David Wallace-Wells
speaker
263 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 29 Jul
David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Climate scientists are trying to figure out how it is the case that something that happens in one part of the world affects other parts of the world.
And it's just a reminder, as I think climate kind of always reminds us, that this system is quite mysterious.
and complex.
There is an enormous amount about this system that is still deeply mysterious to us and which I think in many people should inspire some amount of kind of awe and mystery.
Well, there are a few different components to it.
The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than anyone that's ever been experienced before.
And that can sound a little like a quotidian observation.
It is the case, given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, that just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before.
And so any unusual event is going to happen in an unprecedented set of climate conditions.
But I do think it's worth emphasizing that fact, maybe because we've normalized it so much that, you know, we don't raise our eyes or raise our eyebrows when we see that we're setting new records for global average temperature.
And that means that novel events like an El Nino are happening on top of that baseline.
But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is normal.
a super El Nino, some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Nino, which is to say the temperature levels that we're gonna see, the boost that we're gonna see because of this event may be bigger than any similar event ever observed before in modern history.
And that's particularly alarming because some of the events in that period in the late 19th century had absolutely catastrophic global impacts.
The El Niños in particular of the late 1870s were among the most produced, perhaps the most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced.
We're talking about famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world from Africa to South Asia to China.
And I don't want to suggest that this El Nino is capable of producing that kind of suffering.
Just, you know, obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878.
But it gives you a good framework with which to understand how these kinds of, you know, how the consequences of an El Nino may filter through our political world.
If...
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