A ‘Super El Niño’ May Be Coming. What it means:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a new report that there is a 90 percent chance of a “very strong” event during fall and winter 2026 and 2027 in the Northern Hemisphere. Over the past month, Pacific Ocean temperatures have been more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
The developing El Niño is strengthening quickly and is expected to reach “Super El Niño” status by October at the latest, the report said, and by the end of the year, there is a 69 percent chance that it could become the strongest El Niño ever recorded.
The phenomenon—which typically occurs every two to seven years—is often characterized by chaos because it shifts global weather and introduces new extremes. Yet some scientists paradoxically view it as a chance to prepare for what’s to come.
“When we have an El Niño it influences the global atmosphere in such a way that we have a greater chance of knowing where things are going to happen,” says Emily Becker, a research professor at the University of Miami who is part of NOAA’s El Niño—Southern Oscillation forecast team. “So, it’s that added capability of seeing potential outcomes that really gives us a nice advantage.
The naturally recurring weather pattern has been transforming the Earth’s climate for what scientists believe to be hundreds of millions of years. It typically lasts between nine and 12 months.
The seed of this transformative phenomenon lies in the tropical Pacific Ocean, where winds usually blow from the east to the west, pushing warmer water and stormy weather away from Ecuador and Peru, toward Indonesia. When those winds weaken, the warmer water moves east, and with it, the stormy weather. Surface temperatures across that patch of ocean increase, changing the Earth’s atmospheric circulation.
A super El Niño is not a scientific term but rather a label that forecasters use for a very strong El Niño, when Pacific Ocean temperatures increase at least 2 degrees Celsius above average. They are rare; the last one occurred around 10 years ago. It was on par with other record strong events in the late 90s and early 80s.
These can have devastating effects. The most recent super El Niño from 2015 to 2016 was connected to a record-breaking hurricane season in the central North Pacific, water shortage in Puerto Rico, drought in Ethiopia, and the hottest global surface temperature on record at that time, according to NOAA.
Life After Death? Scientists are examining empirical data on near-death experiences:
Everybody dies. And then?
For most of us, what happens next is a mystery. But millions of people like Winschief have returned from the precipice of death with remarkable tales of briefly entering an altered state of consciousness, one in which they existed outside their bodies and watched life around them unfold.
Researchers estimate that as many as one in 20 people have had a near-death experience. A study earlier this year suggested the number could be even higher. Nearly a quarter of American adults – more than 60 million people – reported having a near-death experience in a survey by the International Association For Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina.
Near-death experiences are frequently triggered by a life-threatening event, such as cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury or a car accident. Every near-death experience is different. But many who’ve had them reported seeing an unearthly light or sensing they were floating through a tunnel. Some said they encountered dead relatives and friends or spiritual figures, like Jesus or Buddha. Often, they sensed their entire life flashing before them.
The phenomenon happens so often that some researchers say there is a growing body of evidence that consciousness continues at some level, for at least some period, after the body has died.
More than 5,000 accounts of near-death experiences shared by people all over the world are published in a long-running registry maintained by the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1998 by husband-and-wife researchers Dr. Jeffrey Long and Jody Long to document and study such cases.
To be included in the registry, people volunteer a detailed summary of their experience and fill out a 64-question survey. The questionnaire asks, among other things, whether their experience was associated with a life-threatening event, whether they were separated from their body, whether time seemed to speed up or slow down and whether they seemed to enter some other unearthly dimension.
Their answers are analyzed and rated on a scale developed by Greyson in 1983 that has become the standard scientific tool to evaluate reports of near-death experiences. Scores of seven or higher out of a possible 32 points are considered credible.
Color me skeptical. Why? Because a word for it: ‘Dreaming’.
How ‘Going Whole Hog’ Failed In North Carolina:
Thousands of dead and bloated pigs floated down country roads, buoyed by floodwaters. Tens of millions of gallons of feces and urine spilled over the brims of lagoons and contaminated everything in their path, including rivers, streams and private drinking water wells.
It was September 1996, when Hurricane Fran pummeled eastern North Carolina and unleashed an environmental catastrophe, the first of several that would occur over the next two decades.
The resulting disasters stemmed from a primitive lagoon and sprayfield system, in which millions of gallons of hog waste are stored in open, unlined cesspools the size of a football field, then sprayed as fertilizer on nearby farm fields.
The hog industry has used this system for years on the state’s massive network of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. It made economic sense to Smithfield Foods, the behemoth hog producer. But the cheap and outdated method of managing waste has inflicted decades of misery on thousands of residents, mostly Black or low-income, who live near the CAFOs.
Then-Attorney General Mike Easley, the state’s future governor, stepped into the fray. In 2000, he negotiated the Smithfield Agreement, a binding pact with the hog producer intended to permanently replace the lagoon and sprayfield system.
Now, the Smithfield Agreement is winding down. As part of the deal, the company had to pay up to $2 million per year for 25 years towards environmental enhancement grants to nonprofits and local governments. It also paid $15 million for research toward the development of “environmentally superior technologies” (ESTs) to replace the lagoon and sprayfield system on corporate-owned farms. The company also pledged to assist its contract growers with their own conversion to ESTs if the technologies were economically feasible.
Smithfield decided they weren’t.
The result: The air near CAFOs still stinks. Every day a miasma of manure rises from the sprayfields. Thousands of lagoons teem with fetid waste. Communities near the CAFOs are at a higher risk of asthma, cardiovascular illness, infant mortality and overall death, multiple scientific studies have shown.
As part of the agreement, five representatives from the hog industry, including Smithfield, sat on an 11-member economic subcommittee to analyze the financial feasibility of environmentally superior technologies. The majority, which included renowned economists, agreed that yes, Smithfield could afford it.
In its dissenting report, issued in 2005, the industry representatives vehemently disagreed. “… Would any net increase in costs of a new technology be economically feasible? The short answer is no.”
Smithfield never backed any environmentally superior technologies—even though one was developed. And it never helped contract growers adopt the technology, either.
Michelle Nowlin, then an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, served on the agreement’s technical advisory committee. Now co-director of the Duke University Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, she sees the folly in hindsight.
“We knew we’d been played.”
This sounds like every Delaware Task Force ever–a bleepload of industry types, no representation from the impacted communities. But, hey, this is the Sunday Magazine. Might as well close on a lighter note:
