Hausfather had just said an El Niño year is a sneak peek of what the new normal will be about a decade on. Here he puts numbers on it: the temporary bump from a strong El Niño is roughly what human emissions add permanently every eight years.
…right? You know, until we get emissions all the way down to zero, which isn't going to happen anytime soon, the world will continue to warm. And so, you know, an El Niño year like what we're experiencing right now is in some ways a sneak peek of what the new normal will be a decade from now, right?
Right. Oh, that's a way to look at it. When you have a strong El Niño, it's a glimpse at what it would be 10 years out, the average. Yeah,
strong El Niños add about 0.2 degrees to annual temperatures the year after they peak. You know, this year might be 0.3 because this El Nino is crazy. But we add about 0.2 degrees from human emissions every eight years. And so we're essentially adding a permanent super El Nino worth of heat to the climate system every eight years just by burning coal, oil, and gas. Trevor Burrus, Jr.:
I want to get into the El Nino, but one more question on the scenarios. So on another podcast recently, you said the SSP3 scenario felt a little close to home for you these days. Why does that specific scenario hit home and what does it do to the emissions picture? Aaron Ross Powell,
the SSPs are an attempt to look at different potential socioeconomic futures. So there's five different SSPs: SSP1, which is a sort of a world that very much embraces sustainability and more modest resource use. There's SSP2, which is sort of current trends broadly continuing as they are today.…
Zero chance of that.