Super El Niño

SUPER EL NIÑO, IS THE TERMINATOR TO BLAME? Headlines are buzzing with news that a super El Niño is forming in the Pacific Ocean. A solar physicist saw it coming 3 years ago.


A super El Niño like this one in 1997 is now forming in the Pacific Ocean.

In a 2023 paper, Robert Leamon of NASA and the University of Maryland (Baltimore County) made a striking prediction: The next El Niño would arrive in 2026. He based it on the Terminator, a magnetic event on the sun that ends one solar cycle and ignites the next.

Averaging the past five solar cycles into a "standard cycle" and projecting it forward, Leamon found that El Niños follow about five years after a Terminator. The most recent termination event happened in December 2021, putting the next El Niño squarely in 2026. His model says nothing about the strength of this El Niño, but the timing is spot-on.

Leamon and his colleague Scott McIntosh had previously shown that every Terminator since the 1960s coincided with a flip from El Niño to La Niña.  Their work correctly predicted the onset of a triple-dip La Niña in 2020 and revealed an unexpected connection between the sun and the ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation).


Adapted from Fig. 5 of Leamon (2023), this chart highlights two apparently successful predictions based on the Terminator

No one knows how the sun exerts control over the ENSO. Most researchers favor "top-down" models: Solar activity alters the top of Earth's atmosphere, making changes that percolate down to affect the weather we experience near Earth's surface. But the actual mechanism is unknown.

At first (2021), Leamon and McIntosh thought cosmic rays were responsible. Galactic cosmic rays vary with the solar cycle, and they influence the ionization of Earth's atmosphere. But later (2023) Leamon himself weighed in against cosmic rays, noting that the timing didn't work. He currently favors a correlation with geomagnetic activity.

The search for a sun-El Niño connection is as old as El Niño itself. Sir Gilbert Walker, who discovered the "Southern Oscillation" (the SO in ENSO) in the early 1900s, tried and failed to find a link to sunspots.  Throughout the 20th century, other researchers likewise struggled to make the connection.  The Terminator, however, is a new concept articulated by McIntosh and Leamon in a series of papers starting 10 years ago. It seems to do a good job of predicting solar cycles and may be successful with ENSO as well.

It will take more than 1 or 2 successful predictions to build confidence in this model, but it's a good start. Let the El Niño begin.

 

one giant insane asylum

 

Remember when the entire planet became one giant insane asylum, practically overnight? Some of these people will never recover.

- Stop The Shots

Read on Substack

change the way we think about religion?

 


Societies grow and change all the time, but it can be tough to think about big-picture shifts when you’re living through the practical details of the day to day. Take the recent popularity of large language models (LLMs). In the short term, we face important sociological questions about how they fit into the norms of everyday life. Is it cheating to use an LLM to help you write, or to generate new ideas? How will new kinds of automation change work, or will they take jobs away?

These are important questions, but it is also useful to take a step back and think about what rapid developments in technology might do to our foundational social relationships and core beliefs. I was fascinated by a recent set of studies published in PNAS that suggest automated work and LLMs could even change the way we think about religion.

“draw an illustration of a church slowly dissolving into a series of zeros and ones, like computer code in The Matrix”

In the article “Exposure to Automation Explains Religious Declines,” authors Joshua Conrad Jackson, Kai Chi Yam, Pok Man Tang, Chris G. Sibley, and Adam Waytz review the findings from five studies. In one, their analysis of longitudinal data across 68 countries from 2006 to 2019 finds nations with higher stocks of industrial robots also tend to have lower proportions of people who say religion is an important part of their daily lives in surveys.

Figure 1 from Jackson et al. (2023) demonstrating nations with a higher stock of industrial robots also express lower rates of religiosity, on average. You can read the full notes at the open-access article here.

I was most surprised by the results of their fifth study—an experiment teaching people about recent advances in science and AI. Respondents who read about the capabilities of LLMs like ChatGPT showed “greater reductions in religious conviction than learning about scientific advances” (8).

The authors suggest one reason for this pattern is that “people may perceive AI as having capacities that they do not ascribe to traditional sciences and technologies and that are uniquely likely to displace the instrumental roles of religion” (2). This is important for us, whether or not you’re personally religious, because religion is a socially powerful force – people use shared beliefs to accomplish things in the world and solve problems, even to cope with hardships like losing a job.

But these results show that new changes in technology, like the advent of LLMs, might be expanding people’s imaginations about what we can do and achieve, possibly even changing the core beliefs that are central to their lives over the long term.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, or on BlueSky.

bioweapon indeed

 

BREAKING: Indigenous Tribunal's Bioweapon Declaration by Brett Hawes

The Alliance of Indigenous Nations rules that mRNA meets the criteria to be classified as a biological weapon — a conversation with Dr Joseph Sansone

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spooky rod

 

good doctors?

 

The Myth of “Fossil Fuels”

 

...and the Myth US Transitioning Away from Oil to “Green” Energy

Rowan Heals

 he's on substack








no woo woo

 

I've never heard anyone explain how to manifest anything in your life like this before… Listen

- Before It Breaks

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Gates on reducing the population

I FINALLY FOUND THE VIDEO OF BILL GATES ADMITTING IT.

- Stop The Shots

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The Cure

 

The cure for cancer was discovered in 1976

- Organ Vitality Detox

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just a reminder

  good reminders!  


oh yeah...

oh yeah...

Trace's book