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
you know, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there's a kind of fertilizer shortage as a result of the war in Iran.
You know, we probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don't die, but there will be considerable political disarray that results, you know, bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world.
And I'm not saying that's inevitable because of this El Niño.
A lot of it is unknown, but I think it reminds us that a huge amount of even what we take for granted as stable features of modern life in the 21st century are nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance and, you know, perturbation by the climate system.
And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.
The basic structure is that it arrives at the end of the calendar year, reaches a peak early in the winter of next year, and then dissipates over the following nine months or 12 months.
So we're talking about something that we're gonna start to notice at a global level, say November, December of this year, and see in a peak in the winter, spring of next year.
But there are already effects, which is why we're able to see it coming.
Well, different people are going to be hit by different effects.
So, you know, I mentioned earlier the risk of a really serious hurricane is actually considerably lower in an El Nino year than in a normal year.
And that means, you know, for plenty of people living on the coast in the Gulf Coast or Florida, they may be relieved.
That's right.
That's all I know about El Ninos.
In California, they're likely to have really significant rainfall events, raising the possibility of these atmospheric river events that we've seen more and more of over the last decade.
And on some level, that seems reassuring because at the moment, the American West as a whole is quite starved for water.
And as a result, we're really worried this year about a quite bad fire season in the United States and particularly the American West.
And it may well be that we do have a really bad fire season in which much of the forest of the West goes up in smoke.
And then immediately afterward, there's a period in which we have really intense rainfall, and that can produce landslides and mudslides at local level, but also at a kind of regional level.
In 2018, we had a similar dynamic.
It wasn't powered by El Nino, but the horrible wildfires in California gave way to a really intense period of rain.
Showing 41–60 of 263 · page 3 of 14
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