Currently in San Francisco — June 9, 2023: Cloudy with a breeze

The weather, currently.

We now know a fossil fuel company was behind the removal of an art installation that criticized them. “Fencelines”, a series of wooden slats painted red, blue, white, and yellow were stationed near Chevron’s Richmond refinery with statements like “My home is not your profit” in April, but were gone by May. But Chevron removed them because it was on “their property”, though the art project’s organizers say there were given permission. It’s incredible to see the fragility of corporations profiting off our deteriorating well-being.

—Priya Shukla

What you need to know, currently.

El Niño has arrived, officially.

On Thursday, NOAA issued an El Niño advisory, meaning that two things have happened: 1) the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean is now unusually warm, and 2) the atmosphere above the tropical Pacific has shifted in response — favoring drier weather over Southeast Asia and Australia, and wetter weather over western South America.

El Niño is the world’s most powerful and important weather pattern, and recurs on average once every 3-5 years. When it does, it adds tremendous amounts of energy to the world’s weather, shifting everything from hurricane development to droughts, floods, and fires in almost every part of the globe. It’s like global warming on steroids.

There’s now a 56% chance that this El Niño becomes ‘strong’ — defined as a warming of the central tropical Pacific Ocean more than 1.5°C. The last time that happened was 2015-16 when El Niño sent global temperatures soaring to a new record high, kicked off the worst drought in the Caribbean in 500 years, and prompted a surge in global carbon emissions from wildfires in Australia, Indonesia, and North America.

-Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

Welcome to the new-and-improved Currently!

If you’re a big fan of Currently, please share us with a friend! Our brand-new referral program is a way to give our biggest fans direct ownership of our company. We are the first weather service in the world to do this, and we’ll have much more in the coming days on our hopes and dreams for member-ownership, as well as Currently as a whole.

Thank you for taking this exciting journey with us!

—Eric Holthaus