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Climate scientist at Berkeley Earth who analyzes global temperature records and warming projections, and a contributor to Carbon Brief.
Peru, the world's most important fishmeal exporter, turned a 10 June anchoveta suspension into a full closure in mid-August, the Guardian reported. The closure rests on a sea institute's El Niño advice. Feed buyers now depend on whether a second season opens.
Reality
Australia's Bureau of Meteorology says weekly average sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific are at a record weeks before El Niño's December peak. Planners in exposed sectors still have 1997-98 and 2015-16 as their closest guide, because the record describes ocean heat and no source yet counts this year's damage.
Reality
Copernicus put August 2026 at 16.96C, a hundredth of a degree above July 2023 and inside its own uncertainty, so it calls the month a tie. The clustering of the record months is the firmer finding.
Perspective Coverage
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Contiguous U.S. temperatures averaged 57.98 degrees F from January to August 2026, the hottest such stretch since records began in 1895, NOAA data show. Only a cooler-than-normal fall would keep 2026 from an annual record, Zeke Hausfather says.
Reality
Science News reports the El Nino region's daily sea surface anomaly hit 3.08 C on September 21, past the 3.02 C mark set in November 2015. NOAA's preferred index still ranks the 1997-98 event stronger, leaving two analogues in play for the coming seasons.
Perspective Coverage
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Molly Taft's Power Play column at Wired ties the power buildout to agents that give themselves hundreds of prompts per user request, and reports a major dearth of data on what one of those tasks consumes.
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Zeke Hausfather logged eight weeks of Claude Code use and priced the electricity behind it, which hands operators a user-side number for agent energy and a reason to stop dividing by chat prompts.
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The forecast signal is stronger than anything in the record since 1950. The observation underneath it is 1.4C, and that gap is the part worth watching.
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Mead and Powell set multiple record lows this month, and the reliable wet signal lands where the water is used rather than where the snowpack that refills them piles up.
Reality
Forecasters see this El Nino peaking well above the 2015 event and pushing 2027 to roughly 1.76C above preindustrial. That is a decade of trend warming delivered in one year.
Reality