The lack of hurricanes also means that heat is not being removed from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, future hurricanes are likely to be more powerful and more frequent.
Plant a garden area with native plants. I have several garden plots across my property and over the years I have been removing all non-native vegetation and replacing things with natives. By keeping the area around my orchard and vegetable gardens all native I have noticed an increasing number of native bees, moths, butterflies and beetles in my garden area, pollinating the things I hope to keep alive long enough to harvest and eat. I have my first good crop of olives this year. I'm pretty stoked.
You can make a difference by giving native insects and birds a place to hang out, safe from insecticides and other unnecessary afflictions.
This does happen every El Niño this years is pretty wild. Every local forecasters is saying "IDFK" and they are right. The the great Atlantic conveyor also starts to die this year we are in for evolution!
If 4-5 degree temperature jump comes true it will be an extinction for many species in tropical and sub tropical areas and millions of people will die as those will hit wet bulb temperature ie it will be to hot and humid for mammals
In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.
One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)
Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.
Strange timeline indeed but Stripe is a big backer for climate solutions and climate research, including a $2B carbon dioxide removal initiative called Frontier: https://stripe.com/climate
Reading Frontier’s website it’s very unclear how much they’re going to remove and how they’re going to do it - though there’s a lot of mentions of biomass
Trouble with techies is they tend plumb for techie solutions like carbon capture aka ClimeWorks rather than low tech options like trees or seagrass
Trees and seagrass don't really address the sequestration side though, do they?
The carbon they latch onto and temporarily hold onto is still within the land / sea surface +/- a few metres layer.
The current largest scale carbon capture projects are catching a small amount of vented CO2 from LNG projects and pushing that back into the subsurface fields - they only capture 10 ton by releasing over a 100.
We're in need of readily powered true air capture of CO2 then sequestered deep underground.
Things like www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992602269X have promise.
> In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
Yes, much better supply chains and infrastructure are examples of how growth and innovation make us more resilient.
El Niño sends the jet stream southward. Once the jet stream gets far enough south it tears apart any developing storms in the Gulf and Caribbean Sea before they have a chance to become a problem.
Overall the expectations are an increase in intensity and inability to predict. There is no expectation around consistency. That is why climate change is going to be such a disaster, it's not acutely predictable and it's death by a thousand cuts for us. The floods in Nepal etc are a good example. Very hard to predict, extremely distructive.
The Nepal incident is also messy because it's a extremely specific local/regional phenomenon, which was always a threat (and has happened before in other, less-populated areas around the Himalayas), but without consistent warming leading to glacier loss, it would be a random rare tragedy. Now that we know what happened and what causes it, we can pretty well expect that it will happen again... but there are so many similar hanging glacers high above steep V-shaped river valleys that we can't easily monitor or predict, not to mention alert locals and evacuate people in time. How many other similar local phenomena will appear? Impossible to say.
> Given the strong and still-strengthening El Niño, which tends to reduce the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin while boosting numbers in the Pacific, there is some chance that this season could end on Nov. 30 with no hurricanes.
But I am not liking this site. Both articles are mostly just restating "this is really rare" in 5+ different ways without explaining why. If anyone has a better site, a link would be most appreciated.
> I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?
That is a question. I suppose the answer is yes, you thought that.
You likely thought that because - Holy cow. Year after year after year of explosively strengthening Cat5 storms is fairly well unprecedented.
source: FL coastal resident and repeated hurricane relief worker.
Equally unprecedented is the supercharged El Nino that's been interfering with the Atlantic Basin's ability to form storms, in proportion to it's record development.
Weather patterns in the Americas and Asia change in the summer through winter months. Rainfall changes throughout the Americas, and Asia sees worsening floods and storms.
Just because the Atlantic sees fewer hurricanes doesn't mean it's out of the woods - the number of winter storms increases.
Nice dashboard. I have built a spreadsheet that I use for tracking weather that is fairly similar to this though I only have 25 years of data that I have collected so far. All of it was collected on my property though and I am up in one of the areas that could become pretty wet if this plays out like the other Super El Nino in 2015-2106. During that period, we almost matched our annual rainfall total between mid-October and 31 December, 2015.
An interesting thing to note in the chart is the projected peak of this El Nino. Their models project a single peak in about November. If this works like 2015-2016 then you can expect to see two peaks with the first occurring late this year and the second occurring by mid-March, 2027. There was a short period beginning in mid-November, 2015 when the ocean SST anomaly dropped from 3.1C to 2.3C before rebounding to 2.9C by mid-January, 2016 and it remained above 2C until mid-March, 2016. I don't see any allowance for a two-headed peak in those model outputs though it makes sense that winter mixing of Arctic waters could cool the eastern Pacific a few degrees without putting an end to the super El Nino conditions, with 2015-2106 being an obvious, recent analogue.
In section 5 the question of coupling appears to be answered in the affirmative in the data from the top left chart of Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and El Nino. There appears to be a long oscillation trend of about 12 years evident in the data. Perhaps one should see whether this correlates at all with sunspot cycles which have a similar period.
I can make another correlation from my own data that illustrates how the El Nino/La Nina cycle works here in NTexas.
Referring to section 4 - In Context you can see the flip to La Nina period around May 2010 and La Nina conditions held until August 2014 and it took until October 2015 for the rains to return. My records show that when it stopped raining in late May 2010 we were ahead of 20-year avg annual rainfall totals for that date. We ended that year and each year through 2014 with a rainfall deficit. By the end of 2014 we were firmly in a multi-year drought in NTexas with a cumulative rainfall deficit during that period of 31.1" (789.94mm) below 20 year avg annual rainfall. Interestingly enough, we ended 2015 with an annual surplus of 32.1" (815.34mm) here at my place. That erased all of the 5 year rainfall deficit (2010-2014) in the period between October 22 and December 31.
The drought broke in October 2015 as I mentioned at the top, after SST had climber to super El Nino levels, the highest on record to that point. The rains arrived about a month before the first SST peak in November, 2015.
Today I have a sensor array that tells me that soil temps in the full sun from a probe 4-6" (~100-152 mm) below surface reached 100 degrees about three weeks ago during this long, hot spell leading into what I hope is a wet period. Soil moisture there is under 30% and everything that was green in mid-June when the rains stopped is dry and brown today except the hardiest native grasses and small plants. We've had 1.5" (38 mm) of rain since mid-June which puts us almost 5" (127 mm) under the 20 year avg annual total for this date.
Luckily there are signs that the hot, high pressure dome that has dominated our weather since June is moving out of the area and the rains that have been falling west and north of us will be falling on us in a few short weeks.
Thanks for posting this dashboard. It fits so well with my own data that it allows me time to plan for winter gardening. I grew carrots last year and if I can do that again it will make it two years in a row. That would be cool.
EDIT: I took a look at the trend of sunspot numbers found here [0] and there is good correlation with peak sunspot numbers being near the zero-crossing on Section 5 - Is it Coupled chart of SOI. Since we are on the declining side of the sunspot cycle heading into solar minimum, still a few years away, it fits well with this being an El Nino period. Adjust the chart using the slider so that it covers the period from 1990-present like the chart in the dashboard. From that data, the strongest El Nino so far in 2015-2106 occurred during the weakest solar cycle in recent history.
Only in the Atlantic Ocean. In the Pacific, Hawaii has had back-to-back hurricanes for the last few weeks. Lala, Lowell, Karina, Norbert. They haven't made landfall there, but have come close enough to send flash floods and high storm surges.
No, not really. Massively fewer rain storms usually isn't good news in the long run. You kind of need rains to keep things from being too dry. I don't know about your body chemistry but water is pretty critical in mine.
I'd love more storms where I'm at. Things have been exceptionally hot and dry. I don't want giant massive Cat 5 storms, but a severe lack of tropical storms and smaller hurricanes hasn't been good.
And as others have mentioned, hurricanes end up cooling off the waters. The lack of these storms from developing due to atmospheric effects destroying them before they grow means the heat builds. So when El Nino goes away, we're likely to get even worse storms soon after.
The lack of hurricanes also means that heat is not being removed from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, future hurricanes are likely to be more powerful and more frequent.
https://news.wfsu.org/state-news/2026-08-31/rising-humid-hea...
And marine populations will suffer. Changes in currents will affect shipping. Overall a disaster.
I wonder if our fisheries or our insect-pollinated crops will collapse first.
Plant a garden area with native plants. I have several garden plots across my property and over the years I have been removing all non-native vegetation and replacing things with natives. By keeping the area around my orchard and vegetable gardens all native I have noticed an increasing number of native bees, moths, butterflies and beetles in my garden area, pollinating the things I hope to keep alive long enough to harvest and eat. I have my first good crop of olives this year. I'm pretty stoked.
You can make a difference by giving native insects and birds a place to hang out, safe from insecticides and other unnecessary afflictions.
Came here to say this.
I saw someone call out the stock performance of $OC (shingles) vs strong el ninos... it seems so obvious. What else is like that?
This does happen every El Niño this years is pretty wild. Every local forecasters is saying "IDFK" and they are right. The the great Atlantic conveyor also starts to die this year we are in for evolution!
If 4-5 degree temperature jump comes true it will be an extinction for many species in tropical and sub tropical areas and millions of people will die as those will hit wet bulb temperature ie it will be to hot and humid for mammals
This El Niño is off the charts for any ever recorded in human history.
Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came to AirMiners to tell us about what's next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Xu_H3Wo8o
In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.
We're building tools at: https://elninoready.earth
One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)
Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.
AMA
> Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather
Who?? The ecommerce website wants us to listen to the climate scientist they bought?
Strange timeline indeed but Stripe is a big backer for climate solutions and climate research, including a $2B carbon dioxide removal initiative called Frontier: https://stripe.com/climate
Amazed that I have never heard of this. Feel like the positive PR would be a large incentive for them doing this at all.
> Feel like the positive PR would be a large incentive for them doing this at all.
Media focus on bad news. Average person seems to be more interested in emotionally charged, bad, or controversial news. Not positive stuff.
On every stable planet, pollution is accounted for in every transaction. Stripe is just building where the puck is going!
How will carbon be removed by Frontier?
Planting trees? Capturing carbon from industrial plants / byproduct from LNG extraction?
Where will the extracted carbon be sequestered?
Reading Frontier’s website it’s very unclear how much they’re going to remove and how they’re going to do it - though there’s a lot of mentions of biomass
Trouble with techies is they tend plumb for techie solutions like carbon capture aka ClimeWorks rather than low tech options like trees or seagrass
Trees and seagrass don't really address the sequestration side though, do they?
The carbon they latch onto and temporarily hold onto is still within the land / sea surface +/- a few metres layer.
The current largest scale carbon capture projects are catching a small amount of vented CO2 from LNG projects and pushing that back into the subsurface fields - they only capture 10 ton by releasing over a 100.
We're in need of readily powered true air capture of CO2 then sequestered deep underground.
Things like www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992602269X have promise.
Huh, that’s actually really cool.
i hear you, however:
> …but Stripe is a big backer for climate solutions…
his post reads pretty clearly as funding “solutions” to adapt to coming climate change rather than “how do we mitigate climate change”
this is why i’m skeptical of people who work for an economic org.
it’s like some these companies are salivating at the idea of Disaster Capitalism.
“it’s going to open up so many chances to make trillions!”
i recognize how jaded i am, but this just feels slimey “there’s much more money to be made if we exacerbate the disaster rather than slow it!”
> In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)
Yes, much better supply chains and infrastructure are examples of how growth and innovation make us more resilient.
I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?
El Niño sends the jet stream southward. Once the jet stream gets far enough south it tears apart any developing storms in the Gulf and Caribbean Sea before they have a chance to become a problem.
Also having large waves of Saharan dust which is too dry and inhibits hurricane development.
Where does this dust end up? Into the oceans? Because iron-rich dust entering the oceans helps create nutrition for algae which can absorb CO2
Believe it or not at least 40 million tons of it ends up in the Amazon basin each year where it does have an effect on the plants there: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/1/1/014...
It goes elsewhere too, as expected.
N/Nw Europe also has sand rains. Not seen it this year yet though.
It also prevents those storms from dissipating the energy. So once the jet stream moves north again, bigger than otherwise storms will happen.
Overall the expectations are an increase in intensity and inability to predict. There is no expectation around consistency. That is why climate change is going to be such a disaster, it's not acutely predictable and it's death by a thousand cuts for us. The floods in Nepal etc are a good example. Very hard to predict, extremely distructive.
The Nepal incident is also messy because it's a extremely specific local/regional phenomenon, which was always a threat (and has happened before in other, less-populated areas around the Himalayas), but without consistent warming leading to glacier loss, it would be a random rare tragedy. Now that we know what happened and what causes it, we can pretty well expect that it will happen again... but there are so many similar hanging glacers high above steep V-shaped river valleys that we can't easily monitor or predict, not to mention alert locals and evacuate people in time. How many other similar local phenomena will appear? Impossible to say.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/hurricane/will-2026-go-down-w... says:
> Given the strong and still-strengthening El Niño, which tends to reduce the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin while boosting numbers in the Pacific, there is some chance that this season could end on Nov. 30 with no hurricanes.
But I am not liking this site. Both articles are mostly just restating "this is really rare" in 5+ different ways without explaining why. If anyone has a better site, a link would be most appreciated.
Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built this dashboard: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso
> I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?
That is a question. I suppose the answer is yes, you thought that.
You likely thought that because - Holy cow. Year after year after year of explosively strengthening Cat5 storms is fairly well unprecedented.
source: FL coastal resident and repeated hurricane relief worker.
Equally unprecedented is the supercharged El Nino that's been interfering with the Atlantic Basin's ability to form storms, in proportion to it's record development.
El Nino decreases Atlantic hurricane activity.
Weather patterns in the Americas and Asia change in the summer through winter months. Rainfall changes throughout the Americas, and Asia sees worsening floods and storms.
Just because the Atlantic sees fewer hurricanes doesn't mean it's out of the woods - the number of winter storms increases.
My understanding was fewer storms, but the ones that do happen, are stronger.
The end of the post touches on it, but couldn’t this be foreshadowing the really bad El Niño that they’ve been talking about?
Yes El Niño creates sheer in the tropical Atlantic inhibiting tropical cyclone formation in that area
El Niño is already underway. Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built a dashboard here: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso
We're way off the charts already.
Nice dashboard. I have built a spreadsheet that I use for tracking weather that is fairly similar to this though I only have 25 years of data that I have collected so far. All of it was collected on my property though and I am up in one of the areas that could become pretty wet if this plays out like the other Super El Nino in 2015-2106. During that period, we almost matched our annual rainfall total between mid-October and 31 December, 2015.
An interesting thing to note in the chart is the projected peak of this El Nino. Their models project a single peak in about November. If this works like 2015-2016 then you can expect to see two peaks with the first occurring late this year and the second occurring by mid-March, 2027. There was a short period beginning in mid-November, 2015 when the ocean SST anomaly dropped from 3.1C to 2.3C before rebounding to 2.9C by mid-January, 2016 and it remained above 2C until mid-March, 2016. I don't see any allowance for a two-headed peak in those model outputs though it makes sense that winter mixing of Arctic waters could cool the eastern Pacific a few degrees without putting an end to the super El Nino conditions, with 2015-2106 being an obvious, recent analogue.
In section 5 the question of coupling appears to be answered in the affirmative in the data from the top left chart of Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and El Nino. There appears to be a long oscillation trend of about 12 years evident in the data. Perhaps one should see whether this correlates at all with sunspot cycles which have a similar period.
I can make another correlation from my own data that illustrates how the El Nino/La Nina cycle works here in NTexas.
Referring to section 4 - In Context you can see the flip to La Nina period around May 2010 and La Nina conditions held until August 2014 and it took until October 2015 for the rains to return. My records show that when it stopped raining in late May 2010 we were ahead of 20-year avg annual rainfall totals for that date. We ended that year and each year through 2014 with a rainfall deficit. By the end of 2014 we were firmly in a multi-year drought in NTexas with a cumulative rainfall deficit during that period of 31.1" (789.94mm) below 20 year avg annual rainfall. Interestingly enough, we ended 2015 with an annual surplus of 32.1" (815.34mm) here at my place. That erased all of the 5 year rainfall deficit (2010-2014) in the period between October 22 and December 31.
The drought broke in October 2015 as I mentioned at the top, after SST had climber to super El Nino levels, the highest on record to that point. The rains arrived about a month before the first SST peak in November, 2015.
Today I have a sensor array that tells me that soil temps in the full sun from a probe 4-6" (~100-152 mm) below surface reached 100 degrees about three weeks ago during this long, hot spell leading into what I hope is a wet period. Soil moisture there is under 30% and everything that was green in mid-June when the rains stopped is dry and brown today except the hardiest native grasses and small plants. We've had 1.5" (38 mm) of rain since mid-June which puts us almost 5" (127 mm) under the 20 year avg annual total for this date.
Luckily there are signs that the hot, high pressure dome that has dominated our weather since June is moving out of the area and the rains that have been falling west and north of us will be falling on us in a few short weeks.
Thanks for posting this dashboard. It fits so well with my own data that it allows me time to plan for winter gardening. I grew carrots last year and if I can do that again it will make it two years in a row. That would be cool.
EDIT: I took a look at the trend of sunspot numbers found here [0] and there is good correlation with peak sunspot numbers being near the zero-crossing on Section 5 - Is it Coupled chart of SOI. Since we are on the declining side of the sunspot cycle heading into solar minimum, still a few years away, it fits well with this being an El Nino period. Adjust the chart using the slider so that it covers the period from 1990-present like the chart in the dashboard. From that data, the strongest El Nino so far in 2015-2106 occurred during the weakest solar cycle in recent history.
[0]https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/solar-cyc...
Such good news.
Only in the Atlantic Ocean. In the Pacific, Hawaii has had back-to-back hurricanes for the last few weeks. Lala, Lowell, Karina, Norbert. They haven't made landfall there, but have come close enough to send flash floods and high storm surges.
Only surfically so. Dig deeper and the story gets much worse.
No, not really. Massively fewer rain storms usually isn't good news in the long run. You kind of need rains to keep things from being too dry. I don't know about your body chemistry but water is pretty critical in mine.
I'd love more storms where I'm at. Things have been exceptionally hot and dry. I don't want giant massive Cat 5 storms, but a severe lack of tropical storms and smaller hurricanes hasn't been good.
And as others have mentioned, hurricanes end up cooling off the waters. The lack of these storms from developing due to atmospheric effects destroying them before they grow means the heat builds. So when El Nino goes away, we're likely to get even worse storms soon after.
The Sharpie works!!
Reminds me of Al Gore's movie poster.