actually form. So Colorado State has cut Atlantic forecast twice down to nine named storms against a traditional 14 that we would normally see. But the same El Nino fires up the Eastern Pacific where Noah forecast a 70% chance of an above normal season for hurricanes and typhoons. Now, why all of this matters for all of us is because the world grain harvest is forecast to be about 2% below last year's with wheat down 4.3%. And the UN blames El Nino rainfall for hitting Australian wheat and squeezing harvest across Africa. Now stack a fertilizer crisis on top of that since late February the straight of Hormuse which carries about 30% of the world's traded fertilizer has been blockaded and seen issues. It's caused ura prices to jump more than 50% in a single month.

[00:10:06]Less fertilizer, thinning grain stock, weaker monsoons and rain all happening at the same time. But if I only talked about that part of it, it would be doing this story a huge miss.

[00:10:18]9798 was one of the strongest El Nino of the modern era. So a scientist named Stanley Chenon sat down afterwards and added up what it actually cost the US.

[00:10:28]The damage was real. About 189 Americans died and it cost around $4 billion. And then he added up the other column. That same El Nino delivered a mild northern winter. And mild winters are cheap.

[00:10:40]Americans saved $6.7 billion on heating.

[00:10:44]Spring brought no snow melt floods. and it helped hold down an unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season. Total benefits close to $20 billion. Extreme cold kills around 770 Americans in an average year. That winter it killed 13.

[00:10:58]All told, Chenon counted roughly 850 million lives saved. So for the US, the strongest Elino in modern history came out on the balance sheet at least as a net positive. And in his own words, it was surprisingly positive. But that ledger is US only and that is the whole point of this video. The very same El Nino was a catastrophe in Peru, in Indonesia, in East Africa. El Nino doesn't destroy the world. It redistributes it. It doesn't so much burn the harvest as move the rain the harvest was counting on from one continent to another. And whether that lands as a shrug or a disaster comes down entirely to where it falls.

[00:11:38]California can lose almost a whole season of rain and barely blink because nearly every crop out there is irrigated, engineered for drought from the start. A rainfed field in Malawi or a monsoonfed farm in India was built for that pattern. And when the pattern moves, there is no backup. And because the whole planet now eats from the same interconnected supply chain of food, a failed harvest in one hemisphere shows up as a price on a shelf in another. So the real danger was never a degree of warming. It's that we have spent centuries building our farms, our cities, and our societies, and supply chains around the weather, staying roughly where it has been historically.

[00:12:16]A mild January in Michigan and a failed harvest in Malawi are the same event.

[00:12:21]Now, you may have seen a scarier comparison going around. A map of 1877 next to today, back when an El Nino, often ranked the strongest on record, helped drive a famine that killed tens of millions of people, with most estimates landing between 30 and 60 million. Now, that famine was real, but the map is a bit misleading in two ways.

[00:12:40]First, we only know the 1877 ocean temperature to within a couple of degrees. So, getting a Victorian chip log estimate beside a modern satellite map isn't exactly a fair comparison. And second, more importantly, El Nino didn't do it alone. It took a four-way pileup, a record El Nino, plus a record event in the Indian Ocean, plus record warm Atlantic water, plus a full decade of buildup beforehand. So, a warm pool of water loaded up over years of strong trade winds is actually exactly what we're seeing now. So, the 1877 parallel is real, but it's not the whole picture.

[00:13:15]And scientists who studied it framed it not as a prediction, but as a warning that this can happen again in a hotter world. Everything I've told you today came from one place, an array of buoy strung across the equatorial Pacific, measuring the winds, the temperatures, and the depths of that thermocline in real time. We built it after the 1982 El Nino caught us with no warning. And it's the reason we now get a six-month head start. That's amazing. But what's not amazing is that we've been quietly letting it rot. In 2012, Noah retired the ship that serviced those buoys. And the data coming back collapsed from a normal 80 90% down to about 40. By 2019, there are only two buoys left out there.

[00:13:54]And Japan ended its program in the region entirely in 2021. And this year, the budget request proposed eliminating the entire Noah office that runs them.

[00:14:03]Now, Congress kept it, but with a 10% cut. So, basically, we're removing our ability to be able to accurately predict this going forward. If you've seen our videos, you know I'm always talking about self-reliance, solar, battery, like taking things that you can do to make your life a little more resilient.

[00:14:20]And it's stories like this that make that really come close to home. If you're able, have a backup power strategy, especially if you have medical devices or anything else, right? Either a standby generator or my preference would be batteries and solar, things that can keep you powered at least to power small stuff long term if the grid goes down. Stock up on food and water and provisions like have a plan because it's always a good idea. And it's not that this Elino is going to be crazy or not, but the weather could be unlike what you're expecting. If that were to happen, be sure you're ready. Clear your storm drains. Make sure all the drains around your house are cleaned and running. That way you don't have any flooding issues. Just take a moment to take care of each other and our neighbors, right? It's not just about us. You're only as safe as our other neighbors and and everything else. Now, flooding is of particular interest because that's actually what costs most people their homes. Your homeowner policy does not cover flooding. At least most don't. You would need a separate policy. FEMA maps put about 13 million Americans in a flood zone. But when researchers built those maps with modern data, the real number looks more like 41 million. So roughly 28 million more people are standing in a flood plane than their own government maps show. One in of water does more than $25,000 in damage. And studies in federal mitigation programs find that for every dollar spent, preparing ahead of time saves around $6 down the road. I think the bigger takeaway from this story is around the weather. When the weather is good, right? Good is relative. It means that it's what we expect. It's rainy when it should be. It's cool when it shouldn't be. It's warm when it should be. Things are normal. Now, in any region, if you had too much rain, more than the system is capable of discharging, you're going to get flooding. If you have so little rain and you don't have desalination, drought is going to be a problem. These are things that we can try to engineer around, but it's a big world and a complex weather system. If you have more experience or you know more about this, please let off in the comments below if you have any other tips or anything else. And if there's interest in more stuff like this or there's more news that breaks in the coming weeks or so, we'll cover it again. But until next week, I'm Rick Tu da Vinci. Thank you so much for watching and stay safe out