Typhoon Tip

Seems to be a cocktail of events ... the old 'chain of misfortune culminating in the plain crash' scenario. I do think that this event began years ago, so to speak ( mentioned the reciprocal thawing and refreezing aspect a while ago, too). I'm also wondering if water accumulating at the glacial-floor interface may have been partially instrumental. In this idea, the integrity of the ice being compromised, then, ...the floor friction can't hold the weight back from being 'lubricated' ...so all that was remaining was ice itself. Made for an easier instance of calving and away she went. Every good play on Broadway took months of preparation for just 2 hours of show.

The NINO is not super at this time The NINO is not causal in why this outlook above appears the way it does

Here's a not-so-novel aspect about ice vs water: when water freezes its volume necessarily expands by 12% to make room for the H20 molecules arranging geometrically into their crystalline position/lattice. That lattice then requires more space in order to achieve this hexagonal configuration among the handshaking molecules. etc... What may or may not be more novel is the application of this basic principle as partial triggering mechanism. If the combination of CC and summer sun have been periodically thawing and refreezing the glacial mass over and over again (decadal), the interstitial integrity of glacial body may have cracked. Fracturing over recent years. Basically we're just describing the glacial destabilization near it's front edge and the pooling of near freezing water and seepage that goes on with the retreating. It's a complex system, but at the end of the day, epistemic awareness ... We can either spend 20 years formulating a high degree confidence polynomial mathematical expression that describes a system to within 99% certainty, proving what we already know, or, we just have to accept that expanding and contracting the ice through these processes will weaken it over time. This both increases calving events, in turn increasing the probability for this to have occurred. Increasing glacial melt --> filling glacial lakes and kettle geological features --> upstream calving then careens forth and there we go

It's hard to parse out what did what and how much, in the run up to this specific states and scenarios. In considering France's issues with agriculture, this was likely set into motion over decades when looking at this as an epistemic/a-priori approach. I'm not personally with any confidence that this specific 'onsetting' warm ENSO has much to do with it frankly. Quick primer ( I get it that you know this.. just for the general reader). As we know El Ninos typically begin to formulate during summers, then maturing during autumn and early winters. This one appears to fit that climatology so far... More importantly, during these prefaces of onset the wholesale seasonal gradients are still flaccid. That's a crucial consideration in the presumptions. Because... the gradient determines where the jet structures will ultimately bias; that becomes the El Nino characterization if/when the El Nino is sufficiently coupled. As an aside, the warming total atmosphere associated to CC is limiting the coupling. Why? because the gradient of winter is being lifted to higher latitudes - that is distancing that latitude (geometrically), so the coupling is getting amorphously defined. Enters RONI... Relative ONI is pure statistical approach to the resulting slipping/lowering observed effectivity. The 2nd aspect that makes the causal parsing a challenge is that the heat and drought has been an improving frequency and specter for decades, doing so regardless of a ENSO variances in either direction over that time. Having said all that, here's where there's an angle: I think there is a gray area in the completer understanding as to what actually triggers the modal oscillation of ENSO. In that area of speculation, conjecture and hypothesis, it may yet be shown that the circulation modes outside the tropics are somehow transitively causing the tropical wind patterns to occasionally reverse. Like the noise over time organizes into a sinusoidal harmonic feedback, at a whole-Earth atmosphere scale. If something like that were taking place then it would be entirely possible/reasonable that machinery 'switching gears' did something to specifically enhance France's agricultural problems now. But, since the specter of heat and drought goes back years, parsing out what's to blame ...mm intuitively argues it's just a CC related matter in general. At some point, if the CC continues to change .. it may herald in a new behavior there and abroad. It's areas of the curve favor a phenomenon typology.

so it begins...

Wiz' is gonna have a thread some day that's titled "May 1st - October 2nd, convective episodes so plenty I'm totally bunning out"

problem is dry air...

There's no debate. The objective reality is that this was caused by destabilization of geological mass (ice/rock/water) failing and thus accelerating from elevation. The +flux (which means increase) of melt water destabilizes the previous the geologic structural integrity that previously held glacial lake mass, and potentially destabilizing land mass(es) made to fail, at bay. A collapse was inevitable. Occurring at significant elevation provided excessive momentum - a structural failure that went on to become mass-gaining. The land, ice, or both-slide probably inundated and ultimate pushed out glacial lake, and then en masse accelerating down the highly sloped region... Subsequently gaining more mass most every time in swept through and acquired any alpine lakes and kettle nadirs that may have been transiently filled with seasonal melt ...etc etc.. along the way. Until there's amassed biblical torrent with so much crushing momentum and weight it was capable of setting of seismology detection. That's it as far as cause. The rest is humanity building civility in the fertile/convenience of an alpine river valley, thus inherently placed in potential harms way. It is important to mention that anytime you place civility under a geological feature, eventually, given time, something like this is going to happen. It is perhaps of even more importance to mention, the acceleration of climate change is going to bring about this sort of thing with increased frequency. This is so for a lot of geo-physical reasons; each case analyzed precisely. In this case, the chain of events described above would likely occur at some point in geology, anyway, but the relationship to rapidly non-restoring climate change is directly provable/moved it up in geological history. Everywhere around the world where these risk zones that can be sought out and identified should be addressed. Now. But won't be... so that people can instead get off on these marvelously dystopian horror shows, watching what are likelier than not to become regular matinees as we go on blithely in denial or just stupidly forward in (humanity's end time?) history. Just wait until Greenland goes on ahead does the impossible whence its land-locked ice slides on off into the ocean, setting off a 22 ft global tsunamis that doesn't run back out to sea after it sweeps in for lunch and eats 3.8 billion lives one single afternoon. Or Antarctica... Luckily for humanity huh, these regions are "presumed" be slower contributors to sea-level rise. Weee. But, no one thought an entire planet and all it its integrated systems, could up and rise a half degree C in the spring of 2023 ... and stay there, either. Has anyone else paused in a moment of startling realization that we are living in an era where the impossible actually happens? By the way, the Greenland massive landslide in September 2023, remember? The one that set off a 200M mega-tsunami through the Dickson Fjord, it was also seismically detectable, worldwide for that matter. The planet rang like a bell for nine days.

Wouldn't shock me if ensuing administration applies referendums, if not immediately repeals when and where legislative rules allow, many of the changes that have been making headlines during this ... quirk of history BS that seems like an infinitely long 4 years in an asylum run by inmates

It's deeper than that ... It actually is an attempt to atone for the weakening correlation that's been observed in climate recency. Not wanting to get into a whole pedantic tl:dr but correlations exists between two points because there is a physical relationship between them. In the context of ENSO, as the whole planet's been warming outside the ENSO girdle with accelerating d(C), the gradient is shallowing. That shallowing gradient means the (particularly warm ) ENSO phases are not coupling to the hemisphere(s) outside the <= subtropical regions as deeply. Climate Prediction Center says it right in their definition, "..RONI is one measure of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and other indices can confirm whether features consistent with a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon accompanied these periods..." RONI is an attempt to tighten the correlation back up by accounting for the whole systemic warming, which offsets the climate bases of ENSO alone. So, using the RONI outlook should ( in principle ) show better impact/effectivity scoring. Heh, it's why Ray and I and others are keenly interested in this espoused ensuing super NINO - it's the best opportunity to date to test that. Really ... all of this is necessary because the climate change has out paced the usefulness of using a static climate inference to gauge the intensity of warm(cool) ENSO.

the act itself was political. don't kid yourself

Some may find this Univ. of Michigan study interesting... "...We don't see a time in the past where El Niños have been as strong as today, and we show that the strength of El Niño changes in parallel with warming global temperatures,..." https://phys.org/news/2026-08-el-nios-intense-years-previous.html "..This event is superimposed on global warming, and it's likely to supercharge the temperature increase that we would normally see from greenhouse gases. There are forecasts that we might get as hot as 1.7 or 1.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, which is quite a bit higher than the current record..." I've been saying this myself ... the super position of the +ENSO with CC is likely to cause synergistic results - they're naming temperatures. But, it's more broadly implicating then just temperature; put another way, makes us all prone to experiencing unusual event.

Between that ongoing greedy shit down there and that plume of toxic cirrus that pumped over during max heat hour ...that oughta bout sum it up for our neck of the woods

Could not have more perfectly timed a butt bangin' cirrus plume

Right ... and "New America" blithely so named because it stole the land from the "old Americans"