I hope you’re already following The Great Simplification podcast and posts by Nate Hagens, an analyst of the intersection of environment, energy and economy whose roots were in “peak oil” days but has greatly evolved and widened his focus. (Michael Barnard at CleanTechnica has just posted a fresh look at Hagens’s path.)
I particularly encourage you to listen to the latest episode — an illuminating update on current and future climate conditions with Zeke Hausfather, a scientist working in basic climate change research at Berkeley Earth, leading a chapter in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and working in the commercial carbon-removal world via Stripe’s Frontier Climate company.
Here’s a core statement by Hausfather putting warming from the projected El Niño in the context of warming from human emissions affecting the climate:
Strong El Niños add about 0.2 degrees to annual temperatures the year after they peak. You know, this year might be 0.3 because this El Niño is crazy, but we add about 0.2 degrees from human emissions every 8 years. And so we're essentially adding a permanent super El Niño worth of heat to the climate system every 8 years just by burning coal, oil, and gas.
You can get a detailed breakdown of the episode with sources and more at Hagens’ post and show notes:
Hausfather also just posted an excellent overview of what to expect from the 2026-27 El Niño:
Hagens on the pandemic
Here’s the 2020 conversation hosted on one of the earliest Sustain What webcasts by my teammate at the time, Dale Willman, with guests Jon Erickson, an ecological economist with the University of Vermont, the economist Juliet Schor of Boston College and Nate Hagens.
Thanks for sharing. I'm very mixed on Zeke, as I find the 'media' scientists offer some helpful info and yet I've never seen any of them ever at meetings of much of the stuff they talk about. I did my PhD in the early 80s on El Nino and then studied the Water and Energy cycle. What I find they often miss is the complex interaction of the general circulation with climate and these cycles. One of the important things I discovered is that El Nino changes the allowed circulations in the subtropics leading to extraordinary drying of the upper atmosphere and a venting of the El Nino surface warmth to space. I still find watching this El Nino fascinating and awesome, but it is in no way any analog for warming. In fact, I will be watching to see if the event actually is an opportunity for the coupled system to vent some of the ocean energy to space or not.
As for low clouds and climate model sensitivity, the most recent and largest model and climate field experiment ever, finished in 2020, gave us the update Zeke is apparently unaware of. That's the hazard of being a media star and not actually practicing in the filed. Here's the actual science result by folks that work in the field - Data gathered during the campaign successfully challenged the long-held "mixing-desiccation" hypothesis embedded in many climate models. It proved that rising convective mixing does not dry out low cloud layers as severely as older models predicted. This discovery helped rule out some of the most extreme warming scenarios generated by overly sensitive climate models
How is this supposed to be relevant for policy making? Let's take as proven that humans cause CO2 emissions and that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere has _some_ effect on geophysiacal outcomes. Is this a new estimate of how sensitive one or more of these processes is to CO2 accumulation? Is there a new estimate of the marginal cost of an additional unit of emission? Is there a better estimate of the effectiveness of some policy at reducing CO2 emission? Has the cost per unit of net emission of different policies been re-estimated?
See:https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-strategy-now