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A graph that should be front-page news

686 points by rakel_rakel

by _alternator_

4 subcomments

With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it.
Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature.
But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was that an eventful year too? I can't tell and the graph is at such low resolution that the source URL isn't visible. If the graph and data is so important, shouldn't we care more about presentation? This is either super sloppy or deliberate obfuscation.
Look, I'm all for good reporting on climate. This just doesn't feel like it.

by inigyou

3 subcomments

This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...
Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533

by voidUpdate

6 subcomments

If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?

by tancop

16 subcomments

the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment.
we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. politicians right now are either doing "think of the corporations we need to leave it up to the market" or insane degrowth proposals or straight climate denial.
the only reason people hate some environmental policies is because they are the wrong ones. we need a wave of green populism thats been missing for decades to scrap unpopular things like ulez, combustion engine bans or individual carbon tax and focus on positive changes people want.
that could be: give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
the point is changes that are good for the climate and good for (ordinary, working and middle class) people are better than changes that hurt or just appear to hurt people, even if they are a bit less effective.

by iDon

4 subcomments

Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/

by codeulike

1 subcomments

For those wondering, I found a post with a graph showing actual temperature rather than std dev from mean
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompickerell_this-graph-shoul...

by pyaamb

3 subcomments

the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.

by harimau777

3 subcomments

If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.

by yellow_lead

3 subcomments

Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...

by andyjohnson0

2 subcomments

People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.

by turtleyacht

0 subcomment

Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...

by mbgerring

1 subcomments

Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org

by l1chorpe

5 subcomments

Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.

by RetroTechie

2 subcomments

Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.

by jones89176

2 subcomments

Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.

by stymaar

1 subcomments

This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.

by marsxr360

0 subcomment

Sanction Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F--SWFQ6M9c
[instrumental intro]
[bridge]
[VERSE 1: judges] Sanction the judges War crimes didn’t happen That’s all you need to know In this controversial matter.
Sanction the judges War crimes disappear Livestreamed in 4K Still don't see clear
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 2: reality] Sanction reality It’s easier that way Moral clarity Concerns go away
Sanction reality Money will follow Don’t follow the money Morality hollow
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 3: Albanese]
Sanction Albanese Her weapon is a pen Research and legalese Her reports contain
Sanction Albanese Political tool Rubio by Chinese He is sanctioned too
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[VERSE 4: Climate]
Sanction the climate But climate doesn’t care No speech, no objections It just comes in waves
Sanction the climate NASA is wrong Moon sixty nine Now facts are gone
[bridge] [instrumental]
[REFRAIN] That was a verse Now this is refrain Follow the narrative From truth refrain.
[bridge] [instrumental]
[Final verse]
The system was broke Sanctions were a joke Reality arrives Humanity thrives Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
Your heart knows the truth It's beyond the proof
[bridge] [instrumental]
[instrumental drum and bass]
[outro]

by femto

0 subcomment

Where I live, it was front page news four weeks ago.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...
Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.

by thelastgallon

0 subcomment

> What is developing is so far beyond any global climate event that has impacted modern industrial civilization that predicting much of what’s coming is educated guesswork. Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
From: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

by pdonis

3 subcomments

"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed."
Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.

by jgalt212

1 subcomments

I see a negative outlier equal in magnitude to the positive outlier the author is drawing our attention to. What should we make of that data point?

by deadeye

4 subcomments

The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.

by d_theorist

0 subcomment

The last 40 years is not "the range within which modern human civilisation developed". It's a very thin slice of time even on human scales. Let's try not to vastly overstate the data.

by SideburnsOfDoom

0 subcomment

This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It's quite possible that this one could worse.

by aliasxneo

1 subcomments

Do we have reliable data that goes back a lot farther? I'm wondering what the graph would look like as extrapolated between ices ages / other large climate changes across Earth's history.

by skybrian

0 subcomment

It will be front-page news if there are storms later this year. For now, ocean temperature readings far away are effectively a distant early warning of future weather. (Depending on your perspective about “distant” and “early.”)

by ecshafer

1 subcomments

The same graph also shows a corresponding -3.5 STDEV below the mean temperature as well. It actually seems rather balanced. This year is hot, but we see similar abnormal jumps in other directions.

by exiguus

0 subcomment

Maybe it becomes headline when the Gulf Stream collapses; but until then: Climate Change does not exist. And actually I read about it a while ago.

by vivzkestrel

1 subcomments

- When I read an article that goes like "it is not A, it is B" i know for a fact that someone used an trash LLM to generate it

by camillomiller

1 subcomments

I believe this post was written with some heavy help of an LLM. I hope the irony is not lost on the author, nor the readers here.

by Arodex

5 subcomments

The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.

0 subcomment

by etc-hosts

0 subcomment

Observations like this is why the Trump administration is dismantling instruments that can observe the effects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...

by recitedropper

1 subcomments

Don't worry, just a few more months until we get AGI and all of our problems magically disappear as the singularity changes everything forever.
Why care for current iterations of nature, when we will all get to experience infinite varities of it as immortal digital consciousnesses?

by the_real_cher

0 subcomment

Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.
So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.

by chrsw

0 subcomment

Climate change is a political problem, not an informational problem.

by retube

1 subcomments

You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance

by 19f191ty

0 subcomment

The right comparison is previous El Nino?

by nekusar

0 subcomment

We know how to fix climate devastation.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)

by insane_dreamer

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Haven't you heard -- it's all about building bigger and better AI now. Nobody GAF about warming temps anymore.
And the band played on.

by IAmGraydon

0 subcomment

Here's a related chart with a bit more context. Check out the different ocean regions as well as the air temp anomoly charts:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

by colechristensen

0 subcomment

The now retired meteorologist at Iowa State, Elwin Taylor had been predicting for decades a dust-bowl level event to happen in 2025 as a result of an 89-ish year cycle. It didn't happen last year but this is a pretty clear signal for this year.
It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.
https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/dust-bowl-coming-in...

by mvdtnz

0 subcomment

Yeah NZ national news has been going on about this for a couple of weeks. They're trying to scare everyone by saying what an extreme El Nino we're in for this summer with such devastating consequences as (let's see here) warm dry summer days.
It's going to be a good summer, I can't wait.

by deadbabe

0 subcomment

> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
Stopped asking this question a long time ago.
It’s over.

by zombot

0 subcomment

> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.

by holowoodman

1 subcomments

This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.

by clcaev

2 subcomments

LLM or not, I absolutely hate the "not X but Y" writing pattern

by justatdotin

0 subcomment

Tjanara Goreng Goreng did nothing rong.
#LiarDreaming

by IshKebab

1 subcomments

It's going to have to be like 20C hotter before some people will accept that it isn't "just summer".

0 subcomment

by nojvek

0 subcomment

The message of article was great, but I wish it was written by a human.
Yeah we are on track to get to a point where Earth heating up is irreversible before Artificial super intelligence can come to aid to solve it. In fact, our datacenter buildout using gas and coal as primary energy makes this worse.
I think about Fermi Paradox a lot. The tragedy of commons when it comes to capitalism may very well one of the reasons why Dinosaurs may have a longer species lifespan than Homosapiens.
The change happens too slowly, but reversal takes global coordination which humans as a species aren't great at. Especially when anyone not coordinating may be economically advantaged.

by tsss

0 subcomment

Now write a blog post about that line at the bottom with comparable magnitude in the other direction.

by znpy

0 subcomment

there is another like that reaches similar deviation, but negative (~ -3.5 degree celsius).
it doesn't say what year is that though.

by thelastgallon

0 subcomment

tldr: Deploy a TON of solar. Use the excess production to charge batteries (EVs, BESS), chemical storage (Ammonia), green hydrogen for industrial uses, heat pump for HVAC, CO2 as refrigerant.
Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!
Phase 1
1) Buy only EVs[1]
2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).
3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)
4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.
5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.
6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)
With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.
Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.
Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.
Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.
All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.
[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.

by sdevonoes

3 subcomments

In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)

by globalnode

1 subcomments

not really understanding why the SD graph for the year drops below zero at some points.

by latentframe

0 subcomment

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by bitternophile

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by jaco6

0 subcomment

[dead]

by CurbStomper

0 subcomment

[dead]

by anirudhak47

0 subcomment

i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers

by DivingForGold

4 subcomments

Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....

by nixonaddiction

2 subcomments

“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.

by KingOfCoders

9 subcomments

There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.

by RecycledEle

4 subcomments

I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.