Big Storm Coming?

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. A cold, wet June. A baking May. Our weather has been unusual. And there's something building in the Pacific Ocean right now that could make things much more dramatic. El Nino is a regular spanner thrown into the world's weather. Bringing dramatic effects around the globe. But this one is likely to be on a much larger scale, affecting millions of people. And some scientists fear it could exacerbate the effects of climate change. So how bad is it going to get?

[00:00:30] And how soon will we know? The Why Curve. Yeah, it's supposed to be a super El Nino this year, isn't it? That's what they're calling it. So one of the worst... And it's right down where you are, isn't it? So I mean, what are people thinking about in Australia? Well, I mean, I think, you know, there are still quite a few climate change deniers living in Australia, even though it's bleeding obvious to most of us that, you know, the weather patterns are changing.

[00:00:55] That the occasional 40 degree day that you used to get years ago, a couple of decades ago, is now quite a common occurrence. And whereas it used to last for a day and then you get a southerly change coming through and the temperature would drop, now it can stick around for a few days. So, I mean, that's all changed. And yeah, I've spoken to farmers who are very worried about El Nino because it basically will mean very dry weather patterns for Australia this summer. So hot and dry, which is not good for farmers. No, no, no.

[00:01:24] And I mean, it's a pretty hot, dried place anyway, generally, I guess. But I mean, it's going to affect the whole world. This is what everyone's saying, that there's a kind of, you know, it is a phenomenon you get every little while. But it's much bigger now. Is that because of climate change? And is it actually going to make climate change worse because of the changing the heat in the atmosphere? I mean, I don't know. But these are all the things people talk about. Or will it be used as an excuse by climate change deniers to go, well, this has nothing to do with climate change. This is El Nino.

[00:01:54] It's a common occurrence. And the fact we've got hotter temperatures or wetter weather, depending on what part of the world you're in, that is because of El Nino, nothing to do with climate change. It could be used as a distraction. Because let's face it, you know, a lot of people go, yes, it's clear now that climate change is real. There's still a lot of people who, despite everything, believe it's not. Well, do they really believe that or do they just say it because, frankly, there's a kind of shrug of what the hell can we do anyway? Well, yeah, because it's inconvenient. That's right.

[00:02:24] And, you know, we don't want an inconvenience if it's going to compromise our lifestyles. So the question is, you know, are we too late? Can you counter it all without compromising your lifestyle? Because, you know, most governments talk about, well, we can have growth. We can still have growth. We can still have high growth with renewables. But can you in reality? Or is that a fall flow? Well, and is it all going to change because of this massive El Nino that's just coming up now and could change everything?

[00:02:52] Let's talk to someone who's studied all this. And that's Manoj Joshi. He's professor of climate dynamics at the University of East Anglia. And he joins us now. So, Manoj, how bad is the El Nino going to be this time? And how do you determine the strength of it? Because we've got this term, this is going to be a super El Nino, which makes it seem as though it's going to be a lot worse than previous years. Right. So the tropical Pacific Ocean, you can think of it as a sort of a seesaw, like a weighted seesaw. So the eastern side of the Pacific is usually quite cold.

[00:03:21] The western side of the Pacific is usually quite warm. What happens every few years is a sort of seesaw mechanism that the western Pacific gets colder and the eastern Pacific can get warmer and vice versa. And this sort of oscillates every few years. But sometimes you can get events which are much larger than you than you usually get. And these sort of sort of super El Ninos. It's important to know that sort of every El Nino is different.

[00:03:48] There's lots of different ways of characterizing El Nino in terms of sea surface temperatures in different parts of the Pacific. And what's being predicted by our models is our seasonal forecast models is that it's going to be a very large event with an onset this autumn leading on into 2027. It might be one of the largest on record, but it's important to note that there's still a little bit of uncertainty around that.

[00:04:14] OK. And I mean, the point, I suppose, is people say, well, the Pacific, I mean, Phil's quite near it, but the rest of us might not be. It doesn't really matter what happens about the temperature in that part of the world. Does it affect Europe? Does it affect Africa? Does it affect America? Well, El Nino or rather, I should say, ENSO climatologists, climate scientists use the word ENSO, which is the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

[00:04:38] And the reason we use this ENSO, because it's a handy acronym, but it also encapsulates the fact that the El Nino part is more in the ocean and the southern oscillation bit is more in the atmosphere. And this is very much an oscillation that couples the trade winds and the circulation of the atmosphere on the Pacific to what's happening underneath in the ocean. These two things are really important. And so the effects of ENSO are felt mostly in the tropical Pacific.

[00:05:05] It's true. So when you get an El Nino event, you tend to get dry conditions in the western Pacific over Indonesia, places like that, and wetter conditions in the eastern Pacific parts of South America, North America, certainly. However, the effects can be propagated on a much, much larger scale, on a global scale.

[00:05:28] For instance, droughts in India are associated with El Nino events, and you can have droughts in southern Africa associated with El Nino events. So the effects of El Nino can propagate all the way through the tropics. In addition to that, the effects of El Nino can also propagate to higher latitudes into the southern ocean,

[00:05:51] certainly into North America, and even into the Atlantic European region, although those effects tend to be felt mostly in winter. So all of this is being driven by change in sea temperature, if I've got this right. Is that what you were saying? So it's the sea temperature of the Pacific Ocean that's changing, and that is what is propagating through to this event, and then that's being passed through into the broader atmosphere. As I say, it's a combination.

[00:06:19] What happens is as the eastern Pacific warms, the circulation over the Pacific Ocean, it's called the Walker circulation, tends to weaken. And so as the sea surface temperature gradients of distribution are changing, the trade winds and the atmospheric circulation on top of that are concurrently changing. So the two are sort of locked together, and that's what's going on. The atmospheric circulation is changing. The effects are felt mostly in the tropical Pacific, but they do propagate to some extent globally.

[00:06:47] And has this always been the case? Has this been, you know, throughout history, we've always had an El Nino effect? El Nino, you know, this ENSO, El Nino Southern Oscillation, certainly throughout history, if you look at paleo records, it goes back decades, centuries. The El Nino Southern Oscillation has been going on at least that long. We can use climate models to try and investigate what might have happened on timescales longer than that.

[00:07:16] It's certainly over the vast few centuries, the El Nino Southern Oscillation is a thing. Climate models do project that as we go into the future, because of global warming, extreme El Nino events may become a little bigger. But there's a lot of uncertainty over that. So let's focus just to focus on that a bit, because I think that is interesting. If what we have as climate change is accentuating the effect. So worse droughts potentially, more rain in some areas.

[00:07:45] I mean, more extreme weather generally. Yes, I mean, climate change changes the base conditions under which an El Nino event can happen. So if you've got a warmer world, you've got droughts in certain parts of the world. El Nino events can make those conditions worse. Of course, you might get lucky. The El Nino event, you know, you may get anomalously high rainfall that cancels it out. So certainly when you add on the effect of El Nino to the sort of pre-existing conditions from climate change,

[00:08:12] which themselves are changing, getting worse as we go through time, or certainly getting bigger as we get through time, then you could get effects that you wouldn't have expected, say, 50 years ago from a large El Nino. What sort of things do you mean? So, for instance, if you get, let me think, if you get anomalously high rainfall, say, over North America, that might give you certain effects, flooding, stuff like that.

[00:08:39] But in a warmer world, this is actually moving even, it's moving air with even more moisture onto North America. So you might, you might, on average, be expected to get perhaps more rain, maybe more flooding. These sorts of projections that we make have uncertainties with them, but there's these sorts of things we think about. You've got an underlying condition which may make the effects of something like an El Nino event worse.

[00:09:05] So I'm still trying to figure out why the sea temperature is rising in cycles. Is it just the general movement of oceans, or is there something else beyond that that's causing it? Well, what happens is, as I say, the tropical Pacific is locked in, is a little bit like a seesaw. There's a very big feedback involved between the winds and the sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. If you have a gradient from east to west, which is cold to warm,

[00:09:33] which means that you get winds going from cold to warm, you get these easterlies and trade winds. As the gradient gets bigger, the winds will intensify. But as the winds intensify, that actually makes this sea surface temperature gradient get even bigger. So there's a very strong positive feedback. It's called the Bjorknes mechanism, named after a famous meteorologist from a few decades ago. So there's these very strong positive feedbacks between what's happening in the ocean

[00:10:01] and what's happening with the atmospheric circulation. Now, on top of that, you have waves and currents in the ocean that can ameliorate this mechanism. And the sum total of all of this is that you get these large oscillations every three to seven years between El Nino, La Nina, neutral, and so on. It's not cyclic. It's more irregular than truly cyclic. Well, you mentioned La Nina then. That's another name I've heard. It's an alternative El Nino. I mean, what is it exactly?

[00:10:29] La Nina, a La Nina event is sort of the opposite of an El Nino. Rather than the eastern Pacific getting warmer, the western Pacific getting colder, what happens is in a La Nina event is that the eastern Pacific gets colder and the western Pacific gets warmer. So this gradient across the Pacific gets bigger rather than smaller. And the impacts of La Nina are almost but not quite the opposite of El Nino.

[00:10:56] So during a La Nina, the western Pacific, Indonesia, places like that tend to get wetter and the eastern Pacific tends to get a little drier. So we know it's going to be a big one this time because what? Because the sea temperature is so much warmer? I'm not entirely certain what the distribution is in the models. I mean, there certainly is a very – there's a big El Nino event predicted. The size of it, we're not quite certain yet.

[00:11:23] We'll have to wait until the autumn, I think, before we'll have a better idea of what the size is. What we tend to do – what tends to happen is when you try to predict whether you're going to get an El Nino or a La Nina, what you do is you run what I call these coupled ocean atmosphere models. They're very similar to physical climate models used to project climate change. But instead of running them forward for decades to try and see what the climate may be like in, say, the 2050s,

[00:11:51] you run lots of these so-called ensemble members, lots of different versions of these models forward for like a year or two. But crucially, you initialize these models with observations of ocean temperature, land temperature, and the atmosphere. Crucially, it's the observations of the ocean, not just the surface ocean, but a little bit deeper as well. You initialize these models with observations of the ocean and you let them go.

[00:12:19] And, you know, what happens is, for instance, in 2026, 2027, they're predicting an El Nino event. Think of it like a weather forecast is initialized with conditions in the atmosphere, enables you to predict the weather a few days ahead. In a similar way, these models initialize with what's happening in the ocean, enables us to make predictions of a few months ahead or more. So when you say only a few months, we don't know really what is going to happen, say, over the winter. I mean, it wouldn't go beyond into 2027 very fast.

[00:12:49] Southern Hemisphere, of course, we're talking about the summer, which is why it's, you know, I mean, I think Australia is gearing up for quite a bad El Nino. And that obviously is bad news for farmers in Australia who deal with pretty dry conditions anyway. If there's no rain at all, I mean, they're getting quite a bit of rain right now. So hopefully that might tide them over. But it's bad news for the farming sector in Australia. Generally, El Nino events are associated with dry weather. Yeah. In Australia, although over most, not all parts of Australia, but quite a lot of parts of Australia.

[00:13:19] And it's important to note that every El Nino is subtly different. So you're not just because the last El Nino event would have given you dry conditions in a certain part of Australia. That doesn't guarantee that it'll happen again. So on top of El Nino, of course, we've got weather going on. El Nino will just predispose the weather in certain parts of Australia to being dry. It doesn't guarantee that things will be dry. That's always important to understand.

[00:13:44] And regarding the earlier question, it's pretty certain that a strong El Nino event is going to happen. What happens after that sort of this time next year as we move into April, May, June 2027? Then the uncertainty starts to get quite big. OK, so Manoj, I mean, what you've been talking about the weather and, you know, there is the weather on top of this. So what we're really in practical terms for non-meteorologists, what people will have to get used to is the strong potential for much more extreme weather events,

[00:14:12] whether flooding or drought or, I don't know, perhaps storms. That's really what people need to think about. It's certainly the case that, you know, climate model projections suggest that leaving aside El Nino and La Nina, leaving aside the El Nino Southern Oscillation, in certain parts of the world, we would project greater extremes. Simply there's more humidity in the atmosphere. That means there's more energy for storms. There's potential for more flooding. And yeah, and so the El Nino Southern Oscillation is going to add on to that.

[00:14:42] So depending on where you are, the potential exists for more flooding. But it depends sort of where you are. It depends on whether you're a part of the world where rainfall is predicted to go up or where you're a part of the world where rainfall might be predicted to go up, but it's uncertain. Projections of rainfall decades into the future are still quite uncertain. We can say certain things about things like the storm tracks in the northern southern hemispheres.

[00:15:07] But we can say generally because we think that extremes of rainfall are becoming bigger, that associated with the El Nino Southern Oscillation suggests that maybe more flooding is something we need to be prepared for. But you're saying we can't say for certain. So it's sort of like, well, we know it's going to mean more weather and that's going to be the takeout. And if we do have unusual weather, then we can say, well, it's the El Nino effect.

[00:15:35] But of course, how do we draw the line between what's the El Nino effect and what is the effect of climate change, which obviously can mean drier or wetter or more extreme weather as well? That's a very good question. And, you know, we get asked similar questions here when heat waves happen over Europe, over northwest Europe and the UK. This leads into an area called climate change detection attribution.

[00:15:59] And what we do here is we can run lots and lots of different versions of climate models into the future where under certain conditions where CO2 is increasing. And of course, these are climate models. These are sort of mini laboratories of climate. We can run climate models under conditions in which carbon dioxide stays the same. You know, methane stays the same.

[00:16:24] And then we can compare what happens with things like the El Nino Southern Oscillation flooding extremes in both the climate model runs where greenhouse gases, greenhouse emissions stay constant. And those climate model runs where greenhouse emissions go up. And we look at the difference in the weather, the extremes in these two ensembles of climate model runs. And that's how we can tell or maybe we can't tell because there's too much noise rather than signal

[00:16:53] of how much climate change is responsible. Crucially, when we think about events, we think about the likelihood of these events happening in a world where CO2 hasn't been increasing and the likelihood of such events happening in a world where CO2 is increasing. And there's a change in those likelihoods. Then we can say, yes, climate change is having an effect.

[00:17:18] So what you're saying is that the noise makes it hard to be terribly certain. But you can say, I mean, it's pretty clear that CO2 obviously is rising. So the effects are worse. And that is, to some extent, human agency. Yeah, it depends what sort of quantity you're looking at. If you're looking at global temperature, it's pretty abundantly clear that, you know, human activity is having an effect because we can we have we have a chain of events going from CO2 emissions to temperature and so on.

[00:17:46] But when we're looking at extremes such as flooding over relatively small areas, then the noise becomes big enough that trying to associate an event with global warming is something that you can't really do. You can only really look at likelihoods. So when we had those warm days, I was in the UK in May when the temperatures were in the high 30s. You know, we beat a record that was back from the early 1900s by a couple of degrees. That was extraordinary, wasn't it?

[00:18:15] And you could say this. So you could just say, well, that's just the lack of the draw. Or you could say, well, you know, this is this is quite unusual by such a large amount. This is because of climate change. If you've got El Nino mixed into all of this, there's there's an opportunity, isn't there, for climate change deniers, for example, to say, oh, well, this is El Nino. This is just a natural phenomenon. This is a cycle. It happens all the time. And if the pitch is confusing, it gets harder, doesn't it, to attribute what is the result of climate change?

[00:18:44] And that becomes a get out clause for those people who are trying to say we shouldn't be focusing so much on it. Well, as far as the heat wave in Europe goes, I think the UK Met Office did some work and suggested I can't remember the exact numbers, but they did show how events like this, which would happen once every few decades or something like that, say, 50, 100 years ago, are going to be happening far more commonly. And you can make sort of, you know, those sorts of projections.

[00:19:12] And those sorts of projections do take into account the effect of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, because the El Nino Southern Oscillation isn't our climate models. In terms of signal to noise, we have to be honest about the fact that there is climate variability in the world. There is weather in the world. And for some signals, the signal of climate change is extremely clear. For other signals, the signal of climate change is less clear.

[00:19:39] But that doesn't mean you ignore it. But, you know, for adapting to climate change, if there are signals of flooding becoming more intense, policymakers have to pay attention to that. El Nino presumably are more extreme. Or the chance, I mean, I know it's not a precise science, but during an El Nino event, we are going to see more extreme temperatures, drier days or wetter days.

[00:20:03] So the extremes that we're seeing, which are, you know, becoming increasingly more common with climate change, would become even more common within the period of El Nino, would they? In other words, if we're going to break a temperature record, are we more likely to do it during an El Nino cycle than we are out of one? Again, it depends where you are, because during an El Nino event, it's the Western Pacific that tends to get a bit drier. So I guess you're more likely to get droughts and heat waves. In a La Nino event, it's the opposite.

[00:20:32] It tends to be a little bit wetter. Certainly, you know, in a well, if you imagine... So whichever way around it is. I mean, if here in Australia, are we more likely to break a temperature record, for example, over the summer because it's El Nino? Yes, more likely. Whether it'll happen or not, we don't know. Essentially, because you have an El Nino event, which changes the circulation by a certain amount, on top of the fact that you've got some base level of global warming.

[00:20:59] You know, the world has warmed globally by 1.4 degrees or whatever it is. So given a given temperature extreme, I guess, does become more likely, yes. Yeah. So essentially, the effect of climate change, what you're saying, is it turns the volume up, if you like, when there is an El Nino. The effects are magnified to some extent. Yeah, exactly. But there's another thing to consider.

[00:21:22] So if you imagine you've got El Nino's, La Nina's events, you know, happening every few years, and of course you've got climate change on top of that, exacerbating these effects. This is assuming that the nature of the El Nino southern oscillation stays the same. But as I say, climate models are projecting that El Nino events may themselves get a little bit more extreme. So if that happens, on top of climate change, the potential really does exist for some big perturbations to weather.

[00:21:50] But as I say, that is still a little bit uncertain. What sort of perturbations? I mean, we're talking massive cyclones, hurricanes, vast amounts of catastrophic flooding. I mean, what are the kind of things in the real world we're talking about? Potential for more droughts, potential for more flooding. Certainly, if you get, for instance, a very strong La Nina event, the Western Pacific warms up, and that means the area of which cyclones can form and not decay will increase. Add global warming to that, and that means that can increase even more.

[00:22:18] So you may potentially get a larger number of large tropical cyclones. But when we talk about extreme events such as tropical cyclones, then the projections of these things are very uncertain indeed. They're very hard things to project. And is the cycle getting shorter? There's no evidence for that. Because the cycle is irregular, it tends to happen every three to seven years. So in the late part of the 20th century, there were quite a few large El Nino events.

[00:22:48] And there was a sort of feeling that, oh, are El Nino events becoming more common? But then we got to the 2000s, and we hardly had any. So there is some decade-to-decade variability in this, but that's just variability in this weather phenomenon. So with all of these unknowns, how do we prepare ourselves then for what might come down the track? I mean, we've done a very bad job, haven't we, of trying to mitigate climate change?

[00:23:14] Because I think it seems for lots of politicians, particularly those in North America, if it's going to slow down growth, then we want nothing to do with it. But what about, you know, the impacts that we could feel? For example, if you are a farmer in Queensland, it would be kind of nice to know that you are going to have a very dry summer this year. So get ready for it. There might be other places that are more likely to have floods.

[00:23:37] But you're saying there's so many known unknowns, we really can't take action to prepare ourselves for what might be coming down the track. I mean, this sort of leads on, there's two elements to the climate change policy picture. There's climate change mitigation. How can we reduce emissions and lower the rate of temperature rise and eventually hopefully stabilize it? And there's climate change adaptation. How does society adapt to the climate change that we know is going to occur over the next few decades?

[00:24:07] Generally speaking, things like heat waves, higher temperature extremes are a little bit easier to predict. Like the uncertainty is a little smaller than hydroclimatic extremes, flooding, things like that. So, for instance, in the UK, a couple of big policy reports came out two, three weeks ago saying that we need to be ready for higher temperatures, more heat waves.

[00:24:31] Buildings need to adapt somehow, potentially putting in a law for maximum temperature working conditions because that doesn't presently exist in the UK. So heat waves, temperature extremes, these are things that we've got an idea about what's going to happen in the future. Well, we've got a pretty strong idea. For hydroclimatic extremes, the situation, there's a bit more noise in the picture, so it's a little bit harder to say.

[00:24:56] Certainly, flooding is supposed to be getting, flooding is projected to get more intense simply because you have more humidity in the atmosphere with higher sea surface temperatures. This means you can get stronger rainstorms, pardon, and more flooding. So how we adapt to flooding is a difficult thing. We've seen areas because with flooding as well, you've got to be careful.

[00:25:23] Flooding isn't flooding in the sense that, you know, we visualize it. Fields, roads, houses, et cetera, being flooded isn't just about weather. It's also changing of the landscape. It's about, you know, forests being cut down or being built. Well, there's a whole number of things in the picture there for flooding. So with flooding, when we try and make projections of hydroclimatic extremes, it's a little bit more difficult than temperature extremes.

[00:25:51] But flooding is also affected dramatically by the landscape and how we've changed the landscape over the last, you know, decades to centuries. That's why it's a very difficult thing. So, Minaj, if some other government minister, say, in Britain or Europe or the United States and flops onto my desk this report saying El Nino could be a mega El Nino coming down the line, there are going to be all sorts of implications. In real terms, what do I need to plan for?

[00:26:20] What could happen in South America, United States, Europe or Africa? What to expect and how big will it be? Well, if a very large El Nino event happens, an example would be the 1997 to 1998 El Nino event was a very large El Nino event. Things that happen were, for instance, a greater likelihood of forest fires in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia.

[00:26:48] It's an area we call like the maritime continent. Meteorologists and climatologists call it that. It sort of goes from Papua New Guinea over to Malaysia and from northern Australia to the Philippines. And it's sort of that area is a very important part of the world in terms of governing the tropical circulation and also the global circulation sometimes too. So potentially more forest fires drought there. El Nino events are associated with potentially drought in the Indian subcontinent.

[00:27:18] So there may be potentially issues with food supply there. Potentially, of course, these are all average things. On the wet side, El Nino events are certainly associated with a lot more rainfall and flooding in parts of the US. But as you get away from there, the effects start to become a little bit harder to predict.

[00:27:41] So El Nino events are somewhat associated roughly with, I think, warmer than average early winters in Europe and colder than average late winters. But there's so many other things going on with the European and Atlantic climate in winter that unambiguously saying El Nino will cause this is difficult. Again, it's just livelihoods.

[00:28:04] Certainly, if you're on the Pacific Rim, policymakers will have an idea of the sorts of things that might happen or indeed into the surroundings of the Indian Ocean as well. It's coping with extremes, isn't it? Planning to be able to cope with extremes, which is, I guess, the question everybody has. So, you know, we might have a slightly colder winter in Britain you can cope with because Britain's used to coping with cold winters. But if there's drought in another part of the world, presumably you'd like to be ahead of that.

[00:28:30] If there's a real fire risk, you want to make sure you've got the resources to be able to cope with that. I'm just wondering whether, just as, you know, generally we need to adapt to the longer term impacts of climate change, we should be doing the same thing as well so we can take mitigating action or at least be able to respond to these weather events. But I'm not sure we do that, do we? We wait till it's happened. Yeah, I think it's the nature of these events.

[00:28:57] There's, you know, individual policymaker, farmer, some of your allies on, for instance, hydropower or something like that, can only deal with the weather that they're dealing with. And you can say, well, you know what, the dice are loaded towards this happening. It's still difficult to react. I think one of the things that's sort of starting to become clearer as well under climate change is the world is obviously interconnected, but climate effects in one region can have knock-on impacts on climate effects on another region.

[00:29:27] Because you can get, you know, climate impacts, for instance, affecting the growth of some commodity like wheat in one part of the world. Well, that can then cause potentially, you know, food rights or something because imports are then, for instance, being curtailed slightly in another part of the world. When you add on effects like the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and climate change, then these potential cascades through the global system start to become a little bit harder to predict.

[00:29:55] For instance, I believe a few years ago, an El Nino event caused dry conditions in Brazil, which meant that hydropower was more in demand. Sorry, hydropower was more difficult to get. So I believe South America bought more gas, which drove the price of gas up globally. Things like that. But these are hard to predict. Everything is connected and climate change may make these connections, you know, fray a little bit. Yeah, hard to predict.

[00:30:23] But similarly, you'd imagine everything is connected. Everything is connected. Well, presumably food is going to be impacted as well. Food prices are going to be if we're seeing crop failures driven by either extreme wet weather or extreme dry weather. Yeah, again, that's certainly possible. But predicting these things in an individual winters, as I say, it's a very hard thing. As I said, predicting hydroclimate is hard to do. Predicting flooding is even harder. But then predicting crop growth is another layer of complexity.

[00:30:50] You can only suggest whether in a certain part of the world crop yields will be potentially higher or lower than normal. But that's, you know, you've got to be aware of the uncertainty. Well, I think prediction being a problem has been the theme really of what we're talking about. Yeah, because the world is, you have to be honest about, you know, the weather and the weather and the climate of the real world, which is what policymakers want. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:31:14] But we can say or can't we say that if it is a more extreme event this year, it's most likely more extreme as a result of climate change? Or is that too big a call? That's too big a call because it's one event. Yeah. OK. So we can't, we can certainly make, you know, I'm sure that people after this event, if it is a very big event, will come and have a think about how likely this event would have been in a world without climate change.

[00:31:42] But with one event, it's very difficult to say. All right. Well, Manoj, thank you so much for at least giving us the sense that what could happen. But thank you. And yeah, batten down the hatches, I think, is probably the best outcome of this, whatever the event is, will actually be. Manoj, thank you. Thanks, Manoj. All right. OK, thank you. And next week, we're going to go back to where Donald Trump's going next, because obviously he's got a situation in the Middle East, which he's never going to resolve. Never going to resolve that. It's going to be there forever. But what's, but in the meantime, that's not going to stop him.

[00:32:12] Where's next? Is it going to go to Greenland? Well, Cuba, we have talked about this quite recently, back in March, but it's coming back into focus because it does now seem to be almost imminent, perhaps not in the way of invasion, maybe just reducing the place to a total shambles, where they invite Donald Trump to come in. That's what it seems to be. And the guy we spoke to, in fact, only back in March about all this, has just come back from Cuba.

[00:32:39] So he'll give us the very latest information on what is happening, what life is like when you've got no energy, got no power, got no kind of economy, really. How much of that is America's making? He's sort of like America saying, well, let's create an impossible situation for you so that you're really glad when we come in and take over the joint. That seems to be what's happening because I think, I mean, certainly hearing now, people almost saying, yes, come in, US, because nothing could be worse than this. But we'll find out. And so will they.

[00:33:07] And, you know, is this going to be the next thing? All right, that's next week on The Y Curve. Join us for that. We'll see you then. The Y Curve.