Was woken this morning by extremely heavy rains and thunder in the Halifax area. We've been getting a surprising number of these kinds of events in this weird weather summer.
There's certainly plenty to be said about global climate change and the increasing amount of bad weather around - but people who remember the 1990s may also want to note the return of an old nemesis: El Niño. Yes that's right, the baby is back, raising ocean temperatures in the Pacific but also impacting weather patterns worldwide.
The Wikipedia article actually points out that El Niño's impact on eastern North America is often minimal, but on the other hand previous El Niños have wiped out ancient civilizations and may have caused the crop failures that helped trigger the French Revolution.
Regardless, I remember El Niño being blamed for a lot of problems back in the late 1990s, and led to a lot of doom-mongering - whether well-placed or not. Storms? El Niño. Drought? El Niño. "Beleaguered" Apple on the verge of collapse? El Niño. Girlfriend dumped you? El Niño.
Funnily enough, we had another really strong El Niño back in 2014-2016, but I don't remember a whole lot of discussion about it. To be fair, though, everyone was focused on other things at that time.
Well anyhow now it's back. Put on your Third Eye Blind and Bare Naked Ladies CDs, get your hands on a colourful iMac, buy some tech stocks, and invest in some good raingear, because I guess the 90s are back again, baby.
The one good thing about El Niño is at least it's cyclical, so it'll go away in a few years - while climate change likely won't. Like all retro trends, the new version is different but in a number of ways worse.
Oh well, when you get knocked down, you get back up again: