El Niño is flooding California's coasts with the highest tides to come
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Realistically how much can they do? Sandbags and berms but it’s not like they can just raise these areas a few feet.
High tides aren't new, and there are areas in the world that battle them since decades. E.g. at the north sea in Germany.
The the governments gave money to their universities and they made studies: how would a high tide impact the area? Some of the impact was obvious, since there have been disastrous floods. But some are not, e.g. of the economical impact. And then they again put money into universities, to let them study hydrology and water-related civil engineering to a much higher degree.
And so we got more modern versions of dams, the harbours and naval bases were protected. Even the rivers were protected, since a high tide travels upwards the river. See for example the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidersperrwerk (sorry, didn't find an english version -> look at the pictures, learn a foreign language, use LLM translation)
But ... all of this is weak compared what the Dutch did regarding hydrology. They not only made protection buildings, but they also made buildings to convert ex-ocean into arable and livable lands. One large example is e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works
So if you look for people that are good at studying the impact of floods (civil and economically) and that are good at doing anything against ... there are possibilities.
You must however tame your ICE. No dutch engineer is willing to work in the USA if the ICE puts him randomly in deportation camps, like they even did for a Swiss journalist of a conservative (!) outlet.
They also spend more than the EU on healthcare.
Seems to be a pattern emerging here...
But this isn't Florida; California is an enemy state, so that won't happen.
Still, that is a lot of difficult fires in any metro area if there are big floods.
just a little thread of warmer water running up the california coast vissible in.this subset https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.cf.g...
but the actual heat energy involved is mind boggling
I think that there will be a number of updates as to the conditions to expect bieng issued shortly, and my personal plan is to keep doubling down on having everything ship shape and ready for prolonged adverse conditions.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-c...
someday Miami is going to be a new part of the Florida Keys
This El Nino phenomena is caused by something called Bjerknes feedback. There is a recurring atmospheric 'wave' of relaxed and enhanced trade winds, called the Madden-Julien oscillation (the MJO) that travels slowly west to east across the planet with a period of approximately 60 days. The "active" phase of the MJO usually comes with a burst of westerly (west-to-east) winds in the west pacific. Those slow down the normally easterly (east-to-west) trades a bit. Some years, those easterly trades are slowed down a bit more than usual; this causes the heated up water in the western pacific to 'escape containment': deep warm water moves west to east, in a Kelvin wave. A strong series of these Kelvin waves can cause a mass of deep warm water to build in the eastern pacific. Upwelling there now brings warm water to the surface, instead of cold water, which means the air above the east pacific gets hotter, which means it rises -- low pressure -- which causes the trades to slacken further (-> the air moves relatively in a westerly direction to take up this low pressure), which causes another, stronger Kelvin wave, and so on and so on. This is Bjerknes feedback; it causes El Nino.
These Kelvin waves stop when they hit South America and split: half moves S->N along the N hemi coast, half moves N->S along the S hemi coast. Warm water is less dense than cool water, so there's a big mass of warm water near the coast. This lower density warm water wants to go 'downhill', offshore. Due to Earth's rotation, it's turned right as it travels (since it's in the Northern hemisphere), and then right again, back towards the coast, which balances against the offshore push. The net effect is a consistent mass of warm water held up against the land, and a consistent S->N current along the shore.
When the water is anomalously warm enough, when the El Nino is severe enough, this effect grows to be very large. In San Diego right now the real tide is around 1-1.5ft higher than the "standard" reading from a tide chart. Dive visibility has been incredible, the best on record, since the warm upwelling is drawing from nutrient poor water. Water temps have been incredible. Water temp is 73 degrees in San Diego right now, normally this time of year I'm in a 3/2 fullsuit. Tropical moisture has been off the charts. At a couple points this year, SoCal was the hottest and most humid place in all the USA. The consistency and count of south swells, including waves from tropical storms, has been absolutely insane. Weird currents everywhere, sandbars in crazy spots. Fog, weird bird action. My neighbor's beautiful 50ft tall Monterey pine was singed by this heat, turned brown from the pine beetle, and is probably going to die. I am buying sandbags for the house and big surfboards for this upcoming winter season. It's all just very very strange, I have never seen weather like this ever in my life. Never ever. And I still have decades to go. We'll see this winter, how bad the storms get...
Massive amounts of land are destroyed and used for cattle. It's insane. Same with water, among other things.
Going veg cuts the numbers a crazy amount. 40-75% in terms of various metrics.
Our lives are built on excess consumption. We live lives of kings. We refuse to give up the largest sources of our damage when it isn't actually that hard. The excuses are so lame.
We are adding energy to the system via our excessive consumption. The ocean sucks up a massive amount of that energy. Warm water expands, among other things(hurricanes).
Also ruminants in general have existed for millions of years before thwn
95% of all mammal biomass on earth is now humans and livestock
In absolute terms, mammal biomass has increased by about 10x compared to 100,000 years ago. ALL of that increase can be accounted for by humans and livestocks, because the biomass of wild mammals has fallen in that same time period
The amount of deforestation, water use, and pollution to scale like we are is not sustainable. This isn't a debate, the math simply does not work and there are mountains of evidence that contradict the "cattle are good for the environment" misinformation that society pushes.
Also, it is a gross myth that people all ate beef for thousands of years. The vast, vast majority of people ate beef only a few times a year, if at all in a year. Beef and those types of extremely resource intensive foods were generally reserved for the rich. That's why our modern society associates stuff like steak dinner with success. We eat it to celebrate. Beef was a very rare thing before massive industrialization of animal agriculture. Then it became an excess item that everyone could enjoy. You can find plenty of advertisements from the industrialization of ag that literally talk about how everyone can eat like kings and princes now. Beef for everyone!
The Colorado river drying up is largely in part to growing grass in arid environments to feed cattle. This is a problem.
Throughout history the vast, vast majority of people rarely ate beef and when they did it was much different than today. Generally old stuff in soups or whatnot. It was outside the budget of most people, if it was available at all in most of the world.
Nothing about our lives is historically comparible to our ancestors. This justification of "we've always eaten meat" is historically inaccurate and doesn't work nor does it make any sense.
This message was definitely not brought to you by the American Beef Council.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236455
This kind of thing will be as regular as clockwork in a few years time. Still there are a lot of people that will simply not believe it.
These rhetorics have a distinct feeling of "I found another out-group to which I will assign all the blame, which is very convenient, because I don't want to ever hear 'The earth is going to shit and I could have done something about it.'"
We cannot solve/tackle climate change when we don't even have functional governments that actually try to genuinely support their citizens needs.
If you call people out for their hypocrisy they act like a doomer victim.
If the state needs money, it needs to take it from where it is, which is still with the masses. In Germany, at around maybe 90k EUR income is a particularly bad place to be. You are nominally considered to be a good earner. But at that point you already give around 70% on the next EUR you earn for various taxes and social security. If you are financially responsible not only for yourself but for other people (which is not reflected in lower taxes unless you're legally married), you can still get along fine, but it might not feel like you are a good earner. I was in a similar situation at one point in my life, it had taken me hard work to earn that money, and I have to say I was a little pissed about the tax situation.
I think I understand why progressive tax systems exist. Given our societies' structures, they probably _have_ to exist. But also I wonder if long-term they _contribute_ to income and wealth inequality. It reduces incentives for those who earn less to earn more (which of course for many people is not easily possible, but for some it would be, by working more, working harder, looking for a different job, etc.). It also allows employers to spend less on their workforce, meaning you could understand it as a kind of subsidiary for employers. Of course, lower salaries might be the only way for employers to even offer a product at prices the market wants to pay. But again it also reenforces inequalities in the income structure.
Tough... thoughts and prayers.
The others are surviving
It is entirely related to both and I'm pretty sure Gizmodo isn't trying to project blame away from climate change here.
Climate change is making unusually adverse weather events more common in general. El Niño is a cyclical event that results in an increase in adverse weather events from whatever the current baseline is.
As climate change worsens things on average, it'll worsen things even more when combined with amplification events like El Niño.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/10/28/this-el-ni...
El Niño is part of the proximate cause for the current water level rise in the Pacific; climate change is the root cause.