Big fan of this website: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

@nic_kup That is satellite based. Seems like it should have good coverage but the satellite record has run into problems with calibrating for satellite drift and between satellites. It is good for up to date daily reading but here we need comparison to 2016.

Therefore I prefer the established NASA or NOAA records. Hadley centre record also good but has been slower with data. Berkeley Earth is another possibility. Anyway we have been told it is NASA over a month ago so I don't think that should change.

@ChristopherRandles Thank you! Didn't know about the issues.

January and February 2024 have been hotter than the respective months in 2023

I’m surprised this is just at 53%

@DavidSasaki La Nina coming

@DavidSasaki

@WieDan Any good market about the probability of La Nina being active in each month?

@bohaska
These look fairly dead perhaps time to create new ones further out.

@bohaska I created a couple (for longer periods than 1 month):

https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/what-will-the-average-enso-oni-be-i

https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-it-be-el-nino-la-nina-or-neith

As the creator is inactive I say that if conflict between datasets arise NASA will be leading.
Just preventing a possible discussion in a year.

@WieDan Any rulings on what happens if the numbers for 2023 and 2024 are equal?

@StevenK It says "exceed" doesn't seem to require a ruling that's pretty straight forward.

@WieDan I see, so equal numbers resolve as NO?

@StevenK If it's not exceeding then that seems a NO yes

Per NOAA:

Looking ahead, there is a one-in-three chance that 2024 will be warmer than 2023, and a 99% chance that 2024 will rank among the top five warmest years.

NOAA was completely wrong in their early year estimates of 2023, giving only a 20% of 2023 being the warmest year as late as June. That being said, I still think this market is too high at 62% and am buying down based on this for a few reasons:

1. I believe their model was blindsided by how quickly El Niño came into force, which has now happened. I suspect that same error won't factor in as much in 2024.

2. This is maybe naive, but I think reversion to the mean is a reasonable heuristic here. 2023 was a surprisingly hot year. I would expect some correlation in the next year, but also some reversion.

Some of this in my head will come down to if this is a earlier or stronger El Niño. I tentatively believe it's peaked and is on the downswing, although we can expect it to still influence things for the next several months.

Epistemic status: Having fun googling and learning, absolutely no professional expertise in this whatsoever.

Edit: After 30 minutes more reading I no longer endorse my model of El Niño, and have updated more towards something like: "wow 2023 was really weirdly hot for reasons we don't understand, could be El Niño or could be something else". This is imo bullish for the reversion to the mean theory, but since that's seriously vibes-based it's extremely low confidence.

In particular this from Carbon Brief:

It is possible that this El Niño event is behaving differently and that the rapid switch from a rare and extended triple-dip La Niña event from late 2020 to the start of this year into strong El Niño conditions is resulting in a more rapid global temperature response.

But this remains speculative at this point and researchers are just starting to disentangle the causes of the unexpected extreme global heat the world experienced in 2023.  

I just read this from Carbon Brief too, which I think updated me upwards: https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-2023-smashes-records-for-surface-temperature-and-ocean-heat/

Seems like they're arguing for a coin toss, slightly biased towards hottest year. I'm comfortable with my position of NO at 60% but probably wouldn't go too much lower.

I'm curious if this market is going to (potentially irrationally?) tick upwards in the first few months, which will definitely be anomalously hot, without correcting for that fact that we expect cooling relative to monthly averages later in the year.

@DanMan314 IIRC NOAA's projections don't take El Nino into account other than indirectly through regression on the temperatures of past months. I think 50-60% is correct based on the projections in the Carbon Brief graph, which I think take all the important factors into account (mostly El Nino and regression to trend).

@StevenK Oh wow, I just checked and you’re right. I should have looked at the details of their model more, it’s literally just a regression over the prior years’ temperatures.

Looking at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly?time=1999..latest&facet=none, I see that there were 7 years out of the 24 years of the 21st century in which the temperature was lower than that last year (namely 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2017, 2018, and 2021; see the screenshot I captured). This suggests a subjective probability of (24 - 7)/24 = 70% (and I bet accordingly using manifol.io).

wow I feel like a whale, this might be the largest bet I've ever placed

@duck_master we have more info than this (el nino, regression to mean)

@duck_master I left a limit order up at 61% if you want to take me up on it.

@DanMan314 Actually, yeah, I'll sell my bet. I know next to nothing about El Niño/La Niña anyways. If this were about 2025 or 2026 I would still be willing to hold such a position though because I think it'd be tricky to foresee what phase that cycle would be in next year or the year after.