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No Atlantic hurricanes by Sept. 12 breaks a 60-year record

accuweather.com

45 points by RickJWagner · 42 comments

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nerdsniper

The lack of hurricanes also means that heat is not being removed from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, future hurricanes are likely to be more powerful and more frequent.

https://news.wfsu.org/state-news/2026-08-31/rising-humid-hea...

  • yanslookup

    And marine populations will suffer. Changes in currents will affect shipping. Overall a disaster.

  • ProAm

    This does happen every El Niño this years is pretty wild. Every local forecasters is saying "IDFK" and they are right. The the great Atlantic conveyor also starts to die this year we are in for evolution!

  • monster_truck

    Came here to say this.

    I saw someone call out the stock performance of $OC (shingles) vs strong el ninos... it seems so obvious. What else is like that?

tito

This El Niño is off the charts for any ever recorded in human history.

Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came to AirMiners to tell us about what's next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Xu_H3Wo8o

In 1877, 50 million people starved to death from El Niño. The charts are looking far worse in 2026 (thankfully our supply chains and infrastructure are much better today)

We can't stop the storms but we can work to avert the impacts and save lives.

We're building tools at: https://elninoready.earth

One thing we need help with is how to provide detailed recommendations per city/address to people based on historical El Niños. What are local emergency notification services, where can you get free sandbags, should you expect floods, droughts, tornadoes? What backup services are there if 911 goes down? (If you have ideas, here's our github: https://github.com/titojankowski/elninoready)

Our first step is bringing together people at New York Climate Week so that's what's up on the site right now.

AMA

  • ProAm

    > Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather

    Who?? The ecommerce website wants us to listen to the climate scientist they bought?

eagerpace

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

  • Veliladon

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

  • fhdkweig

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

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

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

  • yanslookup

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

    • gwerbin

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

  • WarOnPrivacy

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

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

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

    source: FL coastal resident and repeated hurricane relief worker.

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

  • ChrisMarshallNY

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

  • echelon

    El Nino decreases Atlantic hurricane activity.

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

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

  • monster_truck

    Oh it will. It's very fucking bad to not have had any yet

    • anonymousiam

      Just so I understand you correctly:

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

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

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

      • anon7000

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

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

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

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

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

treetalker

The end of the post touches on it, but couldn’t this be foreshadowing the really bad El Niño that they’ve been talking about?

mindslight

The Sharpie works!!

wewewedxfgdf

Such good news.

  • fhdkweig

    Only in the Atlantic Ocean. In the Pacific, Hawaii has had back-to-back hurricanes for the last few weeks. Lala, Lowell, Karina, Norbert. They haven't made landfall there, but have come close enough to send flash floods and high storm surges.

  • vel0city

    No, not really. Massively fewer rain storms usually isn't good news in the long run. You kind of need rains to keep things from being too dry. I don't know about your body chemistry but water is pretty critical in mine.

    I'd love more storms where I'm at. Things have been exceptionally hot and dry. I don't want giant massive Cat 5 storms, but a severe lack of tropical storms and smaller hurricanes hasn't been good.

    And as others have mentioned, hurricanes end up cooling off the waters. The lack of these storms from developing due to atmospheric effects destroying them before they grow means the heat builds. So when El Nino goes away, we're likely to get even worse storms soon after.

mudil

Reminds me of Al Gore's movie poster.

unnamed76ri

Bill Nye told us that deadly hurricanes would increase if Kamala Harris wasn’t elected president. If I can’t trust Bill Nye, who can I trust?

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