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from the just-a-little-storm-that-will-blow-over dept.
The current El Nino continues to strengthen and will probably end next Spring.
"All international climate models surveyed by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate El Nino is likely to strengthen, and is expected to persist into early 2016," the bureau said. Those models project the event could last until next April.
A overview of what this means for the world can be found here.
Economic winners include the U.S., China, Mexico and Europe, while India, Australia and Peru are among El Nino's biggest losers.
California does have one potential remaining issue that could cause the drought to continue: The Blob.
It was a tangled feedback process between hot, dry soil, the strong ridge, and the blob — all working together to enhance the ridge itself, leading to more hot, dry weather. The wintertime pattern has been so domineering that West Coast meteorologists dubbed it the "ridiculously resilient ridge."
As a California resident with limited oceanic-atmospheric knowledge I wonder if anyone out there can add insight to the last article. It seems that this El Nino is really strong and the most The Blob can hope to do is to weaken it. All that energy needs to go somewhere.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by purpleland on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:12PM
While humans seem great at adapting to change in the macro long term scale we seem pretty awful at individual events. Look at how we make fun of bad drivers in rain or a little snow. Or how an entire city like Atlanta grinds to a halt with 3 inches of snow in 2014.
There's an interesting theory that what spurred a lot of our technological development and evolution in our primitive ancestors was learning to survive highly variable environments. E.g. what you have to do in the other seasons in order to survive winter. I believe there's good evidence to support this hypothesis as well. See http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-research/effects/ [si.edu]
By that same argument, you could speculate that whatever climate changes our planet will undergo over the next century or two will have a profound effect on our technological advancement.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:21PM
While humans seem great at adapting to change in the macro long term scale we seem pretty awful at individual events .... Or how an entire city like Atlanta grinds to a halt with 3 inches of snow in 2014.
Get used to it and it doesn't matter. That three inches doesn't even rise to "storm" status where I grew up. Until unplowed snow gets higher than the bumper its just "eh business as usual". We got about ten snowfalls like that per winter, figure one per week average although it varies a bit.
That's the critical part about the El nino. The main human impact is first derivative of the weather, not the actual weather at all. The change in the weather. After a week of rain or heat or WTF its no longer a story, its just how it is. With the obvious exception of the 1% of the population who farm or own substantial solar panel arrays or whatever.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:35PM
After a week of rain or heat or WTF its no longer a story, its just how it is. With the obvious exception of the 1% of the population who farm
And the 99.9% of the population who eat food from those farms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @09:57PM
Technically 100%, unless farmers somehow don't need to eat.