San Francisco is having the rainiest December since 1997. The chart shows El Niño’s in the past. (The bottom chart) The warmest one before this was in 1997-98. Based solely on El Niño activity I expect this to be a rainy season.
San Francisco usually gets 22 inches of rain in a season. In the last El Niño year we got 48 inches. In the 1982 El Niño we got 39 inches in the one before that, 1972, we got 35 inches. We get significant amounts of rain in El Niño years.
That is not the reason for this blog.
My concern is global warming.
The bottom chart shows El Niño as plus and minus the average as red and blue. The top chart shows the global surface temperature above and below the average based on satellite data.
You can see that before 1997 the average temperature was flat from the beginning of the data in 1979. The temperature of the surface of our planet was 56 F. After 1998 it has been flat again but 0.4 F warmer.
So the El Niño of 1997-98 raised the average global earth temperature.
The big question is will the current El Niño do the same thing again?
We won’t know for about five years.
Trouble is, the Armageddon fanatics in the global warming religion control the public discussion of this issue. We will have to look at the data ourselves to see what the answer is.