The $10 Trillion Ocean

0:00Hello listeners, welcome to the podcast. Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro podcast. Joining me on the show today is Justin Mankin. He is a professor in the Department of Geography at Dartmouth University. This was an incredible conversation. I think I've been saying this on social media and even to some of my clients. I've been really struggling with how to think about El Nino. There was so much data out there. There's so much negative data out there. Part of you want to just say these are objective facts. Temperatures are rising. This sounds terrible. But as soon as you scratch the surface, you see that there are lots of different ways of thinking about this, what data you look at. I thought Justin did does incredible work and did an incredible job in this conversation, making something that is very complicated, less complicated, easier to understand, less abstract, and also even managed to end it on a positive note, which even as somebody who is a serial optimist, I find it hard to be optimistic about the climate. Justin found a way to find a silver lining, at least to my view.

1:02I want to thank Justin for his time. He was very generous and stayed over for a couple of minutes listeners. If you want to talk about anything you heard on the podcast, it's Jacob at Jacobshipera.com. Take care of the people that you love. Cheers. We will see you out there. All right, Justin. Thanks so much for joining the podcast. It's a real pleasure to host you. Oftentimes when I'm in the driver's seat for this podcast, it's on topics that I know a lot about or at least dangerous about. I confess I've read a lot of your work and I've been trying to get smart in this, but I'm out of my depth. So I'm going to be the surrogate listener for you here and probably often ask you to stop and explain things to me like I'm a laboratory retriever. And hopefully you won't find it too tedious, but thanks for making the time. Oh, yeah. No, happy to be here. And I think the privilege of being a professor at a private institution is that you kind of have to be intellectually out of your depth at all times. So I'll be right there with you. Well, good, good. We'll drown in the deep end of the pool together or swim as it works. You've done a lot of interesting work about and we'll have links to at least some of your papers

2:06and the show notes about the economic impacts that El Nino can have on the global economy and how we've underestimated these things. And I want to dive into all of that, but I want to take the surrogate listener role seriously here at the beginning and ask you very simply, first of all, what is El Nino? And if you want to also talk about what is the Indian dipole, like maybe that's a good one to throw in there too, because I find that there is a lot of talk about El Nino right now. There is a lot of doom porn out there. It's producing a lot of clicks. And some of it seems right and some of it seems not, but I think before we can get into some of those aspects, we at least just have to talk about brass text. What is this thing and why is it important? So I'll let you start cooking there. Yeah. So these are both both the Indian Ocean dipole or IOD. As it's called by climate scientists and the El Nino Southern oscillation or NSO. As we climate scientists like to call it, these are both what we call modes of variability, right? The planet is a fluid, right?

3:09It's got the ocean, it's got the atmosphere, where a sphere that rotates a energy input predominantly into the tropics from the sun. And so that means that the kind of redistribution of the sun's energy throughout our planet manifests as weather. It's what we experience as storms, as hurricanes, as droughts, right, that is just our planet attempting to equilibrate the energy balance of Earth Lake going back out to space, balanced by sunlight coming into the Earth. And you can kind of think about the emergence of these modes of variability, which are just kind of variations that seem to be systematic in that redistribution of energy that I just mentioned, that kind of have characteristic time scales, like a bell kind of being run in time, right? And so they tend to kind of operate as oscillations or things that look like wave phenomena, just like a wave, you know,

4:09just like the sound wave your listeners are listening to right now of my voice or waves in the ocean. And they have peaks and troughs and characteristic length scales and characteristic time scales over which they operate. And they kind of prevail in different parts of the world, right? So Nino as a phenomenon is, you know, essentially just a breakdown of the prevailing winds in the tropical Pacific. And then what that breakdown of those winds does to energy redistribution on our planet. So I think a kind of a simple way of thinking about it is that, you know, the winds around the equator in the tropical Pacific tend to blow what we're, they're what we call Easterlies, meaning they have origins in the east and they blow in the westward direction. And in doing so, they're just dragging a bunch of surface water. It that's been warmed by the sun in the tropical Pacific all the way over towards Indonesia and Australia, right? Towards kind of the maritime continent, comprising what we call the West Pacific Warm Pool.

5:11So essentially you have this really deep, really tall pile of hot water that's been warmed by the sun and dragged by the easterly winds over there. And then every once in a while for a host of reasons that are active areas of investigation and active ways that we get better predictability on the phenomenon, like El Nino, like what causes the breakdowns of these winds and literally allows this water, which is physically piled higher in the west Pacific than in the east, specifically. There is an actual elevation gradient traveling from east to west across the Pacific, which is pretty wild because, you know, warm water is expanded and takes up more space than cooler water. And so that water just sloshes back down hill when those winds weaken. And that creates a bunch of interesting physics around feedbacks and things happening in the ocean. That tends to reinforce that pattern,

6:11but the kind of way to think about why it's so important for weather around the world is essentially that it's taking water, really, really warm water, which has a high energy content, much higher energy content, you know, than the air. And it's spreading it across the vast expanse, the real estate that is the tropical Pacific, which allows the atmosphere to just draw on much more of that heat than it otherwise would have been able to do if it were like confined in a single region, right? It is, and it reconfigures circulation and patterns of rainfall and patterns of temperature, but it also is just a huge flux of oceanic heat back to the atmosphere, right? So the ocean covers 70% of our planet. It takes way, way, way more energy to heat up, you know, a volume of water, one degree than an equivalent volume of air, right? So it's specific heat is just greater.

7:12So it's just this massive battery of sunlight, essentially. And when an El Nino occurs, you can just imagine all that energy being redistributed back across the ocean surface and allowed to be accessed by the atmosphere. And then because I said at the outset that what we experience is kind of violent weather around the world is just the redistribution of our planetary energy from the sun, right? You can just imagine that that reconfigures weather patterns around the world, which is precisely what it does. And it just has this kind of two to seven-year characteristic cycle. And then it creates these kinds of physical bridges between what's happening in the tropical Pacific, which is a regional phenomena. And then how it actually manifests in Peru or Australia or the Horn of Africa, you know, or in the subcontinent, right? It has what we call teleconnections,

8:14which are the kind of physical bridge between what's happening in the tropical Pacific via the atmosphere and what it means for your local or regional weather. And those, there's a kind of a cannon that can attach that, meaning like we have a pretty good sense of the places that can get wet or during an El Nino event. And a place that can get drier than an El Nino event. And what it might imply for global temperatures are at large, right? So we have this kind of foothold of predictability attached to it, which I think is really important because absent naming El Nino and understanding it to mechanisms and being able to kind of understand what it implies for anything else, it's purely a source of uncertainty. It is, it's like the manifestation of chaos on our fluid rotating planet, right? But because we've named it and we've diagnosed it and we've identified the teleconnections associated with it, it's this key source of predictability.

9:17So we've kind of, you know, scientifically jujitsued this key source of uncertainty into a key source of predictability. And that's kind of a story of modes of variability writ large, right? That to the extent that we can kind of name them and identify their length scales and their temporal scales and their consequences, they become a means of foothold for kind of predictability better understanding of what we should expect, whether to look like on different time scales. The time scale, kind of the life cycle associated with El Nino, I think is maybe just important to mention briefly, you know, you know, we went into an El Nino advisor according to Noah, the National Oceanic and Economic Sphere Administration in June. That's one kind of the official declaration took place depending on, you know, the kind of way we measure El Nino, I think is important for when an El Nino event occurs and the magnitude we associate with that El Nino event

10:19and we can talk about those things, if that's of interest. But essentially El Nino's typically kind of emerge in late spring or early summer and then strengthen into kind of the boreal winter into Northern hemisphere winter. They tend to peak somewhere between October and January historically and then they kind of wane into the subsequent years. So they span calendar years and so the forthcoming El Nino has big implications for what 2020, 2007 will look like climatically and I think that's kind of noteworthy too. And so there, because there's this kind of life cycle and this kind of predictability around it, its genesis and consequences, we just have this kind of, you know, really great lead time to think about what we should be doing and where we should be putting resources in order to mitigate its impacts. That answer was so good that I'm already getting stressed out that we only have one hour to talk because I think I could talk to you for about four hours.

11:19But we'll just have to keep on having you back or we'll do the best that we can to swallow it. And I'll also tell you that I didn't tell you this. I live in New Orleans here on the Gulf of America, I guess we're supposed to call it now. And it's funny because so much of the El Nino doom and gloom is, oh, it's going to create drought and it's going to create flooding and it's going to create all these damages and all these other things. Whereas for somebody who's sitting in New Orleans, El Nino generally, that's great. Like Leninia is when we get the hurricanes. I'm sort of sitting in this opposite end of the spectrum and trying to pull myself apart from it. But goes back to what you're talking about in terms of teleconnections and the geography of weather and everything else. But I want to get into some of the things that you talked about. But I just want to spend one moment on a meta question because I don't think we can avoid it. I don't want to spend too much time on it. But when we're thinking about El Nino to La Nina and then there's a neutral in the middle, that means you somehow have to describe what normal is in this sense. And now we're already off to the bat of a philosophical conversation because what is normal, how much data do you need to find normal? The climate is always in constantly changing.

12:21So the fact that it was warmer 200 years ago, or excuse me, cooler 200 years ago overall, what does that mean? I also was reading one of the things you wrote and you talked about how you can sample from different portions of that big column of warm water that you're talking about. So if you get a little warmer in this patch versus this patch, what does that all mean? So how do we even approach measuring this thing? Because it seems like there is predictability and there's science behind it to your point. But it's also, there is enough variability that you could almost pick out any variable you want and almost paint any, I'm sort of exaggerating for effect, but you can almost pick anything you want. And the last part of that question is also, one of the things that's been happening at least here in the Southeast US is we have watched tornado alley shift eastwards. And I'm just wondering, well does El Nino have a similar sort of thing? Is the El Nino shifting, or is it getting warmer or how does that question, or how does that change measurement of it over time? I threw a lot at you, but that was at least where I wanted to start.

13:22That's fantastic. It's a great place to start, right? You know, what you call normal is the thing that determines the magnitude of abnormality, like what your anomaly is. So so much of how abnormal tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures are now is gonna be a function of your baseline against what you're assessing that anomaly, right? And so this is a huge obsession for climate scientists writ large and it's kind of progenitor discipline called climatology, which is kind of like the statistics of weather. How do you assess the appropriate baseline? We know the planet is monotonically warming, right? Warming is just occurring. And that is an observation. That is not a matter of belief. If you believe in thermometers, as my advisor once said to me,

14:26you believe in global warming. And so that's something to contend with. But the choice of kind of, and I can talk about that in just a second, but the kind of, because it does influence how we measure El Nino, you know, what we're trying to do when we're collapsing like spatial fields of data, right? Observations of sea surface temperature at every location in the Pacific Ocean or in all global oceans. And then how do you, and then you're doing that over time as well, like what constitutes normal in that, you know, that three-dimensional field, well, we collapse the data along particular dimensions in order to identify dominant kind of directions of variation in that, you know? And the thing about El Nino just as like a phenomenon and why I think, you know, it's measurement, he's indelibly linked to its physics. And I think that's something that's the case for essentially

15:27all kind of climate mode phenomena, all these sources of inter-nurability that are in the climate system that I just talked about, whether it's the IOD or the Madden-July in oscillation or the North Atlantic oscillation or the Pacific Decadal oscillation or El Nino itself, right? Like these things, their measurement is concatenated to their physics. It's informed by their physics. And it's also the means by which we explore and understand them. And so these diagnostics are really, really important to kind of have a grounding in the physical world of what we know to be true. And because you're right, you know, what constitutes your baseline? And where you happen to measure and determine that baseline and where you happen to measure the anomaly will be a huge determinant of that kind of thing. And it links back to, you know, all kinds of things you talked about, tornadoes, right? The Enhance Fujita Scale and the Fujita Scale, which classify tornadoes, for example, you know, EF1 to 5.

16:31These are ad hoc kind of measurements of tornado strength. Those are not direct measures of wind speed in a tornado, which is essentially impossible to observe. Instead, it's kind of an inferred strength based on a survey of the damage after the tornado has done its bidding on the land, right? And so that's different. And that's different than say, you know, the Safar-Simskin Scale we use for analyzing hurricanes, another phenomenon you brought up that, yeah, Atlantic hurricanes do go down during El Nino years because of what El Nino tends to do to the Jats dream and the wind shear that's over the Atlantic, right? Essentially, the winds are strong enough at different levels in the atmosphere that the cloud towers that are so important to sustaining and building a hurricane that get ripped apart. And so the kind of heat engine that is a hurricane can't build and sustain itself in the Atlantic during

17:34an El Nino year the way it could in a long year. But essentially, we're measuring, you know, we're measuring what's happening in a region over the tropical Pacific. And you can do that in different places and that may tell you slightly different things about the magnitude of the El Nino, but not necessarily like the occurrence of the El Nino itself shouldn't be sensitive to your chosen measure. We are learning that the spatial pattern of sea surface temperature anomalies, like what the El Nino actually looks like geographically can matter for its teleconnections, right? It infects this place in this way and that place in that way, but not necessarily the direction, maybe some of the magnitudes associated with the hazards, whether you get a flood there or drought there or just the heat wave over here. But in general, the way we measure it is we kind of take a region in the tropical Pacific.

18:36That's kind of towards the eastern side of the central tropical Pacific. And we look at what sea surface temperatures are doing in that spot. The historical way of doing this is the oceanic Nino index, which is essentially calculating how much warmer or cooler sea surface temperatures are in that area, relative to a 30 year average that moves every five years, and so this is Noah's Climate Prediction Center. This is the way they measure El Nino historically. They've since updated to this thing called the relative oceanic Nino index, which is slightly different because ocean temperatures throughout the tropical Pacific are just warming because the ocean is doing humanity a solid by absorbing all this excess heat we're putting into our planet by our greenhouse gas emissions. And so you want to control for that kind of confounding thing. Ocean temperatures are raising everywhere. And so in some sense, what the Roni or relative oceanic

19:39Nino index is doing differently than the traditional one is that it's essentially removing that kind of secular trend in all tropical Pacific ocean temperatures and looking at the kind of Nino region of interest as a departure from that. So how much warmer is kind of the El Nino region than the rest of the tropical Pacific, which is a slightly different question than, or, you know, than how much warmer is the Nino region than the Nino region was on average, right? Both, I think, are well grounded in our physical understanding of what El Nino is which is this kind of sloshing of warm waters into this location, kind of redistributing energy and thus weather on our planet. Yeah, so I kind of set a lot there, but I think one thing to kind of point out, you know, you kind of at the outset mentioned, you know, there's not just what constitutes normal.

20:39There's kind of the different phases associated with El Nino southern oscillation, which is like the full cycle that also considers the atmosphere above the ocean surface. So you have El Nino as a positive phase where ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are much warmer than average. There's La Niña, which is the negative phase, which is when oceanic temperatures are much colder than average. And then there's the neutral phase, which is akin to a weak La Niña, meaning that temperatures are cold in the eastern tropical Pacific, but they're not as cold as they would be during La Niña. And that's interesting because embedded in that kind of whole oscillatory pattern is it asymmetry physically? El Nino's are stronger phenomena than La Niña's, right? La Niña in some sense is an amplification of the neutral state, whereas in El Nino is a reversal of it, which is, I think,

21:43a really important distinction. And that tends to mean that La Niña's impacts globally because it's essentially kind of amplifying in some sense the energy sink that is the ocean, right? The colder ocean is just going to readily suck up more heat energy from the sun. That is just kind of a weaker thermodynamic response than an El Nino is, which is essentially adding a bunch of heat back to the atmosphere, right? Taking up heat from the atmosphere is a different endeavor than releasing heat to the atmosphere. El Nino releases heat to the atmosphere. Yeah, that's a perfect segue because I wanted to ask you about the difference between the Roni, that's very cute, what you call it, the relative Oceania, Nino index versus just the regular ONI. And I'm probably not alone among my listeners. I mean, I have a few Ag clients and they always are interested in El Nino versus La Niña and things like that. And I usually point them to Darryl Richardson or Eric Snondgrass, who are guys who focus on US weather and thinking about this from an American agricultural point of view.

22:45But I at least need to know kind of what's up. But I have noticed across every single vertical in which I have clients, I'm getting questions about El Nino the last month. And I think at least part of it has to be is because if you're on social media at all, or if you're reading the Washington Post or anything, you're seeing these graphics of, oh my gosh, it is so much warmer than it's ever been before. And this is a super El Nino. And we're going to talk about famines from the 1870s. And the last time it was this bad, the millions of people died as a result of global hunger. And I actually posted something about this or reposted one of these graphics mostly because I was bookmarking it for myself to come back to it later. And somebody sent me the chart of the Roni. When was like, yeah, so. And I looked at it and it tells, well, at least it tells a very different story. And I'm guessing part of what you're going to tell me is, yeah, well, so it's associating for higher temperatures overall. So even if it looks so good, well, maybe you're not going to tell me this. I don't know. If somebody sends me the Roni and says, hey, like this is not super El Nino, just kind of calm your jets or something unprecedented about what's going on here. Like how would you respond to that in layman's terms?

23:47Because I looked at that and I sat down and I said, you know what, I recognize that I don't know what I'm talking about. And I need to go talk to some experts and think about this for a little while longer. And here we are. So I wonder if somebody sent you that, how you deal with that. Yeah. So, you know, climate science doesn't just contend with the average. It contends with the variability about that average. And kind of the full distribution of weather possible consistent with any kind of planetary average temperature. Right? What's the distribution of possible outcomes consistent with a world of 1.5 degrees, which is nearly above free industrial, which is where we're at? That's kind of what we're working with. The question is that as we have this kind of long-term trend and our climate, how do we both understand its consequences for the things we care about, but also isolate its effect as a potential confounder

24:51and have asidious measurements that allow us to compare across time. Right? That's the challenge we have as scientists. It is being able to tell the truth about today, but also benchmark that truth to yesterday and to tomorrow. And that is no easy charge. And so when NOAA updated from the ONI to the kind of Roni measure where they're controlling for these warming trends in the tropical Pacific, they were isolating and kind of focusing in on that. There was a confounding influence of global warming, right? Ocean temperatures were rising everywhere. And physically, what we think maybe matters is just how much warmer the tropical Pacific is than the rest of tropical oceans and then also how much of a departure that is from kind of a normal state. And so what constitutes normal becomes really important.

25:54You know, this isn't something we're just contending with in how we classify the occurrence of the Ominio, because you're right, the use of the Roni dampens the magnitude of what we're calling the Ominio. So it goes from, I don't know, 2.7 degrees Celsius of an anomaly today as measured to something like 2.18, right? So it seems like, OK, bad, right? You know, a super El Nino is anything above two. We're already, you know, we're in August. We're already, you know, above two, regardless of what measure you take. And that's a strong El Nino, right? That is something society has to contend with regardless of the measure. But it's not a three degree, it's not a fourth degree El Nino. And certainly when you look at the forecasts, whether you're using the O and I or the Roni, like that matters, I think, you know, here's something.

26:59I just came off a national academy's consensus study on the future of drought in the United States. And the key thing we have to contend with there is that the American West, or parts of the American West are drying. They are erratifying. And that's a problem for drought monitoring. Drought monitoring is something we do every week, week on week, where we're trying to classify how dry a place is. And that measure of how dry a place is, is a function of your question of normality. How long a period of record you have, right? What's the appropriate period of record? And that's a huge determinant of like, you know, how, whether or not the drought class is, you know, what's called a D4 exceptional drought, which should occur no more than 2% of the time, right? Or a D0, what's called abnormally dry conditions, which I think should occur no more than, you know, 20% of the time.

28:03So I guess, I guess the question we were contending with in that report is we have this erratified Cation signal, which is drying out the land surface. And you had this kind of product of drought monitoring on which major decisions were being made, right? Aid to agricultural producers and ranchers throughout the American West who are contending with a lack of feed for their cattle or municipal water supply cuts or curtailments and thus kind of the need for irrigation supplements and things like that. These, that's money being moved around on the basis of an operational product that's attempting to kind of describe the hydrologic conditions as they are, right? As they are, right now, not as they are relative, you know, to 1970 or 1900, like as they are, right?

29:03And that's a function, I think, of like, you know, it gets into all these questions about, you know, well, what kind of adaptations do we have in place? And, you know, we build hydrologic infrastructure to kind of contend with drought. Are they resilient to these droughts? And so what we were finding is that the map this product was just red each week, week on week, right? You know, just drought everywhere all the time. Like if you go to the US drought monitor right now, you're going to see a red map because the large vast swaths of the Western United States is in drought because that is the true hydrologic state of affairs. But the question, but that's benchmarked to like, a normal, a historical normal that's no longer reflective of the normal we have. And so the question we were contending with that the national economies was, well, how should we think about updating what constitutes normal, right? If we're moving into a new baseline as a function of kind of longer term or edification,

30:04how quickly should we update the normality in order to assess how anomalous the current week is? And that is a question we're contending with not just in something like El Nino, right? It's something we're contending with in operational drought monitoring as well. These are really, really hard questions because you want to both be accurate and you want to also be able to benchmark across time. And so the person who pointed out that the Roni, you know, maybe makes things look damped relative to these other kind of assessments, you know, I think both can be true at the same time. Right, that according to the Roni, right? This El Nino maybe isn't the kind of the narliest on record but you need to contextualize that by recalculating what all those historical O'Neillos would have been, via that same measure. And that is like a different exercise. There's a reason we wanted, you know,

31:05Noah wanted the Roni to be used because there was this confounding influence of global warming on the tropical oceans and they wanted to control for that and just look at how much warmer that the Nino region was from the rest of tropical oceans. And in order to do that, you that says that some of the signal that's in the oceanic Nino index is this kind of trend from global warming. There are different questions because, you know, it comes back to like what is physically more valuable, right? If it's about just, you know, like a 2.18 degree Roni event occurring in a much warmer world, I'm not sure that's analogous to a 2.18 O and I event, you know, from a few decades ago in a few worlds, right? So I think that's something to kind of hold. It's not clear to me, you know, that these things are direct analogs for one another.

32:07And so I think both can kind of be true that it's valuable to remove a confounding influence of global warming, but also to recognize that in an Nino occurring today, simply is different physically than an Nino of yesterday or. And so how are you thinking about the upcoming Nino yourself? Do you view it as one to quote you that is particularly gnarly? Is there even, I mean, I would also ask, I get that severity is tied to, you know, increase in temperature, but like how much increase in temperature or in the intensity of the phenomenon, do you have to get to get worse effects if that question makes sense? Like if it's 0.5, does that mean yes, you're going to have much worse effects? Does that mean that it depends on other things, like the dipole that we talked about, or other things that are happening? Like from your view, like on your, on Justin's gnarly index, how gnarly is this one going to be and why? Yeah, I think it depends on a few things, right? I think this question of how,

33:13you know, if it, if it, El Nino of magnitude two degrees occurs in a warmer world versus a cooler world, right? You know, physically are those impacts, are those hazards different? And I think that's something, you know, we don't know for sure, right? How much of the weather hazards themselves and the teleconnections associated with those weather hazards are linked to the geography of the El Menio region itself, being anomalously warm relative to cooler temperatures all around it, right? That's a question. And, you know, I would, I would, I would hazard, I would guess that for, you know, no scientists who developed and embraced the Roni, that it's really about the relative temperature of the Nino region given tropical Pacific,

34:13given tropical ocean temperatures, right? That says that it's actually how much warmer the El Nino region is than the area around it is really important for determining kind of whether or not this place floods or that place dries out and experiences of drought. I think the question of, you know, what an El Menio looks like in a warmer world, that's something we scientists are investigating all the time. I think a world where you have a warming trend and then you have a punctuated El Menio atop that is going to be the hottest year on record, right? There's a, it is a coin flip, whether or not 2026 as the hottest year on record. The 10 hottest years in the last 176 years have occurred since 2015, right? You know, 2016, which at the time was the record warmest year ever associated with the 2015, 2016 El Menio is now like the fourth warmest year, right?

35:13It's just dropping down the list because every year it may not be a record itself, but it's certainly warmer than the preceding years. And so I think that's a different thing we're contending. And this is part of actually what motivated this research on kind of the economic consequences of El Menio is that we have economic consequences associated with the hazards of global warming, floods, droughts, heat wave, fire, sea level rise, right? Things society is contending with things that have demonstrable costs, right? Costs that can be measured in the S. That's kind of the stuff, you know, we, some of what we do in our group, but there also are the costs associated with innate climate variability, right? Like El Menio. El Menio occurs in absence of a greenhouse gas emissions. It is just a feature of a complex Earth. But the question is, is when an El Menio occurs like it's no coincidence that when an El Menio occurs, it's, it's, tends to be the warmest year on record when combined with global warming.

36:15And so I think a question is like how you deconvolve the costs associated with this innate source of variability in the climate system, El Menio, from the cost of global warming, and how you kind of divorce that back to their physics and to the kind of hazards associated with them, right? What's interesting and kind of complex here is that the consequences of El Menio look a lot like the consequences of global warming. Floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, maybe not sea level rise, though thermal expansion is, is maybe a thing. But, you know, and so those consequences, you know, can be, can position us to kind of assess societal resilience and adaptive capacity to the hazards of El Menio that also happen to look a lot like the hazards associated with global warming. And so if you're interested in the costs of global warming going forward, you maybe want to independently assess the costs of El Menio and try to isolate them.

37:17And so I think this kind of interactive effects of El Menio and global warming is not just a physical thing we have to contend with on the scientific to decide when an El Menio occurs and with what magnitude. But also what it implies physically for the hazards, right? Like there is a lot of work investigating how global warming is altering the teleconnections associated with El Menio because we think that like the happening too, right? That certain places are experiencing weaker or stronger associations with temperature anomalies in the tropical Pacific. And how those two kind of conspired together to kind of shape hazards and the pattern of hazards going forward. These are things that we're like actively investigating. And so if you were to ask me, do I want a three degree El Menio in a cooler world or a warmer world? I will tell you right now I prefer it in a cooler world. I want to get into some of the research on the economic impact because I think

38:20it's very interesting. And I also think it's, it makes things less abstract and ethereal because it forced you to think. But before I leave it, and this may be a very naive question to you, but I couldn't help but ask it. So we have this El Menio. We can debate how super it is, everything else, but seems like it's a big deal. Does it mean that there is going to be a snap back to a super La Niña? Is there like a react to every action there is an equal opposite reaction? Is the form function here that we're just going to get stronger El Menio's over time? Because the waters are warming plus we already have this indicator going forward? Is there no relationship whatsoever just because you have a strong El Menio? Does it mean anything about the strength of La Niña or what neutral is? I was curious about the sort of back and forth there and what this tells us about anything going forward. If it does, I'm very happy to be slapped down and said like that's nice. No, no. But like don't bring your Newtonian quotes to this conversation. No, I mean, this is, they do kind of obey physics right there. So there is, there, you know, a strong La Niña can follow a strong El Niño.

39:26And so there is kind of, I mentioned there is this asymmetry embedded that El Menio's are a reversal of the neutral state, whereas La Niña's are an amplification of the neutral state. But from kind of an energetic standpoint, if you think about kind of El Menio as a spring releasing, right? You know, you can imagine that that spring rebounding back could look pretty, pretty amplified. And so it is the case, you know, that the buildup of a really strong La Niña, for example, can mean a much deeper, what we call thermal climb in the West Pacific Warmpool, meaning that super, that super warm water is just penetrating way deeper into the, in the West Pacific, such that there is just way more heat for it to release, right? So you can imagine physically, like intuitively, why a really strong La Niña would be get potentially a really strong El Niño.

40:36And the kind of positive amplifying feedback that prevails, that kind of governs the Soscelation, is called the Burekness Feedback, whereby, you know, stronger, Easterly wins tend to favor a colder, tropical, Eastern Tropical Pacific, which tends to kind of load the dice for La Niña, and therefore allow for that spring, that spring to kind of build up tension, that deep, deep warm water to build up in the West Pacific, such that when an El Niño occurs, and when those winds break down, even if that's written, even if that's stochastic, right, that when it occurs in time, it's just going to be a much bigger event, right? And so it is a case that these things can kind of slingshot into one another. You know, the time scale over which we should expect, you know, a really strong, because like wind blows based on, you know,

41:37it's like temperature differences, induced density differences, density differences, induced pressure differences, and pressure differences are what like moves air from one place to another, right? Like that's what's happening. So if you have a really warm West Pacific, and a really cold East Pacific, there is just going to be a really large pressure gradient, right, and high pressure wants to equilibrate with low pressure. That's why you're getting this air movement, and then if something disrupts that, all that water is going to flush back, that's going to weaken that pressure gradient that's going to allow more of that water to slosh back, which is going to weaken that temperature gradient, which weakens that pressure gradient. So there are these positive feedbacks associated with it. So you're absolutely right that this is an oscillatory pattern, and that's really kind of a crucial element to it. And I don't like the answer to that question. Okay. Well, I mean, I like it, but I don't like what it means, probably for me sitting here on the go. Okay, well, you did a great, a lot of work evaluating the sort of macroeconomic toll of previous alneños and talking about how we need to prepare for more of this in a warming world.

42:44You specifically, and you're writing talked about how the global price tags for 1983 and 1998 alneño events were orders of magnitude higher than earlier estimates suggested 1983 4.1 trillion 1998 5.7 trillion. So those are big numbers. I wanted to ask you sort of in a devil's advocate way, though, to say, 1983 does come after the peak of the Reagan recession. And 1998 is right after the Asian financial crisis. And so I wanted to ask you how you were isolating those variables. How could you tell what was related to alneño versus comparing to a macroeconomic context where there were a lot of things going on? And maybe there were relationships between those things, but those those dates stuck out to me just because they are you could technically make a macro argument about well, these are economic crises. You're analyzing the period after major economic crises. Of course, you're going to see reduced economic activity. How much of that can you pin on alneño versus the things that were going on in that context? So how did you do that? And how did you arrive at those numbers? And when we're thinking going forward, how do we separate what's going on in the global economy that has, you can't say that things in the global economy have nothing to do with weather because as we're just talking about alneño is going to affect everything.

43:57But I think you get the question that I'm circling around. Yeah, there are a lot of things that affect the economy. Like how do you isolate the contribution of alneño to global economic growth? Absid all the other factors that are arguably more important for kind of determining economic productivity. And I think one way to kind of think about this is to draw an analogy with say medicine and medical control trials. I want to know the effectiveness of acetamethan on reducing pain occurrence for your headache. And so I might kind of, there are a lot of things like why you get headaches, why you individually, how you physically physiologically respond to getting some Tylodol, for example, right? So maybe instead I construct a medical control trial where I randomize a bunch of people who are very different, right?

45:00Different in height and size and kind of genetic capacity to jump or to run or have different underlying medical conditions, right? Come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds or different ages, right? And I randomize those people such that I have a treatment group that receives acetamethan and a control group that doesn't, right? And then that is a medical control trial, you know, and then when people get headaches, we give them, you give the treatment group Tylenon, you give the control group a placebo or you don't give them anything. And then you're comparing kind of the medical outcomes among those two groups, right? There are a lot of things that are determinants of headache occurrence and magnitude. What we're isolating in a framework like that is the contribution of a dosage of a seat of metaphid to headache pain or headache occurrence, right?

46:01That's essentially what we're doing when it comes to kind of El Nino empirically, like our identification strategy is mimicking a randomized control trial as you would have in medicine, except we're doing it with real world data, such that we are trying to kind of compare the world as it is with El Nino's to a world of a personnel Nino's, that includes things like, you know, banking crises and that includes thing, you know, like a currency, a currency crisis or an economic downturn or what have you. And we do that a bunch of ways, right? So empirically, what we're trying to do is effectively compare a country's economy to itself, its response in years with versus without El Nino's. And we are also trying to control for everything else, like I don't need to be able to simulate everything that makes a person physiologically human in order to know how a seat of metaphid is going to change headache pain for that person, right?

47:15So true is that the case that I don't need to know everything about what makes the global economy tick in order to isolate the contribution of El Nino to the global economy, right? These are kind of marginal effects, right, controlling for everything else. And so all this rests on this building of account or factual world, what would the world have looked like absent this El Nino event? And that's what we're doing empirically. And so in order to kind of deal with things happening during the Reagan years or economic downturns around 2008 or what have you is we, you know, estimate these relationships. So we're using causal inference, we're using statistics here, kind of where we're controlling for the fact that Peru grows differently than Sweden, controlling for the fact that, you know, there are big macro economic events that happen. Whether that's the collapse of the Soviet Union, right, or, you know, a massive kind of economic downturn, like when layman brothers went down in 2008, right? So we have, we're controlling for all these things by adding these kind of terms to our model and assessing how our estimation of how our economy responds to El Nino changes when we include versus exclude those effects.

48:38And this is kind of, you know, we're doing this kind of systematically across the world and across all these years and an event kind of, you know, doing what's called cross validation, essentially assessing how sensitive our economic estimates are to the kind of period over which we're making the assessment of the relationship between El Nino and economic growth. And we find a high degree of invariance, meaning it doesn't seem to be that sensitive, right? So when you, when you remove kind of major economic downturns, you know, it has a, it has a bit of an effect on the final say of like how important an El Nino is for economic growth, but not much. It doesn't change the direction of it. And it doesn't really change the implications of what we understand to have been historical costs associated with El Nino's. So I think I hope that kind of explains what we've done and I'm happy to unpack any of those things or try to make them a bit more clear.

49:40No, it's perfect. There is an acetaminophen RFK junior jokes somewhere in there that I haven't had quite enough coffee to develop, but I know it's there. I know that if we work a little harder, I'm sure that we can make fun of him about that. But I'm also conscious of time and I know that we have about 10 minutes left. And so I want to start bringing it, bringing the conversation or at least this phase of the conversation to a close. Hopefully you'll come back on with diving into what you just said and sort of making it a little less of, not less abstract, but more tangible for listeners. And part of it was, you know, when you were talking about or writing about El Nino, one of the things that I thought was interesting was first you were talking about not just long term effects, but potential permanent effects on the economy. You also though, you know, from your writing talked about how the conflict hazard related to El Nino didn't necessarily didn't necessarily scale linearly that it was threshold dependent. And I wanted to ask you to unpack that a little bit for me. And also that it was more about drought or scarcity rather than flooding. So it was actually the dry elements that were worse, maybe than the wet elements, which I also thought was interesting. And I also thought in the paper, the comparison with that Indian Ocean dipole, which you talked about being a monthly sort of variation rather than a longer term thing. And it being very regional that when you have some kind of change in that Indian Ocean dipole, you're looking at the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia, but you're not necessarily looking at the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America or all these other places.

51:00And how it's going to affect things globally, which considering what's happening in the Horn right now is also an interesting thing because it's one of the most, I think, I talked about awful things happening in the world in general. So by way of at least closing this chapter of the conversation, talk to me a little bit about sort of what the long term impacts are of an El Nino, the relationship to something like the Indian Ocean dipole and some of that help me unpack what you meant by threshold dependent and how we're looking at these things. Yeah, so on there's kind of the economic side and that that was work that I got to do my collaborator there was a former PhD student in the Chris Callahan, who is now professor at Indiana and just a remarkable scholar really, really fun to work with, really fun to think with. That is kind of a distinct piece of work about the growth consequences of El Nino and I can I'll come back to that in a second that the conflict work was with another PhD student, a person by the name of Tyler Bagwell at Rice University, who's just a stellar kind of statistician and an econometrician and has been thinking about the relationship between hydroclinatic variability and what it means for social outcomes like violent conflict.

52:15And those collaborators at Rice built a kind of an impressive and a conflict data set with high degree of kind of spatial resolution that allowed us to kind of go in and assess how climate variability impacts conflict risks. So these are pretty coarse measures, you know, the chance of a country tipping into violent conflict, it was like maybe one and 30, you know, in any given year. So what we find is that, you know, a strong El Nino event can kind of induce a one in 20 kind of likelihood of conflict risk at the global scale. It also because of the high spatial resolution of the data we're able to kind of go in and look at what that implies for different regions globally El Nino is like why El Nino is such an interesting macro economic test bed and why it's such an interesting kind of global conflict test bed is because it is a global phenomenon reconfigures global weather.

53:18IOD Indian Ocean dipole is different it is a motiv variability that's well studied and well diagnosed but it's geographic fingerprint footprint is is considerably smaller kind of limited, you know, to the Horn of Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. And the Indian Ocean dipole as a phenomena is is is kind of a sea saw pattern essentially in ocean atmosphere relations that is a determinant of of kind of rainfall and drought in places like the Horn of Africa and what's different there and there is an interaction between the IOD and things like the Madden Julian oscillation and the breakdown of those Easterly trade winds that are so important for establishing. And the neutral state in the tropic Pacific so there is a kind of maybe a physical relationship to El Nino there the you know the atmosphere is connected on our planet the oceans are connected and so there is undoubtedly a bit of a relationship there and I think you know when an IOD occurs and when an El Nino occurs that can mean it even more muted kind of onset to say the South Asian monsoon for example which is just so important for determination.

54:37And so it's a very important thing you know farmer livelihood and well being the IOD though it occurs on a very different timescale that kind of a slowly building El Nino which you know has kind of an eight to 12 month trajectory associated with it the ID can see saw pretty, pretty rapidly and so the kind of societal risks and societal response to it or just happening on a different timescale even if the hazards are things like you know drought followed by rapid floods right so you can imagine people in the Horn of Africa in response to an IOD driven drought kind of moving closer to a settlement moving closer to a reverse edge right an informal settlement with insecure no property rights insecure. And you know and in order to access water and then a day loose coming creating a flood and just washing out that informal settlement just kind of adding insult to industry with with the drought right like the that kind of whiplash is something explore what's notable in the conflict work and contrast with the economic work.

55:47Is this kind of threshold behavior so as far as we can tell it would an economy response to an El Nino the magnitude of the El Nino matters right so how strong that El Nino is but also how tethered your your weather is to El Nino as a phenomenon how strong your teleconnection is those are crucial mediators for your economic response so the more connected your weather is. To El Nino as a phenomenon the more impacted you are economically by an El Nino and that's something we observationally document that's different when it comes to conflict conflict. It does you know places that don't have super strong teleconnections can have equal conflict risk responses to an El Nino as strongly tele connected places so teleconnection strength is not a crucial mediator that's really interesting and that may make sense right the economic response to an El Nino is propagating through direct impacts roads being washed away

57:01floods in fields or droughts you know destroying yields the transport sector disrupted maybe investments and prices are changing these are these are impacts that are kind of nearly direct losses on on an economy from a hazard the decision to kind of like put down a pitch fork and pick up a gun and fight like that is a tertiary you know impact it is like pretty far downstream right you need to have had the hazard have had that you know that that that crop you know fail and then you have needed to have made the calculus that it was economically more beneficial for you to join a militia or to join a resistance or to kind of seek you know some kind of restitution to your grievance and that's what you need to be there some kind of latent grievance in order in order to like you could just see how it's just far downstream it's kind of down this this kind of impacts cascade quite divorced from the physics itself and so I think what that implies is just a high degree of nonlinearity in impacts right we in the climate science can be constantly thinking about whether you get a proportional response to a

58:29forcing right does a one degree El Nino give you know a hundred million dollar response or you know or a one millimeter addition to your heaviest rain day or a one degree increase in your hottest day of the year right these kind of proportionalities but the physics of the climate system don't work that way right and and often you can get kind of an amplifying or multiplying effect where that one degree El Nino implies a 10 millimeter increase to your heaviest rain day and maybe you know for you when you're thinking about the impacts maybe your house doesn't flood with 10 millimeters of additional rainfall it's that 11th millimeter that's the crucial one that kind of you know breaks the fresh old and floods out your home all right so that that is a high degree of nonlinear and what we think is going on is that conflict kind of behaves the same way such as the right kind of behavior is going on as a conflict kind of behaves the same way such that these places even if they're not strongly teleconnected or just under this kind of tension of grievance such that you know the straw that breaks the camel's back need not be as heavy in this place as it does in that place and you can just kind of have this kind of nonlinear response in conflict risk and that's different than what we think is happening with the economy

59:52which seems to be more linear despite some of the nonlinear hazards and nonlinear impacts I was just talking about. I could literally talk to you for hours just and I know we have to get out I know I have to get you out of here so I'll close on this one of the questions I get most often when people are asking me about politics is how do you sleep at night everything seems like it's terrible right now and my answer is usually some version of it's kind of always crazy and I actually am optimistic about many things that are happening right now. You can choose to focus on the positive of the negative from where you sit how do you feel about the world over the next five years and I know it's unfair to spring that on you as the last question without any wants but I you know people do it to me all the time so I'm returning the favor like are you optimistic or you pessimistic are you just looking at it all with a sort of scientific discipline of this is what it is I couldn't help but ask the question. Yeah I mean you know as a scientist I'm I'm kind of interested in understanding how the world works and and kind of documenting what is true and and updating my understanding and expectations when faced with with new evidence you know if thinking about this forthcoming El Nino like by our estimates like if you just take what we estimated economically for historical

1:01:13on the news and and think about you know this El Nino doesn't get any stronger than it is today my expectation is that the global economy in five years will be $10 trillion less wealthy than it otherwise would have been right so that is a big economic loss. I think if we moved out of sample right if I if I actually did the attribution based on what the forecasts suggest it will be you're looking at nearly $15 trillion worth of economic loss that's a that's a size will loss but that's also happening within a global economy that is growing I think there's a question of like does economic growth equal human well being and I think you know and your listeners know that those are not a big question. The same thing right the the kind of distillation and focus on on economic productivity as like a benchmark for success or failure I don't think is great like I think the global economy will be bigger in five years you know part of the reason why this is going to be the most expensive El Nino in history is because it is just impacting a much bigger global economy than it did in 2016 or 98 or 82 83 right so I think.

1:02:27You know the question of five years from now for me as an attribution scientist somebody who's who's kind of focused on attributing causality scientifically in a complex or system the question I think about is well what's the counter factual what could the world have looked like in five years had we done something different that's where I spend a lot of my life. I'm thinking the world will be richer in five years is my expectation but will people be better off more secure will you know my kids be better educated and have better avenues for possibility of a fulfilling life than then you know I did and what choices can we make now to ensure that I think one of the things that's really interesting about El Nino is that it is not you know as is commonly held by a lot of scientists a lot of my colleagues kind of point to this El Nino as kind of an indication of future right as being some kind of prediction of what the world looks like 10 years from now on average.

1:03:45And I like us somebody who thinks about both the mean and variability in the climate system I just don't think that's right the El Nino that's unfolding right now is like fully reflective of where we are climatically right now it is revealing the kind of adaptation deficit that exists around the world and so part of my hope is that you know like we're seeing in the financial industry which is like way out in front of trying to understand this El Nino and your phone ringing off the hook with people. We're clients trying to kind of understand this that that makes sense like that to me is actually quite heartening it says oh this is a risk that we see coming much like global warming and like we can potentially manage some of the downsides associated with it I would love like one of the things I hold for kind of the next five years is like what it looks like to take that focus on minimizing economic and financial downside and translating that into minimizing human. Downside like actual human wants people are going to die from now the Selmingo that is preventable in many cases and what does it look like to kind of make the investments that make that preventable and I think some the tension here is that the economic withdrawal of money is from risky financial markets in kind of low income economies right the ones most likely to be impacted by the end of the world.

1:05:12So I think that's why the health hazards of El Nino that diminishes the resource that those communities would have to be able to contend with El Nino's costs and so I would love to kind of have an El Nino like this be an instigator of a conversation on what kind of a cogent global economic and kind of resiliency response to El Nino that that actually thinks about minimizing human loss and maximizing human welfare and not just economic growth. That's an incredible answer you've been very generous with your time just thank you so much and I hope you you won't mind if I reach out to pepper you with questions in the future yeah no happy to do it thanks for having. Thank you for listening to the Jacob Shapiro podcast if you enjoyed today's conversation you can find more episodes essays a link to our sub stack and tons more analysis at Jacob Shapiro dot com. And if you ever want to reach out directly with questions feedback guest ideas if you want to acquire about booking me for an event or any of my consulting services you can email me at Jacob at Jacob Shapiro dot com also if you found this episode valuable or interesting please consider subscribing leaving a review or rating or sharing it with someone you think might appreciate it take good care of the people that you love cheers and we will see you out there.

1:06:35Thank you for listening to the podcast.