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• @DredPyr8Roberts@lemmy.world 2026-10-20 01:08

  This past weekend, Tropical Storm Rachel slammed into Southern California. High tides flooded streets in Newport Beach and surf tore apart the Long Beach boardwalk, leaving homes on the verge of collapse. Storms like this rarely make landfall in California. But Rachel is just the latest impact from an El Niño that’s already the strongest ever recorded. It may just be the strongest in a thousand years. During El Niño years, warm water pools in the eastern Pacific, particularly off Peru, and weather around the world goes haywire. The last big El Niño to drench California came in 1997, flooding the state that winter — and this year’s is looking even stronger. In Southern California, it’s easy to feel the effects. In the past few weeks, temperatures have topped 100 degrees — in October. That’s around 22 degrees above normal. To try to cool down, I’ve often taken my kids to the ocean, which, at 10 degrees warmer than normal, has felt more like the Caribbean. Climate change already has the Pacific running a fever, and with El Niño on top, it’s smashing records. To document what I’ve been seeing in Santa Barbara, I’ve started keeping an El Niño diary in my newsletter. The headlines give us rainfall forecasts and evacuation counts. They rarely capture what it feels like to watch the world outside your window change.  The heat has been hard to escape. Like much of Southern California, Santa Barbara used to have a mild climate. A lot of buildings, including schools and the university where I work, have little to no air conditioning. Kids have been sitting in classrooms with temperatures topping 100 degrees and getting sent home early. California had a fund to fix this: More than 4,000 schools assessed their heating and cooling systems, but fewer than 200 got the money to replace them. Then, in the midst of one of many heat waves we had over the past few months, when half a million school kids had their days disrupted by extreme heat, Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down the program. Newsom also gutted the Demand Side Grid Support Program, which helps keep power bills low when extreme heat strains the grid. When electricity prices spike, it kicks in: More than 200,000 households send power from their home batteries back to the grid, together supplying as much energy as a gas plant. As I wrote in May, it’s the largest virtual power plant in the world. Yet Newsom refused to adequately fund it this year, with his team arguing it rarely gets used. That argument hasn’t aged well: during this month’s heat wave, it was triggered three times in four days. California is bracing for an especially wet winter, too. One forecast model has San Diego getting 263% of its normal rainfall from December through March, and Santa Barbara 226%. The Bay Area isn’t spared either: San Francisco and San Jose are projected to see nearly double their usual rainfall totals. We’ve seen this before. Almost 30 years ago in 1997, one of the world’s worst El Niño events unleashed a chain of devastating storms. In February 1998, Santa Barbara got nearly 2 feet of rain in a single month. It remains the wettest month the city has ever recorded. Landslides closed Highways 101 and 154, and mudslides destroyed homes up and down the South Coast. San Francisco got nearly 15 inches of rain that month, breaking a record that had stood since 1878. Statewide, 35 counties were declared federal disaster areas and 17 people died. Meanwhile, our beaches are literally losing ground. Hurricane swells have been eroding Southern California’s coast this fall, with water levels more than a foot above predictions. During the big El Niño in 2015, West Coast beach erosion ran 76% above normal, the worst on record. Climate change only makes this worse: Rising seas mean every storm starts from higher water. Scientists project that up to two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could be gone by 2100. This isn’t just a California phenomenon. Last week, Santiago, Chile, was inundated by rainfall that was nine times the average for October. In Peru, over a million people are at risk from flooding and mudslides. In other parts of the world, El Niño has the opposite effect — drying out southern Asia. India’s monsoon season just ended 13% below normal, one of its weakest in decades, threatening crops and raising food prices. This fall, wildfire smoke from Indonesia made it all the way to Australia. It’s an ominous echo of the past: Back in 1997, Indonesia’s drought-stricken peatlands burned so fiercely that haze closed airports across Southeast Asia for months. The fires released up to 40% of a year’s global fossil fuel emissions at that time. In California, Gov. Newsom knows we’re heading into a rough winter. Last month, he declared a state of emergency for this El Niño, warning that “climate change is intensifying these weather and hydrologic extremes in California.” He’s right. But a leader who understands this threat shouldn’t be dismantling the programs that protect us from it. With a new governor taking office in January, we have a chance for renewed leadership. Whoever wins should restore the school air conditioning fund and fully fund our virtual power plant. This El Niño will pass. The warming that supercharges it will not.

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• @moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 2026-10-20 15:18

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