00:00:00
This science corner is about the dreaded El Nino season that is coming up. This is a forecast for sea surface
00:00:07
temperature anomalies. Ocean temperatures are going to exceed anything we have seen in recent history.
00:00:13
That top image is the sea surface temperature anomaly. That means how different the ocean temperatures are.
00:00:18
And this is compared to 1877 when we had the biggest El Nino year ever. Why does
00:00:23
this all matter? The reason is the oceans are the battery of weather. And at this point there is so much excess
00:00:30
energy stored up in the oceans. It's about 11 million terowatt hours. That's
00:00:34
500 years worth of human energy in this ocean. And over the next few months that
00:00:38
energy is going to be released into the atmosphere. 99% confidence that will make the upcoming year the hottest year
00:00:43
on record by far that humans have ever experienced. Southern Argentina, Chile, Brazil could see record shattering heat
00:00:49
waves. And this is where things start to get a little nasty because when that happens, the crops start to fail.
00:00:54
Hundreds of millions of people depend on the exports out of Brazil. Brazil's the
00:00:57
world's largest a exporter and the scariest one of all is if the monsoons fail which is now a very high
00:01:02
probability event in India 150 million farmers in India and one and a half billion people that depend on that food.
00:01:08
If you think about the second and third effects of this over the next year you could see energy prices spiking and
00:01:14
electricity spiking and the grid failing in parts of the southwest, commodity prices spiking all over the world. And
00:01:19
then you would see places like India, the Philippines, Vietnam starting to face some sort of unrest if there isn't
00:01:25
enough food supply that's coming into those markets. And then the question in
00:01:28
India is a really nasty one because there isn't a really good solution.