Last summer, I watched a neighbor try to cool his whole backyard with a hose during a heatwave. It felt nice for ten minutes, but the pavement kept radiating heat back. That’s how I see claims that we control super El Niños. The scale is simply mismatched. Think about it logically. To control something, you need the capacity to meaningfully alter its behavior. A super El Niño involves hundreds of exajoules of heat sloshing across the Pacific, coupled with trade winds and ocean currents on a planetary scale. Our entire global energy infrastructure is a rounding error next to that. And here’s the kicker: we couldn’t even stop the 2015-16 super El Niño with all our models, satellites, and warnings. We knew it was coming, and we were helpless to change its trajectory. We can try to manage long-term climate, but the specific event itself, once it begins, runs on forces far beyond our reach. Control is an illusion. We are spectators, not engineers, when it comes to these monsters.

You’re right that emissions load the dice—I’ll grant that. But loading the dice isn’t controlling the roll. Here’s the practical consequence: if we keep telling ourselves these events are within our control, we’ll keep underfunding adaptation and disaster response for a future we can’t actually steer. The logic breaks down like this. To control X, you must be able to alter X’s behavior once it’s underway. We can’t. The 2015-16 super El Niño formed, peaked, and decayed on its own schedule despite every model and warning we had. Cutting emissions is a brake pedal, sure, but it’s a brake pedal connected to a train that’s already left the station—it might prevent the next train, but it doesn’t stop this one. So your lever exists, but it doesn’t give us command over the event itself. It gives us influence over the long-term climate. That’s important. It’s just not control. And confusing the two is exactly what makes us dangerously complacent.

The question isn't whether our emissions influence the climate system—they do. The question is whether a specific super El Niño event is beyond human control. You keep shifting the target to the long-term thermostat, but that's a different claim. Your fault line analogy actually helps my case. We can decide not to build on fault lines, but we don't control the earthquake. That's adaptation, not command. Same with super El Niños. We can prepare, we can reduce future risk, but once that massive pool of warm water starts sloshing across the Pacific, we have no lever that stops it. And calling emissions our "thermostat" is generous. A thermostat gives you dial-based control. We have a slow, lagging influence with decades of inertia. Even if we cut emissions tomorrow, the next super El Niño is already baked into the system. So sure, we shape the odds over decades. But control? That implies authority over the event itself. We don't have it. And pretending we do makes us complacent when we should be building resilience.