Stop the track­ing cir­cus.

Tired of mis­lead­ing cookie ban­ners? The EU Commission has fi­nally pro­posed a so­lu­tion: set your pri­vacy pref­er­ences in the browser once, and never see an­other ban­ner. Unfortunately, the track­ing in­dus­try is push­ing back — and so far, they’ve been suc­cess­ful. We need YOUR help to #KillTheCookieBanner!

Cookie ban­ners are made to trick you into waiv­ing your rights

You may think that EU pri­vacy law re­quires cookie ban­ners. But the law is clear: on­line track­ing is pro­hib­ited by de­fault.

Therefore, the track­ing in­dus­try needs you to waive your rights. That’s why they in­vented cookie ban­ners, which of­ten are de­lib­er­ately mis­lead­ing as well as an­noy­ing.

This re­sults in up to 90% of peo­ple say­ing “YES” — even though only around 3% ac­tu­ally want to be tracked on­line. This sys­tem is bro­ken by de­sign.

The so­lu­tion: au­to­mat­i­cally com­mu­ni­cate your pri­vacy pref­er­ence

In Autumn 2025, as part of a big­ger le­gal re­form*, the EU Commission fi­nally pro­posed a so­lu­tion to the cookie ban­ner prob­lem: au­to­mated sig­nals that would com­mu­ni­cate your pri­vacy pref­er­ences be­tween your de­vice and web­sites or apps. You could then choose whether you want to ac­cept, refuse, or limit track­ing.

This idea is nei­ther new nor com­plex. Your browser al­ready au­to­mat­i­cally sig­nals other pref­er­ences to web­sites, for ex­am­ple your pre­ferred lan­guage. In some US states, such sig­nals for pri­vacy pref­er­ences are al­ready legally sup­ported.

The track­ing lobby fights to keep the cookie ban­ner

This would be a sim­ple so­lu­tion. But the track­ing in­dus­try seems afraid that if you can ex­press your pref­er­ences ef­fi­ciently, it could re­sult in lower con­sent rates for track­ing.

Following lob­by­ing ef­forts spear­headed by Google and the track­ing in­dus­try, sev­eral Member States are now block­ing the EU Commission’s pro­posal to get rid of the cookie ban­ner.

But not only that: in­dus­try groups are also lob­by­ing the European Parliament to re­ject the pro­posal.

We need YOUR help!

That’s where you come in: the fight to kill the cookie ban­ner is far from over. The Member States and the European Parliament have not yet de­cided on their po­si­tion on the is­sue yet.

You can take ac­tion by con­tact­ing your rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the European Parliament or in your Member State and ex­press your frus­tra­tion.

*This pro­posal for pri­vacy sig­nals is part of an EU law re­form called the Digital Omnibus. Most other parts of this re­form are prob­lem­atic and would weaken peo­ple’s rights. We want to make clear that we do not sup­port these other as­pects of the pro­posed re­form.

*This pro­posal for pri­vacy sig­nals is part of an EU law re­form called the Digital Omnibus. Most other parts of this re­form are prob­lem­atic and would weaken peo­ple’s rights. We want to make clear that we do not sup­port these other as­pects of the pro­posed re­form.

Serving tech en­thu­si­asts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analy­sis and ad­vice you can trust.

A hot potato: A fed­eral case in Atlanta is rais­ing ques­tions about a pri­vacy-fo­cused mo­bile op­er­at­ing sys­tem, with pros­e­cu­tors ar­gu­ing that its fea­tures were used to erase ev­i­dence. The US Department of Justice is at­tempt­ing to pros­e­cute Atlanta res­i­dent Sam Tunick un­der a fed­eral statute that makes it a crime to de­stroy prop­erty in an ef­fort to pre­vent it from be­ing seized.

The case cen­ters on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source op­er­at­ing sys­tem that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users en­ter a pass­code to wipe a de­vice clean.

Experts said the le­gal ap­proach is un­usual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an op­er­at­ing sys­tem. “It’s con­cern­ing — and sends the mes­sage that [GrapheneOS] is crim­i­nal by de­fault,” said Christophe Boutry, a cy­ber­se­cu­rity and sur­veil­lance ex­pert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, se­nior staff tech­nol­o­gist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a sim­i­lar case.

The in­ci­dent be­gan at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on January 24 of last year. Tunick had just re­turned from a trip to the Dominican Republic when he was stopped for ques­tion­ing. According to court tes­ti­mony, fed­eral agents had al­ready cir­cu­lated his name and photo in­ter­nally, say­ing he was un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion for “suspected ter­ror­ism ac­tiv­i­ties” be­cause of his al­leged as­so­ci­a­tion with the move­ment against Cop City.

Tunick was taken to a sec­ondary screen­ing room, where mul­ti­ple agents ques­tioned him. A mo­tion filed by his de­fense ar­gues the in­ter­ro­ga­tion fo­cused on child sex­ual abuse ma­te­r­ial as a pre­text for in­ves­ti­gat­ing his con­nec­tions to the protest move­ment. The mo­tion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was de­nied each time. According to the same fil­ing, agents did not pre­sent a war­rant or read him his rights.

Government at­tor­neys and agents pushed back dur­ing Monday’s hear­ing. They de­scribed the en­counter as a rou­tine air­port in­spec­tion. Larry Findley, a Customs and Border Protection of­fi­cer, said agents were “looking for any­thing that’s pro­hib­ited.”

During the ques­tion­ing, agents re­peat­edly asked Tunick to un­lock his phone and warned they would seize it if he re­fused. When he fi­nally pro­vided a pass­code, the phone ap­peared to restart. The de­fense mo­tion states that “the screen went blank, flashed sev­eral times, and the phone ap­peared to restart,” re­sult­ing in the loss of data.

The wipe is now cen­tral to the case. Prosecutors are treat­ing it as an in­ten­tional act to de­stroy ev­i­dence, while the de­fense ar­gues that the search vi­o­lated Tunick’s con­sti­tu­tional rights and that the ev­i­dence should be sup­pressed.

The case raises ques­tions about which con­sti­tu­tional rights ap­ply at US bor­ders, in­clud­ing in­ter­na­tional air­ports, where au­thor­i­ties have broader search pow­ers. A judge is not ex­pected to rule on the de­fense mo­tion un­til at least late October.

GrapheneOS is de­signed to im­prove pri­vacy and se­cu­rity on Pixel phones. Supporters say those tools are le­git­i­mate se­cu­rity pro­tec­tions, not ev­i­dence of crim­i­nal in­tent. Boutry pointed to France and Spain, where au­thor­i­ties have strug­gled to gain ac­cess to se­cured de­vices. He said au­thor­i­ties have treated the use of GrapheneOS it­self as sus­pi­cious. In Catalonia, Spain, po­lice have been pro­fil­ing peo­ple car­ry­ing Pixel phones, as­sum­ing they have GrapheneOS in­stalled and are drug deal­ers or gang mem­bers.

“The main goal [of the op­er­at­ing sys­tem] is pro­tec­tion of pri­vacy,” Boutry said. “They’re our phones and the state can’t tell us how to use them.”

The case is tied to on­go­ing op­po­si­tion to Cop City, a $109 mil­lion po­lice train­ing fa­cil­ity that opened last spring. The pro­ject has drawn op­po­si­tion from ac­tivists con­cerned about po­lice mil­i­ta­riza­tion and en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts. Law en­force­ment of­fi­cials have de­fended it as nec­es­sary for train­ing and re­cruit­ment.

Previous at­tempts to pros­e­cute pro­test­ers at the state level have foundered, while fed­eral au­thor­i­ties have more re­cently stepped in, in­clud­ing a sep­a­rate in­dict­ment an­nounced last month.

A work­ing model of the PostgreSQL en­gine

load­ing the city code…

Early, un­re­viewed pro­to­type. It al­most cer­tainly con­tains in­ac­cu­ra­cies in both the model and ex­pla­na­tions. Found one? Open an is­sue or send a pull re­quest.

Kimi K3

K3 is the next gen­er­a­tion of open fron­tier mod­els from Moonshot AI. It is the world’s first open 3T-class model, de­signed for fron­tier in­tel­li­gence across long-hori­zon cod­ing, knowl­edge work, and rea­son­ing.

What to ex­pect

New ar­chi­tec­ture built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals

Native agen­tic ca­pa­bil­i­ties: tool call­ing, brows­ing, and multi-step plan­ning

Extended con­text win­dow de­signed for repos­i­tory-scale code un­der­stand­ing

Open weights, re­leased right here on this page

Stay in the loop

Hit Like and Notify on re­lease and we will send you a sin­gle email the mo­ment the weights are pub­lic. No spam, just the drop.

Planned ar­ti­facts 1

moon­shotai/​Kimi-K3

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HTMX 4.0, the first JavaScript li­brary to re­lease ex­clu­sively on the Game Boy® plat­form!

Experience the power of HTMX, now on your fa­vorite portable hand­held.

Four lev­els of pickle-col­lect­ing ex­cite­ment.  Squish client-side JS down to size, avoid slop and, if you have the skills, de­feat Warren to un­lock the htmx 4.0 source code!

Be the hero that the web needs!

Quality is guar­an­teed. If there is a print er­ror or vis­i­ble qual­ity is­sue, we’ll re­place or re­fund it.

Because the prod­ucts are made to or­der, we do not ac­cept gen­eral re­turns or siz­ing-re­lated re­turns.

Such a for­ma­tion, also called a cu­mu­lonim­bus flam­ma­gen­i­tus cloud, can be seen dur­ing vol­canic erup­tions — or, as in this case, when a wild­fire roasts the air near the ground, caus­ing it to rise quickly.

The ris­ing air cools and be­comes a cloud, or fire cloud: a tur­bu­lent mass that can gen­er­ate its own winds that worsen fires. If it be­comes very large it can even gen­er­ate light­ning.

Hitherto, they have only re­ally been seen in wild­fire-prone Australia and North America. NASA calls them the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”.

What causes them?

FNSPF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Eric Brocardi:

“The rise in ground tem­per­a­ture at the heart of the blaze is so ex­treme that the in­tense heat surges up­ward in a col­umn, meet­ing cooler air masses at the top. This con­tact cre­ates a py­rocu­mu­lonim­bus — or fire cloud — though un­for­tu­nately one de­void of mois­ture. This smoke cloud gen­er­ates its own weather sys­tem, caus­ing any­thing in its path to spon­ta­neously com­bust.

“Lightning forms within the cloud, strik­ing the em­bers on the ground and fur­ther fu­elling the fire … It pro­duces a low, rum­bling sound.

“While this type of fire oc­curs reg­u­larly in Canada and Australia, it is un­prece­dented in France.”

Can it be brought un­der con­trol?

“We are deal­ing with a so-called ‘convective’ fire that cre­ates its own winds — winds that con­stantly shift di­rec­tion, un­like a stan­dard fire that spreads in a con­i­cal pat­tern. The re­sult is that it spreads in every di­rec­tion and de­vel­ops mul­ti­ple fire fronts, mak­ing the sit­u­a­tion com­pletely un­pre­dictable.

“We don’t know how the blaze will spread; the fire front is con­stantly shift­ing. We can­not fight it di­rectly. It’s a David-versus-Goliath sce­nario: the idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there.

“Salvation will come ei­ther from the sky — in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heav­ily for three days — or by find­ing a way to steer the fire to­ward a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for ex­am­ple.”

Do the fire­fight­ers have any hope?

“We have reached a point of ‘operational im­pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that re­quires us to ac­cept the need for strate­gic re­treat — to un­der­stand and ac­knowl­edge a nat­ural force be­yond our con­trol.

“It calls for … know­ing what can be done and, above all, what can­not. The sit­u­a­tion on the ground is de­fen­sive rather than of­fen­sive; it is a war-like sce­nario where we are un­der con­stant bom­bard­ment and must get every­one to safety.

“We re­alise we are fac­ing a sit­u­a­tion where we are pow­er­less. Yet, that pow­er­less­ness leaves no room for de­spair. It is cer­tain that all the ef­forts be­ing made will yield re­sults. It is out of the ques­tion for the fire­fight­ers to feel that their work on the ground is in vain.

“Every sin­gle ac­tion — de­fend­ing crit­i­cal sites, res­cu­ing an­i­mals — breathes new life into their ef­forts, dri­ven by their fierce de­ter­mi­na­tion. There is a sup­port force ready to re­lieve them.

“However, not all fire­fight­ers from across France can sim­ply con­verge here, be­cause the risk ex­ists every­where. We have to hold the line.”

(Interviewed by AFP jour­nal­ist Juliette Collen)

© 2026 AFP

this is a sim­pli­fied viz · for sci­ence-grade ren­der­ing → Synchray.jl

London Gatwick has be­come the first UK air­port to in­tro­duce ro­botic park­ing, al­low­ing pas­sen­gers to leave their car in a pri­vate drop-off cabin. Autonomous ro­bots park it in a se­cure stor­age area and car own­ers don’t need to hand over their keys.

The new ser­vice, launched in part­ner­ship with Stanley Robotics, is now avail­able to book ahead of its first cus­tomer jour­neys in August. Eliminating the has­sle of search­ing for a park­ing space, the tech­nol­ogy gets pas­sen­gers from their car to the ter­mi­nal more quickly while mak­ing more ef­fi­cient use of air­port park­ing ca­pac­ity.

How Gatwick’s ro­botic park­ing works

Instead of dri­ving around a car park look­ing for an avail­able space, pas­sen­gers sim­ply drive into a pri­vate en­closed cabin near the South Terminal and scan their book­ing.

After park­ing the ve­hi­cle in­side the cabin, they leave the car and keep their keys. A Stanley Robotics au­tonomous park­ing ro­bot then slides un­der­neath the ve­hi­cle, lifts it by its tyres and trans­ports it to a se­cure stor­age area.

Passengers pro­vide their re­turn flight de­tails dur­ing the book­ing process, al­low­ing the sys­tem to mon­i­tor their ar­rival and have the ve­hi­cle wait­ing in a col­lec­tion cabin when they re­turn.

The fa­cil­ity is within walk­ing dis­tance of the South Terminal, al­though a free shut­tle bus is also avail­able.

No need to hand over your keys

Unlike tra­di­tional valet park­ing, pas­sen­gers re­tain pos­ses­sion of their keys through­out their trip.

According to London Gatwick, this of­fers ad­di­tional peace of mind while the au­to­mated sys­tem han­dles park­ing and re­trieval.

If pas­sen­gers ac­ci­den­tally leave an es­sen­tial item in the ve­hi­cle af­ter drop-off, on-site staff will be avail­able to re­trieve emer­gency items.

Helping air­ports use park­ing space more ef­fi­ciently

Robotic park­ing sys­tems are de­signed to im­prove the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence while also max­imis­ing the num­ber of ve­hi­cles that can be stored within a given foot­print.

Because no one needs to ac­cess the ve­hi­cles once parked, cars can be po­si­tioned much closer to­gether than in a con­ven­tional car park. This helps air­ports in­crease park­ing ca­pac­ity with­out build­ing ad­di­tional park­ing in­fra­struc­ture.

Stanley Robotics has de­ployed sim­i­lar sys­tems in­ter­na­tion­ally. The Gatwick in­stal­la­tion is its first de­ploy­ment at a UK air­port.

Supporting Gatwick’s fu­ture growth

Oli Bedford, Head of Airport Access, Marketing and Commercial Products at London Gatwick, de­scribed the ser­vice as “a real game-changer.”

“It’s quick, easy and com­pletely has­sle-free — and you even get to keep your keys, giv­ing ex­tra peace of mind while you’re en­joy­ing your hol­i­day,” Bedford said.

Stanley Robotics CEO Clément Boussard said the tech­nol­ogy would help ad­dress fu­ture park­ing de­mand as the air­port con­tin­ues to grow.

“We are thrilled to part­ner with London Gatwick, a global leader in avi­a­tion, to de­ploy our so­lu­tion and ad­dress their crit­i­cal park­ing ca­pac­ity chal­lenges as they pre­pare for sig­nif­i­cant growth,” Boussard said. “This pro­ject marks a ma­jor mile­stone for Stanley Robotics in the UK, and we are proud to bring our in­no­v­a­tive tech­nol­ogy to one of the world’s most for­ward-think­ing air­ports.”

Gatwick ro­botic park­ing ve­hi­cle re­quire­ments

The ro­botic park­ing ser­vice at Gatwick is avail­able for most stan­dard pas­sen­ger cars, sub­ject to the fol­low­ing lim­its:

Maximum weight: 2.6 tonnes

Maximum height: 2.3 me­tres

Maximum wheel­base: 3.3 me­tres

Maximum wheel di­am­e­ter: 21 inches

The ser­vice must be booked in ad­vance. Same-day drive-up park­ing is not avail­able.

When did the word “compromise” be­come vil­i­fied?

Compromise is nei­ther good nor bad, it’s some­thing we do every day. It’s de­ci­sion mak­ing. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more im­por­tant than an­other. It’s find­ing the right bal­ance be­tween two com­pet­ing de­sires.

Which compromises you make   — that’s what mat­ters. Choosing the right com­pro­mises is what de­fines good de­sign.

Companies like to tout prod­ucts as “uncompromising” or hav­ing “no com­pro­mises”. That’s im­pos­si­ble. Once you de­cide on an ap­proach, you in­her­ently de­cide against other op­tions.

Another word for com­pro­mise is “tradeoff”. The word “tradeoff” con­veys the re­la­tion­ship be­tween strengths and weak­nesses. You are trad­ing a weak­ness for a strength.

Having an opin­ion­ated set of trade­offs ex­poses your ap­proach to a set of weak­nesses. The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker some­thing else will be. That’s okay! Making those dif­fi­cult choices is what peo­ple pay you for. You should be proud of your com­pro­mises.

My fa­vorite prod­ucts are opin­ion­ated. They make a clear state­ment about what they are not good at, in fa­vor of be­ing much bet­ter at some­thing else.

Appealing to every­one is im­pos­si­ble. If you make some­thing that aims to be good across a broad range of ca­pa­bil­i­ties, you are choos­ing not to be ex­cep­tional at any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. That might be the right com­pro­mise for your au­di­ence, but it’s def­i­nitely a com­pro­mise.

Good de­sign is opin­ion­ated. Good de­sign is choos­ing the right com­pro­mise for your au­di­ence.

I’m gen­er­ally pretty mea­sured in how I dis­cuss cli­mate data. There has been only one time in re­cent years when I was truly shocked: when global tem­per­a­tures came in for September 2023 at a full 0.5C warmer than any prior September on record.1 Once un­til to­day, that is. With the July runs now in from 667 en­sem­ble mem­bers across 14 dif­fer­ent sea­sonal fore­cast mod­els, it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since re­li­able records be­gan — it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blow­ing mar­gin.

The multi-model me­dian for the even­t’s peak (measured as de­trended sea sur­face tem­per­a­ture anom­alies in the Niño 3.4 re­gion of the trop­i­cal Pacific) cur­rently stands at 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hot­ter than the prior record of 2.75C set in 2015 – 16. For con­text, the gap be­tween the strongest and the fifth strongest El Niño of the past 150 years is only about 0.5C. The mod­els are fore­cast­ing some­thing out­side the en­ve­lope of any­thing we have ever ob­served.

A few things stand out in this fig­ure. First, no event in a cen­tury and a half of ob­ser­va­tions has ever pushed mean­ing­fully past 2.75C. The leg­endary 1877 – 78 event comes clos­est, in a sta­tis­ti­cal dead heat with 2015 – 16 (2.73C vs 2.75C, well within the un­cer­tainty of 19th-century ship data). Second, the mid­dle 80% of this year’s fore­cast en­sem­ble sits en­tirely at or above that all-time record: even the low end of the plume (2.8C) grazes it. Around 91% of en­sem­ble mem­bers ex­ceed the 2015 – 16 record at their peak.

To see what this would look like as the event un­folds, we can com­pare the fore­cast tra­jec­tory against the five strongest events ever ob­served, month by month through the de­vel­op­ment year and into the fol­low­ing spring.

What is re­mark­able here is not just the level but the tra­jec­tory. The 2026 event is de­vel­op­ing faster than 1997 – 98, the pre­vi­ous gold stan­dard for ex­plo­sive El Niño on­sets. And un­like 2015 which started its year al­ready warm from a pre­cur­sor event, this one launched from gen­uinely La Niña-ish con­di­tions in January.

Of course, a multi-model me­dian can hide a lot of dis­agree­ment, so it is worth look­ing at where each in­di­vid­ual model puts the peak. The fig­ure be­low shows the dis­tri­b­u­tion of mem­ber peaks across all 14 mod­els.

Every sin­gle mod­el’s me­dian peak lands at very strong (”super”) El Niño in­ten­sity, and all but one (JAMSTEC’s SINTEX-F, at 2.2C) put their me­dian above the 2015 – 16 record. Model agree­ment this strong is un­usual, though I’d note that agree­ment is not the same thing as skill as I dis­cuss later on.

Long-time read­ers may re­call that in a warm­ing world, the raw Niño 3.4 anom­aly risks con­flat­ing El Niño with the broader ocean warm­ing trend. NOAA’s an­swer is the rel­a­tive ONI (RONI), which sub­tracts the trop­i­cal-mean SST anom­aly to iso­late the ENSO sig­nal. In RONI terms the record holder is ac­tu­ally 1982 – 83 (a peak monthly value of 2.69C), not 2015 – 16. However, even us­ing RONI the multi-model me­dian in 11 of the 14 mod­els shows a record event.

Putting the two to­gether: mod­els give a ~91% chance of a record peak in Niño 3.4 terms and ~77% in RONI terms this year. Whichever way you slice the in­dex, the fore­cast says the same thing: this is more likely than not to be the strongest El Niño ever ob­served.

So how did we get here? The fore­cast has been build­ing all spring. The fig­ure be­low shows how each mod­el’s pro­jec­tion evolved from its March run through its July run, against ob­served monthly con­di­tions.

Nearly every panel shows the same thing: each suc­ces­sive run warmer than the last, across five months and thir­teen in­de­pen­dent mod­el­ing sys­tems.2 This pat­tern of sus­tained re­vi­sion as ini­tial­iza­tion im­proves is the clas­sic sig­na­ture of a real in­ten­si­fy­ing event rather than model noise. The rea­son is vis­i­ble in the black line: ob­served con­di­tions kept out­run­ning the fore­casts. (Though credit where credit is due: NCAR’s CESM1 was call­ing ~4C back in March when that looked ab­surd, and I and oth­ers called it out as un­re­al­is­tic at the time. The en­sem­ble has since con­verged to­ward it.)

The com­bined multi-model pic­ture makes the same point more con­cisely.

The peak me­dian has climbed from ~2.8C in the March runs to 3.6C in July — though no­tably the re­vi­sions are de­cel­er­at­ing (+0.5C, +0.14C, +0.14C over the last three cy­cles), sug­gest­ing the fore­cast is con­verg­ing rather than still es­ca­lat­ing.

It is also worth look­ing at what this event looks like spa­tially. The fig­ure be­low maps each mod­el’s SST anom­aly field at its own fore­cast peak month.

The clas­sic east-Pa­cific El Niño tongue is there in every model. I’d flag CMCC as the out­lier to dis­count: its 5.3C peak sits a full 1.3C above the next warmest model. Because we are look­ing at the multi-model me­dian, even dis­count­ing CMCC does­n’t change the over­all fore­cast mean­ing­fully.

Meanwhile, the ocean is not wait­ing for the mod­els. Daily SSTs in the Niño 3.4 re­gion are al­ready run­ning around 2C above their era-ad­justed av­er­age — the thresh­old for a very strong (”super”) El Niño if sus­tained — and it is only mid-July. The fig­ure be­low puts this in con­text, show­ing the daily Niño 3.4 anom­aly for every year in the satel­lite record, with each year mea­sured against its own er­a’s cli­ma­tol­ogy so the long-term warm­ing trend does­n’t mess up the com­par­i­son.

No prior year in the 45-year record has been any­where near this warm this early: not 1997 (+1.6C at this date), the pre­vi­ous bench­mark for an ex­plo­sive on­set, and not 2015 (+1.3C). And El Niño al­most al­ways peaks near the end of the cal­en­dar year — typ­i­cally be­tween November and January, oc­ca­sion­ally as early as October — so the physics of ENSO’s sea­sonal phase-lock­ing says there is likely a good deal of in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion still to come.3

What does all this mean for global tem­per­a­tures? Because global tem­per­a­ture lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this even­t’s warm­ing will land in 2027, which is now shap­ing up to be a gen­uinely alarm­ing year and the warmest on record by a siz­able mar­gin. But a strength­en­ing El Niño does load the dice for late 2026: our dash­board cur­rently gives this year a non-triv­ial chance (~28%) of edg­ing out 2024 as the warmest on record, up from ~13% at the start of the month..

I want to end with an im­por­tant caveat about these num­bers: the mod­els have never been ver­i­fied in this ter­ri­tory. Seasonal fore­cast sys­tems have real, demon­strated skill at this lead time for or­di­nary events, but no en­sem­ble has ever fore­cast (and then ver­i­fied against) a 3.6C El Niño, be­cause one has never hap­pened. Model agree­ment is re­as­sur­ing, but it is not proof. But the un­cer­tain­ties can cut both ways, and the ob­served ocean, not just the mod­els, is al­ready in un­charted wa­ters.

As al­ways, for daily up­dates on the El Niño fore­cast and global tem­per­a­tures head over to our Climate Dashboard.

1

I re­ferred to it as “absolutely gob­s­mack­ingly ba­nanas” at the time, which might be the only time some­thing I said ever went prop­erly vi­ral on­line.

2

The SINTEX-F model is not in­cluded in this plot as I only be­gan track­ing it in July.

3

The lone ex­cep­tion in the mod­ern record is the un­usual two-year 1986 – 88 event, which reached its ONI max­i­mum in August 1987. Every other strong event since 1950 peaked be­tween October and January.

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