I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?

El Niño sends the jet stream southward. Once the jet stream gets far enough south it tears apart any developing storms in the Gulf and Caribbean Sea before they have a chance to become a problem.

Also having large waves of Saharan dust which is too dry and inhibits hurricane development.

Where does this dust end up? Into the oceans? Because iron-rich dust entering the oceans helps create nutrition for algae which can absorb CO2

Believe it or not at least 40 million tons of it ends up in the Amazon basin each year where it does have an effect on the plants there: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/1/1/014...

It goes elsewhere too, as expected.

N/Nw Europe also has sand rains. Not seen it this year yet though.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/hurricane/will-2026-go-down-w... says:

> Given the strong and still-strengthening El Niño, which tends to reduce the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin while boosting numbers in the Pacific, there is some chance that this season could end on Nov. 30 with no hurricanes.

But I am not liking this site. Both articles are mostly just restating "this is really rare" in 5+ different ways without explaining why. If anyone has a better site, a link would be most appreciated.

Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built this dashboard: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso

Overall the expectations are an increase in intensity and inability to predict. There is no expectation around consistency. That is why climate change is going to be such a disaster, it's not acutely predictable and it's death by a thousand cuts for us. The floods in Nepal etc are a good example. Very hard to predict, extremely distructive.

The Nepal incident is also messy because it's a extremely specific local/regional phenomenon, which was always a threat (and has happened before in other, less-populated areas around the Himalayas), but without consistent warming leading to glacier loss, it would be a random rare tragedy. Now that we know what happened and what causes it, we can pretty well expect that it will happen again... but there are so many similar hanging glacers high above steep V-shaped river valleys that we can't easily monitor or predict, not to mention alert locals and evacuate people in time. How many other similar local phenomena will appear? Impossible to say.

> I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?

That is a question. I suppose the answer is yes, you thought that.

You likely thought that because - Holy cow. Year after year after year of explosively strengthening Cat5 storms is fairly well unprecedented.

source: FL coastal resident and repeated hurricane relief worker.

Equally unprecedented is the supercharged El Nino that's been interfering with the Atlantic Basin's ability to form storms, in proportion to it's record development.

My understanding was fewer storms, but the ones that do happen, are stronger.

El Nino decreases Atlantic hurricane activity.

Weather patterns in the Americas and Asia change in the summer through winter months. Rainfall changes throughout the Americas, and Asia sees worsening floods and storms.

Just because the Atlantic sees fewer hurricanes doesn't mean it's out of the woods - the number of winter storms increases.

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Just so I understand you correctly:

1) It's "fucking bad" that we are at a 60-year low for hurricanes this season.

2) It's "fucking bad" that "global warming" will cause more hurricanes in the future.

So how does it actually work? Climate "scientists" have been telling us that Earth has severely warmed already, and they've been telling us that the warming will cause more hurricanes. So when is that going to begin exactly?

The problem with practically every climate denier out there is you only see things from a very narrow local perspective. Skipping horrible weather in one area doesn’t mean the rest of the world is ok.

Climate scientists, in fact, predicted that there would be fewer hurricanes than normal this year because of El Niño. (https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/how-does-el-nino-impact-atlantic-h...)

I think it would be fucking foolish to look at a system as complicated as the climate on planet earth and think “hm, I think warming by a couple degrees has barely any impact on the weather.” In fact, El Niño is an amazing example that localized warmth in one specific area can completely halt the hurricane season.

But while that’s great, for now, it’d be extremely short sighted to think that a system which can do that is always going to act in your favor.

In fact, a complete lack of weather systems at all is a bad thing if it means your region doesn’t get rain anymore. Which is currently happening in Indonesia, because of El Niño, and is devastating (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/el-nino-fuels-wil...).