Just the Beginning: Global Heat & Local Extremes with Leon Simons & Dan Miller

And what I really like about this graph is it, it really visualises the, how strong this El, El Niño already is.

It's already, as you see here, at two and a half degrees temperature, uh, degrees Celsius or Kelvin, which is the same, above the anomaly.

Um, and that's the Ocean Niño Index, which keeps changing.

For every year they, they use the, um, 30-year average from, um, every time, every five years that period changes that we use more and more.

You see the relative El Niño, but here it is the ocean Ni- Oceanic Niño Index.

Um, and this is from 19, uh, 95, I think, to 2006, uh, to, to 2005, so 30 years.

Or, sorry, 1996 to 2025.

That's the ano- this is the anomaly.

You see it's really ex- um, now at two and a half degrees above, so already well in the, the super El Niño territory, much sooner than ever before.

And it might shift a bit with when the, when, when the temperatures get sh- sh- shifted with the new 30-year baseline.

Um, that's why the relative El Niño is, in many ways, better to use.

But it does give an indication.

And I, I shared this from, from a Twitter or X post because I, I really appreciate how many people, um, I don't know if, if this person is a, is a scientist, but everyone who, who can access the data and can work with the data can make their own graphs and do data visualization.

And I really recommend everyone who, who can do that to try it out and to look at the, look at the actual data.

And if programming isn't your thing, you can also just go to, to website of climate re- reanalyzer.org, and you can see the data as well.

You can download it to, to make an Excel sheet, or you can just, uh, use the interact- interactive, uh, web app or web program and look at the data.

And funnily enough, 'cause this is the 1991 to 2020, uh, baseline, it's a bit lower.

It...

So the, the temperature of the region, um, decreased.

If you take the new 30 year period, there was seemingly some cooling, and of course that's because there were more La Niñas or less El Niños.

And so you have to take that into account to understand the small differences in these anomalies.

But, um, also then if you use this, it's already well in, uh, super El Niño territory.

Mm-hmm.

And I want to show you this as well, where, um, Adam McKay, his team, um, he, for a yellow, uh, with Yellow Dot Studios, which he, he founded to, um, make people more aware of climate change and what to do about it.

Um, they-

I should mention that we interviewed Adam McKay a year or two ago, and, uh, if you're interested in hearing that, it, I think it's called Is Climate Change Funny? Because, you know, he takes a different approach to, uh, talking about social issues, and usually with humor as part of what he does.

Uh, Adam McKay is the one who, uh, produced and directed film Don't Look Up, The Big Short, and, and many others.

Uh, well, well-known, uh, filmmaker.

And, uh, go check that out if you, uh, missed, uh, missed that show from a year or two ago.

Check it out on Climate Check.

Early July, Stacy, 2024.

Okay.

Yeah.

You can find it on, uh, Climate Check, Adam McKay, if you, if you look it up.

Thank you, Dan.

Um, yeah.

And they raised the alarm, and, uh, I also signed his letter, and everyone can, can sign his letter to ask the governments, uh, from g- uh, countries and regions to, um, get their shit together in, in many ways, right? And to prepare us, us for the very strong El Niño.

Because what we are experiencing now isn't, isn't really El Niño yet, 'cause it takes a few months for these impacts to materialize.

And also Europe isn't impacted normally much by El Niño.

It's impacted by many things, we'll get to that, but not very much by El Niño.

Um, so I think, yeah, everyone should sign this letter because you cannot cope by yourself with these extreme weather impacts that are coming the coming year.

So you really need, need to re- uh, req- uh, yeah, get your government officials, um, demand them to, to do that for you, to prepare the countries and, and also global cooperation.

Because of course, many people will suffer who are not in wealthy countries, and they also need assistance.

But as, uh, the title of this program is, is Just the Beginning: Global Heat and Local Extremes-

Yeah

...

I think important to point out that however hot it gets, uh, this year and next year, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that later, but in 10 or 20 years we'll be looking at this as the cool, good old days In other words, there's only one direction.

I mean, it fluctuates up and down, especially because of El Niño and La Niña.

So year to year, we certainly can have fluctuations.

But decade to decade, it doesn't fluctuate.

This is the coolest decade forevermore.

As bad as you think it is, it's the coolest decade forevermore, unless we do SRM and other things.

But, um, so this is really serious.

And to be honest, I mean, society has not been paying attention to this very much.

And, uh, it's getting woken up.

And, but even, even with what's happening, I think people see it as a one-off, uh, kind of crazy thing and, uh, and, and don't realize that this is really, um, just the beginning.

Yeah, it's wishful thinking.