Word: ni
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...crisis has been a "wakeup call" for Vietnam, says Ian Wilderspin, senior technical adviser for disaster risk management at the U.N. Development Program in Hanoi. The drought was predicted, he says, referring to last year's projections that El Niño would bring an unusually warm and dry winter. Yet Vietnam traditionally prepares for floods and typhoons, which are more dramatic and devastating when they hit. "Drought is a slow, silent disaster, which in the long run will have a more profound impact on peoples' livelihoods," he says...
...surface waters deeper. When that occurs in the central Pacific, "the ocean responds by sending that water to the East," where it rises again close to the equator, says MIT's Kerry Emanuel, a co-author of the new study. This is more or less what happens during El Ni...
...Nature, one possible factor is hurricanes. Scientists have long suspected that global warming could make hurricanes more intense somehow, but the new study suggests the effect works both ways: tropical cyclones could help drive up temperatures in response. "We're suggesting that hurricanes could have created a permanent El Niño condition," says Yale's Alexey Fedorov, lead author of the study. (See pictures of the effects of climate change...
...modern world, El Niño is a change in wind patterns and ocean currents that occurs every few years, bringing warmer water to the normally cool eastern Pacific; the result is major changes in storms and other weather effects, along with a temporary spike in global temperature. El Niño happened in 1998, for example, so if you were to take that year as a starting point for tracking global temperatures, you'd find that the following decade didn't see a lot of warming by comparison. (This is the origin of the myth that global warming...
...while El Niño alone couldn't create long-lasting warming - since it's really just a rearrangement of the ocean's heat, not an overall increase - it could trigger an environmental feedback cycle that could. When you make the tropics warmer, "you also get more evaporation, so there's more water vapor in the atmosphere, which is a strong greenhouse gas," says Fedorov. So intense hurricanes can create conditions that warm the planet overall, leading to even more intense hurricanes, leading to more water vapor, and so on - a loop that could plausibly help explain the Pliocene...