I was watching footage of the new mini-volcano in Iceland – Mount Fagradalsfjall – the other day on YouTube, with the inevitable result that the algorithm pushed other volcano footage at me. Next up was the Shishaldin volcano in the Alaskan Aleutian islands. And that set me thinking that there seems to have been a lot of seismic and volcanic activity recently. Of course, there is always the possibility that – as with reports of “extreme” weather and climate records world-wide – we are simply more aware, thanks to 24/7 news coverage, the ubiquity of the internet and smart phones and so on, of such incidents, rather than them actually becoming more frequent.
The vlogger whose excellent drone footage of Mount Fagradalsfjall I was watching, made mention of the various dangerous gases associated with it, and he also talked about the amount of CO2 being released by the volcano. For many people this is probably nothing new, but I hadn’t really looked into the subject before. It’s time to share my findings.
These are that the scale of volcanic CO2 emissions can’t be stated with any great certainty. For example, if you believe Australian climate sceptic and geologist Ian Plimer (author of “Heaven and Earth – Global Warming: the Missing Science”, published in 2009) you might conclude that volcanic CO2 emissions are rather substantial, and little understood. He points out (at page 217) that although the proportion of gases emitted varies from volcano to volcano, typically the proportion of CO2 is in the region of 8-12% (H2O being the main gas, at 70-80%, the other main gases being nitrogen and sulphur dioxide – both less than the amount of CO2 emitted – with minor proportions being hydrogen, carbon monoxide, sulphur, chlorine and argon). He also points out (lest we get too excited about the warming implications of volcanoes) that volcanic aerosols scatter incoming short-wave solar radiation, resulting in cooler surface and troposphere temperatures (but stratosphere warming). He also argues that we under-estimate the amount of CO2 released by volcanic activity, because we don’t take sufficient cognisance of submarine volcanoes.
This is obviously dangerous talk, as is the statement in his book (on page 413) to the effect that volcanoes emit more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined. It is so dangerous that the Guardian has gone to great lengths to discredit it, especially in the wake of his book being published. In November 2009, George Monbiot argued in the Guardian that the BBC’s flagship radio programme Today was wrong to give Ian Plimer airtime. Following a debate between Ian Plimer and George Monbiot and an interview of him by James Randerson that year, two articles damning him and his views followed in quick succession, here and here. In the wake of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption the following year, which caused such problems for the global airline business, the Guardian returned to the fray. Earlier this month the Guardian was on the warpath again. Clearly Ian Plimer is a dangerous heretic who must be silenced.
Having said all that, I have no idea whether Professor Plimer is on the money, or whether he’s talking rubbish. I am not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist or a vulcanologist. Let’s assume Professor Plimer is wrong, the Guardian is correct, and volcanoes are nothing to worry about – at least so far as their CO2 emissions are concerned. What do the “official” organisations have to say about the subject?
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is pretty clear:
Human activities emit 60 or more times the amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes each year. Large, violent eruptions may match the rate of human emissions for the few hours that they last, but they are too rare and fleeting to rival humanity’s annual emissions. In fact, several individual U.S. states emit more carbon dioxide in a year than all the volcanoes on the planet combined do.
They also make Professor Plimer’s other, related, point:
Today, rather than warming global climate, volcanic eruptions often have the opposite effect. That’s because carbon dioxide isn’t the only thing that volcanoes inject into the atmosphere. Even small eruptions often produce volcanic ash and aerosol particles.
Whether from small or large eruptions, volcanic aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, cooling global climate. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora produced enough ash and aerosols to cancel summer in Europe and North America in 1816.
Which is a rather scary thought. As is the historic activity of volcanoes, if it were repeated today:
Volcanic activity today may pale in comparison to the carbon dioxide emissions we are generating by burning fossil fuels for energy, but over the course of geologic time, volcanoes have occasionally contributed to global warming by producing significant amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
For example, some geologists hypothesize that 250 million years ago, an extensive flood of lava poured continually from the ground in Siberia perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. This large-scale, long-lasting eruption likely raised global temperatures enough to cause one of the worst extinction events in our planet’s history. Current volcanic activity doesn’t occur on the same massive scale.
Let’s hope not, anyway.
The cited figure – that humankind produces at least 60 times as much carbon dioxide annually as volcanoes – comes from a 2013 study by Michael Burton, Georgina Sawyer, and Domenico Granieri. Two years earlier:
U.S. Geologic Survey scientist Terry Gerlach summarized five previous estimates of global volcanic carbon dioxide emission rates that had been published between 1991 and 1998. Those estimates incorporated studies reaching back to the 1970s, and they were based on a wide variety of measurements, such as direct sampling and satellite remote sensing. The global estimates fell within a range of about 0.3 ± 0.15 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, implying that human carbon dioxide emissions were more than 90 times greater than global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions.
NASA doesn’t go with either the 60 times or the 90 times figure, preferring to say that “human contributions to the carbon cycle are more than 100 times those from all the volcanoes in the world – combined.”
Let’s leave Professor Plimer out of it and go with the measurements that most people are likely to rely on. We are left with a range of figures, such that humankind annually (in the absence of unusual levels of volcanic activity in any one year) produces around 60, 90 or 100 times as much CO2 as volcanoes. The “official” websites to which I have referred (as well as the Guardian, for that matter) do seem anxious to tell us that in the scheme of things, volcanoes are pretty insignificant, so far as CO2 emissions are concerned. Which I find interesting, not least since depending on who you believe, the UK’s CO2 emissions are less than 1% of humankind’s global CO2 emissions on an annual basis. Our World in Data puts the figure at 0.93%. Wikipedia puts it at “under 1%”). The Worldometer website (which supplies an out of date 2016 figure) puts it at 1.03%. Given that the UK’s annual emissions have fallen since then while most of the rest of the world’s have risen, it seems safe to assume that the UK’s emissions are indeed less than 1% of the global total.
Depending, then, on which of the “official” figures we accept for volcanic CO2 emissions, the UK’s emissions are either on a par annually with those from volcanoes, are a bit less, or are about two thirds of the level of volcanic CO2 emissions (per NASA and Burton, Sawyer, and Granieri). And if volcanic emissions are such small beer, such that we can safely discount them and not worry about them, then why the hysteria from the likes of XR and Just Stop Oil about UK emissions? Perhaps it’s time for a new protest group – Just Stop Volcanoes.
Climate Scepticism 
I think it’s about time JSO activists started gluing themselves to the rocks at the foot of erupting volcanoes to protest about Big Gaia’s CO2 emissions.
Whilst we’re on the subject of Big Gaia, Just Stop Oil never mention the fact that it was Gaia who conspired with the Sun in the first place to create fossil fuels and thus tempt mankind into exploiting them, just like the serpent did with Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden. How come Gaia gets a free pass in all of this climate emergency nonsense and how come She can just go on polluting with impunity whilst we humans get rapped over the knuckles for simply wanting to travel places and keep warm in winter?
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Thanks for summarising your research, Mark.
It’s a very interesting read, and will save many of us a lot of hard work. 😉
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Very funny title and subtitle Mark. The first time I met a geologist who was a climate sceptic was in 1992. He was working as a minerals exploration expert in Bristol for the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto. (Anachronism warnings: I doubt the term climate sceptic had even been coined then. And It was RTZ Mining & Exploration in those days, within the RTZ group. RTZ had purchased BP Minerals from BP only a few years before and had renamed it thus, before renaming itself.)
Anyway, we were sitting in a cafe in Bristol taking a break from our discussions of databasing RTZ exploration information, going back over a hundred years, leading to the aptly named Century Mine in Australia for example, and this guy, with two PhDs, was furious about the nonsense of alarmism as of 1992. And the one bit of ‘science’ I remembered afterwards was that he said the amount fo CO2 being spewed out by Mount St. Helens in those days (on and off since 1980, in fact, I learn from the ever-trusty Wikipedia)) dwarfed man’s puny emissions. But those just in Washington State or globally? I don’t remember that level of detail. All I know is that I looked at the other highly qualified explorationists as he set off on his diatribe. They didn’t want to publicly agree but I sensed from their looks that they knew he was right in his general critique. But that even then there was a perceived cost in saying so. So I assumed he was right too.
When I travelled back to Bristol in May 2019 to hear Rachel Hayhoe I tried to have a civil conversation with her at the end. In order to date my initial interest in climate alarm I mentioned this key meeting just down the road in some obscure cafe. At once she jumped on me saying that the claims sceptics made about emissions from volcanoes were provably wrong. But I hadn’t made those claims – to her or to others. There was no meeting of minds on pretty much anything. How polarised we have got.
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Very interesting, Richard.
I have no idea whether Ian Plimer’s claims about the emissions of submarine volcanoes are true, partially true, or untrue. I suspect that we don’t know as much as we should, or as we like to think we know, about such matters, and that volcanic emissions may be higher than is generally acknowledge. I am certainly prepared to concede that Professor Plimer’s claims may well be over-played.
My purpose really was to make the point that it’s not consistent to argue that volcanic emissions (at perhaps 1-1.5% of human emissions) are overwhelmed by human emissions, and there’s nothing to see here, but that the UK’s emissions (at less than 1% of human emissions globally on an ongoing basis) are so significant that UK net zero is essential by 2050 (or by 2045 in Scotland – an even more ludicrous proposition).
My other purpose was to draw attention to the power of natural forces and to remind ourselves of the scale of extremes that our planet has witnessed over 4.5 billion years. Today’s human activity, whatever the fabricated hysteria surrounding it, is a drop in the ocean, a blink of the eye in terms of what our planet has witnessed and will in the future witness. It is sheer hubris to deceive ourselves as to our importance in the scheme of things.
For instance, this report:
https://www.livescience.com/yellowstone-caldera-supervolcano-eruption
is in many ways reassuring with regard to just one possible terrifying volcanic explosion – that of Yellowstone. It’s good to know that it’s probably nothing like imminent. But if just one such event occurred (and many such events have occurred throughout the life of our planet) than humankind’s puny efforts would well and truly be put in the shade (both metaphorically and literally).
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Mark: Yep, both your purposes were very worthwhile. Sorry for bypassing them both in my trip down memory lane! But while I’m there, I may not have made clear that Century Mine was named that because mineral exploration had been carried out in that area of North West Queensland for over a hundred years. Some of it by the company called CRA which was now part of RTZ. Plenty of zinc found but not enough for an economic mine, with all its need for good old diesel equipment. Until finally, partly after going back to very old records, the sweet spot was found. That was how important information management was. The exploration game is even more extreme with minerals than with oil. You’re looking typically for a football pitch cubed of the really dense and thus good stuff. (And was that only for gold? Geologists among us please correct. But I found it exciting to learn about.)
I’m with you on not knowing if Plimer is right. But I would not be surprised if he was.
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Forget Yellowstone Mark, worry much, much more about Phlegraean Fields, near Naples, another, but much more active super volcano with more than twenty vents/calderas, and much, much nearer to the British Isles.
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Thanks Alan – interesting & scary, just shows what other threats we can be blindsided by.
Mark – “A 2017 study claimed to have found 138 volcanoes, of which 91 were previously unknown. Some volcanoes are entirely under the ice sheet.[1][2] Unconfirmed volcanoes are not included in the table below.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_Antarctica
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Alan,
I was hoping you would comment. Thanks for drawing my attention to that. Here’s an article about it in the Guardian (which can still do good journalism when it isn’t lecturing and hectoring):
“Parts of Italian volcano ‘stretched nearly to breaking point’, study finds
This article is more than 1 month old
Campi Flegrei (Phlegraean Fields) near Naples is now in ‘extremely dangerous’ state, say academic experts”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/09/parts-of-italian-volcano-stretched-nearly-to-breaking-point-study-finds
I’m actually not that concerned about it (on a selfish personal basis) because I assume prevailing westerly winds would carry the ash cloud away from us, which is the reverse of the case with Yellowstone. I would be very worried if I lived nearby, despite the Guardian watering down its alarming headline by saying in the body of the article:
By coincidence, YouTube’s algorithm pushed at me yesterday evening a brand new video about Yellowstone, suggesting that it is in fact much closer to an eruption than previously thought. The explanation seemed plausible to me, but then I’m not a geologist. The good news is that “closer” still doesn’t mean “imminent”, apparently.
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Thanks Dougie,
There is an entirely different discussion to be had about the possible effects of volcanoes and how they link in to the climate change debate. There’s a lot of talk about a warming Antarctic and record Antarctic ice melt, but if it were to turn out that this is caused by renewed activity from previously unknown or unsuspected volcanoes, then it would put a very different complexion on things.
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Mark. An erupting Phlegraean Fields volcano would almost certainly destroy Naples and vicinity. The financial implications of this would be global. Also given the impact of the eruption itself, don’t be so secure in your western fastness.
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Alan,
Point definitely taken. I am not at all secure in my western fastness. Volcanoes fascinate and scare me in equal measures. I suspect that we are more at risk from them than we are from climate change.
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The PETM was a geologically brief (~200k years) period of extreme warmth when palm trees grew at the poles and the North Atlantic average sea surface temperature was 33C. It was a volcanically very active period too, but what is almost certain now is that the carbon ejected into the atmosphere during the PETM was NOT the cause of the extreme warming.
https://clintel.org/the-paleocene-eocene-thermal-maximum-or-petm/
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Jaime,
Many thanks for that link, a fascinating read. I am learning all the time. 😊
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We all are Mark. That article adds to my prior understanding that the all singing-all dancing models were having a hard time modelling the temperature rise during the PETM, even assuming very high climate sensitivities. Science has a really nasty habit of not being settled 97% of the time!
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Jaime, Mark: indeed a fascinating read, but one that is perplexing. I note throughout that tried and true methods of determining in the past temperature and atmospheric CO2 (and other stock variables) are commonly in conflict with each other. I wonder if Paul Dennis might comment. For those who don’t know Paul was in charge of the Department of Environmental Science (UEA) isotope laboratory and I would trust his opinion about isotopes (and other geochemistry) over others.
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All volcanos are not created equal. It seems that when Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted close to Samoa last year, it injected 50 or maybe 150 million tonnes of water into the stratosphere. This seems to be causing much of the rise in temperatures we have been seeing recently. More on whatsupwiththat:
Funny that the MSM hasn’t cottoned on to this yet…
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My favourite photo opportunity for a volcanic eruption – as the International Space Station happened to be overhead of Sarychev Peak in the Kuril Islands on 12 June 2009 and a hole in the clouds made something beautiful happen.
More of NASA’s ‘best available science’ here.
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It’s beautiful, yes, but good grief – it looks like an atomic bomb.
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Well, it seems like volcanoes on land produce temporary cooling because of aerosols or they might warm the planet by adding CO2, however submarine volcanoes might cause significant short term warming by injecting huge quantities of water vapour (a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) into the atmosphere (rather more than previously estimated). Besides the warming, there’s also the rainfall when this water vapour precipitates out, which rather dampens the hysterical proclamations of the climate crisis crowd who see every extreme rainfall event as being the result of climate change. Oh dear.
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https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/satellite-data-confirms-july-2023?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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Could this be getting close to some mainstream coverage?
“Massive Water and Cloud Boost From Tonga Eruption Could Explain Recent Unusual Weather Patterns”
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/08/04/massive-water-and-cloud-boost-from-tonga-eruption-could-explain-recent-unusual-weather-patterns/
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Mark,
The Associated Press reported on the possibility of temporary warming due to Hunga Tonga in Sep 2022 but played it down and implied that it would be minor. I think what we are seeing is that quite significant warming is now happening. Reports that volcanic aerosol emissions from Hunga Tonga were minimal are not correct; only Pinatubo and El Chichon exceeded Tonga’s emissions of stratospheric aerosols in the satellite era. So therefore we would have expected some cooling, but it was compensated by warming I believe and now that those aerosols have cleared the atmosphere, we are seeing the unmasked effect of the warming. This also explains why we didn’t see as much cooling as we expected during the recent ‘triple dip’ La Nina. So, if the underlying warming from Hunga Tonga was enough to mask cooling from volcanic aerosols AND La Nina, now that those aerosols have gone and El Nino is developing in the Pacific, we could be looking at some pretty extreme warming in the next 6 months to a year. Cue mass hysteria.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tonga-volcano-eruption-warm-earth-rcna49084
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“Well What Do You Know? “We’ve seen a complete change of climate and weather patterns,” Says Tonga Resident”
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/well-what-do-you-know-weve-seen-a?utm_medium=email
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It’s hard to believe Mark. That article completely ignores the sodding great volcano which erupted on Tonga’s doorstep just 18 months ago, but jumps at the opportunity to blame ‘climate change’ for the current anomalously cold weather!
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Paul Homewood is on this now:
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Mark,
“”Questions have been raised as to why we are only seeing the effect a year after the eruption. There are two very good reasons for this:
1) La Nina last year helped to offset any temperature rise from Hunga Tonga.
2) For the months following the eruption, the cooling effect of aerosols tended to offset the warming effect of the water vapour. Gradually however these aerosols have since dropped out of the atmosphere, and now there is nothing to offset the water vapour effect. Remember that global temperatures fell by about 0.5C following Pinatubo.”
I made these points two weeks ago and most recently on Judith Curry’s blog when someone was questioning why warming was only happening now. It’s about time other sceptics picked up on what to me seemed rather obvious. Of course, it’s so simple it could be wrong, but better to be wrong stating the obvious than not state it at all.
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/satellite-data-confirms-july-2023
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A somewhat ironic title:
“Volcanoes and wildfires offset 20% of global heating over eight years
Events that inject smoke and gas into high atmosphere help to cool planet but are no solution to climate crisis, says study”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/23/volcanoes-and-wildfires-offset-20-of-global-heating-over-eight-years
No mention of Hunga Tunga.
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Mark,
I checked the study. Included in the inventory of sulphate aerosols from volcanoes is Hunga Tonga, but the far more significant stratospheric water vapour injection and the positive radiative forcing from that is completely ignored. Also completely ignored is the elimination of sulphates from ship fuel which has possibly contributed to warming recently. Talk about cherry-picking data! I also suspect that their model overestimates cooling from wildfires.
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This is a sad story, run by both the Guardian and the BBC today, presumably as a result of their being a press release today from somebody (I note that the event is said to have occurred last year, to that extent isn’t new news):
“Climate change: Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66492767
And:
“Emperor penguins: thousands of chicks in Antarctica likely died due to record-low sea ice levels
Breeding failures in the Bellingshausen Sea ‘without precedent’ as multiple colonies across large region all failed in a single season”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/25/emperor-penguins-thousands-of-chicks-in-antarctica-likely-died-due-to-record-low-sea-ice-levels
Climate change? Possibly – certainly the BBC and the Guardian are both keen to tell us that it’s the likely explanation. I do, however, note this:
“Reconstruction of changes in the Amundsen Sea and Bellingshausen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet since the Last Glacial Maximum”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379113004101
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“Tonga volcano triggered seafloor debris stampede”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66731845
As Jaime and others are doing, it’s interesting to speculate as to what else Hunga Tonga might have triggered. Needless to say, the BBC doesn’t carry speculation that far. Nor does the Guardian, which instead gives us this:
“Heat denial: influencers question validity of high temperatures
Tweet viewed millions of times claimed ground temperature was being confused with air temperature”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/07/why-climate-deniers-are-wrong-validity-heat-measurements
I suppose I should be grateful that they put the words in print, even if their sole reason for doing so is to seek to discredit them.
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Mark, the superlatives keep coming for Hunga Tonga. Climate alarmists love to tell us about ‘unprecedented’ weather events but they seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge the ‘unprecedented’ (at least in the instrumental record) nature of the Hunga Tonga eruption, which may or may not be affecting global temperature via the ‘unprecedented’ injection of water vapour as far as the upper stratosphere.
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September has broken global heat records by a considerable amount. The planet is the warmest it has been since satellite monitoring began in 1978 and the spike just keeps going up. The ridiculous thing is, ‘scientists’ and commentators are extremely reluctant to attribute the warmth to Hunga Tonga, preferring instead to point the finger at an El Nino which has cannot at present be contributing much at all and vaguely hand-waving about some magical mechanism which is making natural and man-made warming ‘act in concert’ to produce unprecedented warming. Hunga Tonga gets a brief mention only in passing. There is NO plausible explanation for the current huge spike in global warming bar stratospheric water vapour radiative forcing. El Nino is contributing some, man-made global warming even less. How much longer are the press and the ‘experts’ going to keep this ridiculous narrative up?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/09/23/record-warm-temperature-september-climate-threshold/
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Southern hemisphere land temperatures have spiked significantly in September. This is in line with predictions of greater warming in the southern hemisphere due to greater concentration of stratospheric water vapour in SH from La Tonga, plus faster warming over land. Ron Clutz says:
“Remarkably, in 2023, SH land air anomaly shot up 1.5C, from -0.56C in January to +0.93 in July, then dropped to 0.53 in August. Now in September SH shot up again to 1.5C. Tropical land temps are up 1.48 since January and NH Land air temps rose 0.9, mostly since May. The consolidated rise greatly exceeds the upward spikes peaking in 2016.”
It is looking increasingly likely, given the pattern of observed warming, that La Tonga is mainly responsible for the remarkable warming we are seeing in 2023. I’m in Scotland and have been wandering round in a T-shirt. Yesterday felt like a summer’s day it was so warm and settled.
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Jaime, enjoy it while it lasts. I’m off to Ballater on Thursday, where the temperature is forecast to peak for one hour on Sunday at 7C.
As regards the serious content of your post, however, it does look increasingly as though something must explain the unusual warmth, beyond it being human-emitted CO2 wot done it. It it was CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t expect the dramatic spike in temperatures (or have we passed a tipping point, and we sceptics are confounded?).
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Mark,
A lot cooler (but drier) in the coming week.
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“‘Virtually certain’ that 2023 will be warmest year after October record”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67332791
What’s interesting in this story is the rush to blame CO2 emissions and El Nino, despite there having been no sudden upsurge in CO2 emissions and despite this El Nino event being a relatively small one. The reality is that scientists don’t understand what’s driving the unusual warmth , but it doesn’t stop them making all the usual assumptions, even though they obviously don’t explain it:
As Jaime would point out, there is one recent event that could explain it – the massive amount of water vapour (a greenhouse gas) blasted into the air by the Hunga Tonga volcano. However, that can’t even be discussed – it might distract from the narrative, even if the narrative is confused (“”This El Niño is weird….”).
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Gobsmacking dishonesty and distraction from Hausfather and Otto. Yeah, like, it’s CO2 which is the main driver of the heat (even though CO2 emissions have not suddenly increased), supplemented by a “weird” El Nino which started punching well above its weight even when it was only knee high to a grasshopper, and also the amazing warmth is being driven by an unusually “rapid switchover” from La Nina to El Nino conditions. Zeke apparently fails to grasp the fact that this, if true (which I doubt), would only result in there being a sudden and large RELATIVE difference between global temperatures in 2022 and those in 2023, whereas we are seeing ABSOLUTE warmth in relation to ALL other years. Hausfather and Otto take us all for fools.
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“Iceland volcano: what could the impact be?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67402198
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Well, well, well. I read this and thought “Here we go again. One last pusg before COP 28”:
“Climate change: Is the world warming faster than expected?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67360929
To my pleasant surprise, I read a reasonably balanced article (by BBC standards), which includes this:
Of course, being the BBC, and COP 28 pending on the near horizon, the impact of the volcano is minimised, but at least it has now received a mention.
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It’s quite pathetic really; they’re floundering around for answers as to why the planet has experienced truly unprecedented (in the observational record) warming in 2023. It must be the first time they haven’t used the word unprecedented when it would be entirely justified to do so! It’s got them worried obviously because 2023 demonstrates unequivocally that the world can warm very rapidly and by a huge amount relative to the very gradual increase which we have seen since 1850 and it cannot be explained by ENSO variability (even ‘weird ‘ El Ninos) or man-made GHGs. They’re clutching at straws with the aerosol emissions and the Antarctic albedo effect. The Conversation back in July mentioned an additional influence – solar activity.
https://theconversation.com/global-temperatures-are-off-the-charts-for-a-reason-4-factors-driving-2023s-extreme-heat-and-climate-disasters-209975
Hunga Tonga – or whatever it is that is causing the world to ‘boil’ in 2023 – is really interfering with their attempt to portray deadly GHGs as the principal driver of global temperature increases and extreme weather, because natural variability quite obviously greatly exceeds the miniscule long term trend, which logically implies that it may enhance or diminish that trend over years, decades, even multiple decades, or it might totally obscure it. They don’t want natural variability – be that volcanoes, solar activity, oceanic cycles or El Ninos – raining on their global warming parade. It’s becoming harder and harder to brush off that natural variability as ‘insignificant’ or temporary. Science and data are catching up with their fraud.
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“El Niño Behind High Temperatures in 2023 – Similar to 2016”
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/12/20/el-nino-behind-high-temperatures-in-2023-similar-to-2016/
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Mark, credit to Chris Morrison for noting the possibility that Hunga Tonga could be driving the current global warming spike, but sadly he comes up short when talking about El Nino:
“The table below is compiled by GISS, the NASA global temperature dataset. The trend in higher anomalies – departures from the norm – seen from October 2015 through to April 2016 is similar to that seen from June this year.”
This is the whole point. The current moderate/strong El Nino was only just getting going in June and, barring some mysterious unknown physical process, COULD NOT have driven the spike in global surface temperature which started then. I find it immensely frustrating that sceptical writers at WUWT and DS will not apply some simple logic to this El Nino issue and are so reluctant to delve more deeply into the possibility that Hunga Tonga is responsible for the record cumulative monthly anomalies which we have seen from June 2023 onwards. And why aren’t they reading my Substack?!
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Jaime,
David Whitehouse at Net Zero Watch has a new piece up:
“2023: Global temperature, statistics and hot air”
https://www.netzerowatch.com/2023-global-temperature-statistics-and-hot-air/
You may find it worthwhile reading it, but will probably be disappointed by this paragraph:
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You’re right Mark. Disappointing – and somewhat paradoxical.
Whitehouse says:
“Clearly El Nino has a lot to do with it, coming after an unusual three years of La Nina events that tend to absorb heat in the oceans, releasing it in a subsequent El Nino, as has now happened.”
Then he says:
“It is pertinent to say that climate scientists were a little puzzled at this year’s sudden temperature surge as they cannot quite explain it: their models neither predict it nor are they able to account for the surprise.”
So it’s not that clear that El Nino has a lot to do with it and the correct year for comparison is not 2016, when El Nino faded but global temperatures peaked, it is 2015, when El Nino developed, and no way did we witness these extreme monthly anomalies in summer 2015. Why can’t these people get that simple fact into their heads before they start claiming that “clearly El Nino has a lot to do with it”? Whitehouse uses the excuse that El Nino happened after an extended triple dip La Nina, so presumably it was like a ‘loaded spring’ type effect with all that heat suddenly released from the oceans after being suppressed by La Nina, but this doesn’t make much sense because there was an even longer and more intense period of La Nina conditions from 1998-2001 and then a moderate El Nino started developing in 2002, but it didn’t suddenly and very radically warm the planet when it just got going, or even when it peaked. Dr David Whitehouse is the Science Editor for NZW; he should know this stuff. I’m not impressed.
https://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
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“2023 confirmed as world’s hottest year on record”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67861954
The more I see of this, and the bafflement of climate scientists (who scratch their heads while insisting that it must be due to a combination of manmade climate change and El Nino) the more I think that Jaime is on to something. Even the most alarmed of the alarmists didn’t predict such warming, so it must be due to a cause that they didn’t anticipate. El Nino doesn’t explain it, because it’s too early in the cycle. Hunga Tonga is certainly looking like a prime suspect.
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Mark,
Hausfather’s ‘weird El Nino’ posturing is just beyond pathetic now. Even Gavin Schmidt has come out and said effectively that it cannot have been El Nino and that something else must have caused the extreme heat from June onwards, specifically mentioning Hunga Tonga and ship fuel emissions. The BBC – as usual – is deliberately misleading its readers by claiming that the extraordinary warmth in 2023 was “driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event.”
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Interesting to catch up with where this thread has ended up. Congats Jaime and Mark.
(Cliscep as wiki-in-wordpress has many weaknesses but a sudden reminder, via New Comments, can be educational for the sporadic lurker.)
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This is too funny not to share. The Beeb has an exciting new graphic depicting the 1.48C ‘hottest year ever’ of 2023. Is it just me, or do these ‘humps’ look suspiciously like depictions of sea floor volcanoes?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67861954
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Once again, WP puts a comment straight into Spam. Commenting software on WP is about as reliable as Horizon.
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Sorry Jaime, it’s free now.
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Yeah, and I’ve never felt more like a subpostmaster.
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“What are El Niño and La Niña, and how do they change the weather?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64192508
It’s all about El Niño and man-made climate change; no sign of any mention of Hunga Tonga.
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Mark, it’s incredibly frustrating that the BBC gets to pump out its science-lite, evidence free disinformation to millions of readers and viewers whilst we sceptics on alternative media only ever manage to drum up a few hundred views at the most. It hasn’t helped that WUWT and other very popular sceptic sites have also generally bought into the ‘weird El Nino’ explanation for 2023 warmth. Even Roy Spencer was saying in summer that the extraordinary monthly lower tropospheric anomalies were down to El Nino. Why has talk of Hunga Tonga become so verboten?
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Well, Jaime, they’re just as confused in Australia:
“El Niño doesn’t automatically mean it won’t rain. Here’s why it’s been so wet and stormy for Australia’s eastern states”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-07/wet-el-nino-weather-pattern-explained-bureau-of-meteorology/103289232
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More confusion on display here:
“‘Astounding’ ocean temperatures in 2023 intensified extreme weather, data shows
Record levels of heat were absorbed last year by Earth’s seas, which have been warming year-on-year for the past decade”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/ocean-warming-temperatures-2023-extreme-weather-data
Well, which is it? Astounding and off the charts, or no significant acceleration and basically a linear increase from about 1995?
And if it’s an increase in “carbon” emissions, what’s the point of all the COPs and the UK’s claims that it’s leading the way? And if it’s El Niño, how is the increase so dramatic so early in the El Niño cycle?
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Mark,
“Research director for the CSIRO’s Climate Intelligence program Dr Jaci Brown likened El Niño’s behaviour to a chocolate pinwheel.”
“Without any forecast, there is an equal chance it could be a wet, dry or normal year,” Dr Brown said.
My head just hit my keyboard. Then your second quote from the Guardian; it’s just unreal the lengths they will go to to dismiss science and evidence in favour of pseudoscience and ideology. I can’t begin to explain how exceptionally dangerous this trend is.
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Nature paper confirms what I’ve been saying for months: 2023 warmth extremely unlikely due to El Nino:
“Since the state-of-the-art climate models cannot generally reproduce the observed margin, we argue that it is highly unlikely (p ~ 1%) that internal climate variability alone would have caused the large increase in global mean temperature in September 2023. It is therefore likely that other external forcings such as (1) the Raikoke and Hunga Tonga volcanic eruptions8,9 and (2) the removal of sulphur pollution from ships10 have contributed to the observed temperature anomaly.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00582-9
But some people can’t admit that they were wrong. Net Zero Watch claims that David Whitehouse called it right. He did not, which you can see if you go up the thread here.
Not a good look for the UK’s premier Net Zero sceptical website. Please do better.
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“February on course to break unprecedented number of heat records
Rapid ocean warming and unusually hot winter days recorded as human-made global heating combines with El Niño”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/17/february-on-course-to-break-unprecedented-number-of-heat-records
They are struggling to explain how the change is happening, because they are struggling to accept that there might be natural causes – in the form of the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption, and the huge amount of water vapour that it threw up into the atmosphere. After all, it has to be our fault, but the models say “do not compute”:
As the current moderate El Nino fades away, it will be interesting to see whether temperatures turn down. If not, what then for climate scientists and their models? It would appear that the science isn’t settled after all.
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Do you notice that when the WEATHER apparently does not seem to behave as expected (as when temperatures are higher) it is invariably reported as being the CLIMATE that is being affected? Colder than expected weather is either dismissed as being weather or increasingly is being explained away and again attributed to changing climate. Strange that.
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There’s ignoring the elephant in the room and then there’s Hunga Tonga denialism, which now appears to have become a fully fledged pathological mental condition among journalists and certain scientists.
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“What Really Made 2023 a Warm Year?”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/02/21/what-really-made-2023-a-warm-one/
Includes this:
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Douglas Brodie’s comment:
“If the author’s graph had gone up to the present time it would show that the UAH global average tropospheric temperature (published monthly by custodian Roy Spencer) has undergone a sudden huge spike of almost 1°C in less than a year. Such rapid spikes can only be the result of natural forces, typically El Nino events and certainly not man-made CO2 which alleged only forces global warming at a slow but steady rate of about 0.2°C per decade.
The current El Nino has been fairly modest and is already waning. The reference to the slow-acting 60-year cycle AMO is a red herring. There can be no doubt that the global warming of 2023 was the result of the Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption which spewed massive quantities of water vapour, the most powerful greenhouse gas, into the stratosphere.
Meteorological authorities around the world have lied by omission in suppressing information on the Hunga Tonga event so that they could blame the elevated temperatures on man-made CO2 at their COP28 pantomime. They are doubly embarrassed because Hunga has shown that water vapour is a much more potent global warming agent that CO2.”
The monthly AMO index did spike near the end of 2022 so this might conceivably have had some influence on the sudden spike in warmth starting mid 2023 and the rise in north Atlantic sea surface temperatures in the spring of 2023.
The cleaner ship fuel legislation came in during 2020, so I can’t really see how that could have affected temperatures suddenly in 2023. El Nino does not explain the dramatic rise in temperature beginning June 2023. It would be nice to see some decent unbiased detailed research on what did really contribute, when and by how much, to the dramatic rise in global mean surface temperature in 2023 (ongoing into 2024).
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It appears the confusion is at an end. Climate scientists bemused by 2023’s surprising heat are bemused no longer – the models have solved their problem, and it’s all down to El Nino. Not a mention of Hunga Tonga:
“El Niño forecast to drive record heat from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024
Coastal areas facing ‘enormous and urgent climate crisis’ as event supercharges human-caused global heating, scientists say”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/29/el-nino-forecast-record-heat-2024-climate-crisis
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Climate ‘scientist’ and volcanologist Bill MacGuire shared this article on X, also blaming El Nino, so I pointed out some facts to him. He blocked me immediately without even bothering to draft in Jo Brand or some other comedian to convince me of the error of my ways!
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Pretty outrageous front-page website propaganda from the BBC. Even the Guardian occasionally gives Hunga Tonga a passing mention.
“More climate records fall in world’s warmest February”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68428348
Of course, water vapour is a “heat-trapping greenhouse gas”, but it’s only our human-made greenhouse gases that count, apparently. Those gases, and El Nino.
They acknowledge El Nino doesn’t fully explain it, yet there seems to be no curiosity as what other natural phenomena might explain it – it has to be our fault.
And climate change is apparently only ever destructive. It never delivers a positive, according to climate scientists.
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Mark,
Good. Grief.
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“We know what to do – stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable, renewable sources of energy,” says Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.
“Until we do that, extreme weather events intensified by climate change will continue to destroy lives and livelihoods.”
Says the Chinese funded Imperial College ‘scientist’ who used one ‘record’ temperature reading from a 5-rated junk status weather station at Cambridge Botanical Gardens and estimated readings from a day or two earlier when the thermometer’s batteries had failed, to conclude that “the likelihood [of the three day ‘heatwave’] is about 10 times higher (at least 3 times) due to climate change.”
I’m beginning to intensely dislike Otto; she seems to be one of the worst of a very bad bunch. Her “more sustainable, renewable sources of energy” are about to cost energy bill payers another £1.4bn in subsidies thanks to Jeremy Hunt [rhymes with . . . . . ]
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El Nino is fading fast and subsurface Pacific temperatures are already below normal. Sceptics are anticipating the end of global boiling hysteria, but I think they may end up being disappointed because it was almost certainly NOT El Nino which initiated the global boiling. It would seem this point is very hard to get through to almost everyone commenting on climate at the moment, which is quite weird in itself. What will happen if El Nino continues to fade rapidly but global temperature does not follow suit? The boiling fanatics are just going to scream louder: “We told you so!”
“Lawks-a-mercy, the oceans have stopped boiling. Cancel the slots on cable news for rising media stars and noted climate hysterics Jim Dale and Donnachadh McCarthy, and loosen the protective clothing for the unhinged UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres. To be serious, the current strong and natural El Niño event is starting to dramatically collapse with critical ocean temperatures in the central tropical Pacific ocean falling from 2.1°C above normal in late November to 1.3°C. The collapse in temperatures is even more dramatic at the sub-surface 300 metre level. In the western tropical Pacific, the temperature has plummeted by nearly 1.5°C, and the water is now cooler than normal.
Apart from damaging a few budding media careers, what does this mean? El Niño is a natural transfer of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere that starts in the Pacific regions. The effects of an El Niño are far from completely understood but they are essentially large heat transfers from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. We have experienced three strong El Niños in the last 25 years – 1998, 2016 and 2023 – and in each case they have disrupted weather patterns around the world. This leads to sudden spikes in ocean temperatures and unusual weather events. Over the last year, these events have been ruthlessly catastrophised by activist scientists, politicians and journalists seeking to nudge citizens to accept the collectivist Net Zero agenda.”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/13/collapsing-el-nino-spells-end-to-year-long-bout-of-climate-hysteria/
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Jaime, those sea temperatures aren’t collapsing, according to the GUardian:
“Australia faces a hot autumn with Sydney sea temperatures warm enough for a tropical cyclone
Ocean temperatures are ‘off the charts’, say experts who blame the tide of hot weather on global heating”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/13/australia-autumn-weather-sydney-sea-temperatures-cyclone-risk
“Much of Australia is facing a hotter than usual autumn with sea temperatures in Sydney now so warm they could support the formation of tropical cyclones.
Sea temperatures are required to be above 26.5C for tropical cyclones to form. Temperatures recorded in Sydney by Manly Hydraulics Laboratory have surpassed this temperature, twice recording temperatures of 26.75C in the last week.
This temperature is approximately 3C above average for March, and the highest recorded in Sydney since 1992, making the temperature of the Tasman Sea akin to Queensland’s tropical waters. The previous record was 26.6C in February 2022….”
Wouldn’t it be great to have an unbiased organisation, with no axe to grind, no agenda to push, one that simply gave us the unvarnished facts and left us to think about the implications for ourselves? The Guardian and the Daily Sceptic can’t both be right.
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Mark, the DS is talking specifically about temperature in the central Pacific Nino 3.4 region. Average global sea surface temperatures are still riding very high. It will be interesting to see if globally averaged sea and land surface temperature follows ENSO phase (as it has traditionally done over interannual timescales) or whether, in 2024, global mean surface temperature temporarily decouples from ENSO. The MSM are seemingly incapable of addressing this subtle possibility.
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“Scientists divided over whether record heat is acceleration of climate crisis
Some believe global anomalies are in line with predictions but others are more concerned by speed of change”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/16/scientists-divided-record-heat-acceleration-climate-crisis
Again, no mention of Hunga Tonga.
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“Hunga Tonga Volcano is “Most Likely” Cause of Recent Warm Temperatures”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/26/hunga-tonga-volcano-cause-of-recent-high-temperatures-says-scientist/
“The climate events of 2022-24 have been “truly extraordinary”, notes Dr. Javier Vinós writing in Dr. Judith Curry’s online blog. The rare convergence of a number of events “that may not be repeated for hundreds or even thousands of years” represents a “unique learning opportunity” for climatologists. Interestingly, Dr. Vinós downplays the roll of the current El Niño. He says that the January 2022 Hunga Tonga underwater volcanic eruption, that boosted upper atmospheric water vapour by a remarkable 10%, is the most likely cause of the recent warming, which in turn led to an unprecedented three sudden stratospheric warming events. As the excess water leaves the atmosphere, observes Vinós, it will induce a cooling effect at the surface potentially lowering temperatures for the next three to four years.
The Hunga Tonga eruption was an extraordinary event since it blasted an enormous amount of water vapour into the upper atmosphere without the usual volcanic ash. Dust particles spread throughout the atmosphere can have a temporary cooling effect, as in 1815 with the Mount Tambora explosion, but water vapour has warming properties and is considered the most potent ‘greenhouse’ gas. “Unlike the lower troposphere, where the greenhouse effect is relatively saturated, the stratosphere, well above the Earth’s average emission altitude (about 6 km), experiences a much more pronounced effect from the addition of water vapour,” he observes.
The unusual weather events over the last few months have been catnip to alarmists in the general ranks of media, science and politics. The strictures of following the Net Zero political agenda mean that large swathes of climate science are ‘settled’ and out of bounds for discussion. All the changes in the weather and climate are due to humans using hydrocarbons, state the authorities. The constant catastrophising of the recent weather has largely ignored natural variation, and so the heat transfers of El Niño and the boosting of water vapour from Hunga Tonga are relegated to subsidiary footnotes.
Climate scientists were initially shocked by the ferocity of the Hunga Tunga eruption and the huge plume of water that suddenly shot into the upper atmosphere. Within months a group of European scientists drew attention to the scale of the discharge. They concluded that the unique nature and magnitude of the global stratospheric perturbation caused by the volcano “ranks it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observational era, with a range of potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate”. Since that date there does not appear to have been a great deal of debate about the subject published in the scientific press. The cynical might conclude that there is not a big demand for anything that might dent all the recent weather propaganda helpfully propping up Net Zero.
Never before have we witnessed an undersea volcanic eruption with a plume capable of reaching the stratosphere and depositing a large amount of vapourised water, states Dr. Vinós….”
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Mark,
The BBC are still in Hunga Tonga denier mode where all weather and climate phenomena are either climate change (TM) related or due to ENSO variability.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-68666843
Paul Homewood has a brief post mentioning Javier Vinos’ article at Climate Etc. but commenters are largely sceptical of the influence of the volcano, which is fine, but they should at least endeavour to get their facts right.
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Still no mention of Hunga Tonga:
“Climate change: ‘Uncharted territory’ fears after record hot March”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68665166
“Climate change could move “into uncharted territory” if temperatures don’t fall by the end of the year, a leading scientist has told the BBC.
The warning came as data showed last month was the world’s warmest March on record, extending the run of monthly temperature records to 10 in a row.
It’s fuelled concerns among some that the world could be tipping into a new phase of even faster climate change.
A weather system called El Niño is behind some of the recent heat.
Temperatures should temporarily come down after El Niño peters out in coming months, but some scientists are worried they might not.
“By the end of the summer, if we’re still looking at record breaking temperatures in the North Atlantic or elsewhere, then we really have kind of moved into uncharted territory,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News...
…For now, longer term warming trends are still pretty much consistent with expectations, and most researchers don’t yet believe that the climate has entered a new phase.
But scientists are struggling to explain exactly why the end of 2023 was so warm.
The March record was expected. El Niño, which began last June and peaked in December, has been adding heat to the warmth put into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels, the main driver of high temperatures.
But temperatures began breaking records by a particularly large margin around last September, and back then, El Niño was still developing, so can’t explain all of the extra warmth.
Dr Schmidt is concerned about what this means for predictions going forward.
“Our predictions failed quite dramatically for the specifics of 2023, and if previous statistics don’t work, then it becomes much harder to say what’s going to happen in the future,” he said.
“We’re still trying to understand why the situation changed so dramatically in the middle of last year, and how long this situation will continue, whether it is a phase shift or whether it’s a blip in long-term climate trends,” agrees Dr Samantha Burgess from Copernicus.
The current El Niño is now waning, and will likely end in the next couple of months.…”
It’s all a mystery, apparently. At least it is if you ignore the elephant in the room.
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Unbelievable isn’t it Mark. The Guardian has a very similar story which I’ve remarked upon which I see you’ve already liked, thanks.
It very much looks to me like that they are getting ready to blame ‘uncharted global warming territory’ for the anomalous warmth if it doesn’t subside over the summer and with all that stratospheric water vapour still up there, barring the rapid development of a very strong La Nina, it might not.
The media is slowly but surely ‘nudging’ us into the belief that we have entered a new and frightening era of man-made global warming. Will the public fall for it?
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And now it’s “just stop improving air quality” (I think):
“Weatherwatch: how reducing air pollution adds to climate crisis
Aerosols produced by pollution cool the planet; the crusade for clean air is removing this protection”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/apr/12/weatherwatch-air-pollution-climate-crisis
“Curbs on the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere are just one of the ways that politicians are reacting to the scientific evidence that we are damaging our health and our planet. An even greater threat to human life in the short term has been air pollution in the form of particulate matter from the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture and many industrial processes.
Clean air has become a crusade everywhere from Beijing to London, to save lives and improve economic output. At the same time as damaging lungs and hearts, the aerosols produced by pollution increase cloud formation, change rainfall patterns and reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the planet.
Scientists studying the significant progress that has been made in cutting air pollution this century concluded that this success had also “added considerably to amount of global warming we can expect”. The removal of pollution is already partly responsible for the “unprecedented rate of human-induced warming in the last decade”, they said.
The problem is that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, the main greenhouse gases, remain in the atmosphere for long periods, continuing to add to global heating, while the disappearance of aerosols instantly removes any protection. So, they say, less air pollution means we may expect continued acceleration of surface temperatures this decade.“
At one level, that might be an argument for saying that the impact of greenhouse gases is less than has been suggested. But of course the alarmists will simply say that as we clean our air we are making the climate crisis worse, so we have to double down on reducing greenhouse gases.
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It’s official, apparently:
“Climate change: El Niño ends with uncertainty over cooler future”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68826152
It will indeed be interesting to see what happens next. Will there be a continuing Hunga Tonga effect?
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Mark,
So basically, they’re going to claim that if it does not cool down in the next few months, then we’ve reached a global warming ‘tipping point’! I think this was the plan all along: falsely point the finger at El Nino for unprecedented warming in 2023, then if cooling does not happen after El Nino fades, start scaremongering about a ‘climate crisis tipping point’ aka unforeseen acceleration of global warming. That will keep the climate alarmist bandwagon going for at least another 6 months.
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Doug Brodie has alerted me to an article at the Con:
https://theconversation.com/tongas-volcanic-eruption-could-cause-unusual-weather-for-the-rest-of-the-decade-new-study-shows-231074
It looks like the study is question (restricted access) is just a re-publication of a study by the same authors published in Dec 2023, and it looks like the Con article is merely an exercise in propaganda, because it says this:
The study in 2023 confirms this 0.015C, but this is the globally averaged mean temperature anomaly for years 3-7 (2025-2029). The study says nothing about the short term global response to HTHH, but it does say this:
They can’t have it both ways. Even if they claim that Hunga Tonga had no effect on global mean temperature in 2023/24 (which is highly dubious), they can’t then claim unequivocally that the regional variations in seasonal climate, weather, precipitation etc. expected (and probably occurring) as a result of the eruption, for up to 7 years after the eruption, are due to global warming!
I’ll be exposing these shenanigans in a forthcoming Substack post.
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H/T Jaime Jessop.
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“July ends 13-month streak of global heat records, but experts warn against relief
Climate scientists say that the world is continuing to warm, despite brief respite in record breaking temperatures”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/08/global-extreme-heat-record
It’s official – nothing to do with Hunga Tonga, and El Nino explains everything, so it will be interesting to see what happens to global temperatures for the rest of the year.
Earth’s string of 13 straight months with a new average heat record came to an end this past July as the natural El Niño climate pattern ebbed, the European climate agency Copernicus announced on Wednesday.
But July 2024’s average heat just missed surpassing last year’s July, and scientists said the end of the record-breaking streak changes nothing about the threat posed by the climate crisis.
“The overall context hasn’t changed,” Copernicus’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said in a statement. “Our climate continues to warm.”…
…El Niño – which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather across the globe – spurred the 13 months of record heat, said Copernicus senior climate scientist Julien Nicolas. That has come to a close, hence July’s slight easing of temperatures. La Niña conditions – natural cooling – aren’t expected until later in the year.…
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Here is UAH. It’s cooled slightly from the peak but the world is still running a high fever and July was slightly warmer than June. Warming started too early for El Nino and the high temperature has continued for way too long after El Nino peaked in December/January. Hunga Tonga is still the most plausible explanation but the authorised narrative gatekeepers are loathe to admit it.
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Despite the science apparently being settled, it seems that climate scientists are baffled by heat that their models didn’t predict and can’t explain:
“‘We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
The leap in temperatures over the past 13 months has exceeded the global heating forecasts – is this just a blip or a systemic shift?”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/15/we-should-have-better-answers-by-now-climate-scientists-baffled-by-unexpected-pace-of-heating
In a remarkably candid essay in the journal Nature this March, one of the world’s top climate scientists posited the alarming possibility that global heating may be moving beyond the ability of experts to predict what happens next.
“The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, a British scientist and the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
If this anomaly does not stabilise by August, he said, it could imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated”.
Many in the science and environment community read these words with alarm. Was the leap in temperatures over the past 13 months, which has exceeded the global heating forecasts of experts, a sign of a systemic shift, or just a temporary anomaly? If the world was warming even faster than scientists thought it would, seemingly jumping years ahead of predictions, would that mean even more crucial decades of action had been lost?…
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“In a remarkably candid essay…….”
Why remarkably candid? That implies climate scientists are not usually candid. Oh wait! It’s Gavin Schmidt so we shouldn’t be surprised he’s normally less than candid. A revealing statement by the Guardian.
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Schmidt’s candidness stretches only so far as admitting that we still don’t know the direct causes of the 2023/24 jump in global temperature. It wears thin when he pronounces certainty upon what does not account for the sudden leap in temperature, principally, the Jan 2022 Hunga Tonga volcano, on the basis of some limited scientific studies by Dessler et al. It wears thin when he pronounces that come August, if global temperature is still very high (it is) then we must be in some ‘uncharted territory’ of man-made global warming.
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“Climate Q&A: Population, volcanoes and electric cars”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rxlygvnx6o
It’s the section on volcanoes that interests me here:
...How are volcanic eruptions influencing our weather?
Volcanic eruptions can have significant effects on the global climate. One of the most famous cases is Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, external, which erupted in 1991.
It released nearly 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, which formed sulphate aerosols.
These tiny particles reflected some of the Sun’s energy back into space, cooling the planet by an estimated 0.5C over the following two years or so.
When it comes to long-term warming, human activities are unquestionably to blame. Natural factors such as volcanic eruptions made effectively no difference, external to global temperatures averaged over the past decade.
There has been much speculation about the massive eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano at the start of 2022.
But it is thought that it had at most a minor effect on global temperatures, and certainly cannot explain the record temperatures of 2023.…
“But it is thought that…“. Oh well, that’s me convinced.
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Mark/Jaime/others – prompted me to have a look at RealClimate, not been there for a while.
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“2023’s ‘Record Temperatures’ Were Not Driven by CO2 Emissions, New Science Paper Finds”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/23/2023s-record-temperatures-were-not-driven-by-co2-emissions-new-science-paper-finds/
…There has been a recent scrabble in climate circles to explain the temperature spike, given the lack of scientific proof linking it to rises in just one trace atmospheric gas, namely carbon dioxide. The authors note the recent reduction in atmospheric particulates or aerosols caused by cleaner marine fuels, increased solar activity and the Hunga Tonga submarine volcano eruption and the associated boost to upper atmosphere water vapour. But they come down on the side of the argument that “ENSO is the primary reason for the global warming spikes”.…
...There have been a number of scientific papers trying to understand the recent temperature spike, although some are inconvenient in failing to support the ‘boiling’ trope and are therefore ignored in the mainstream. As the Daily Sceptic recently reported, a detailed paper from a group of mathematicians and scientists published in Nature found “limited evidence” for a global warming surge over the last the last 50 years. “No change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” they wrote. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature, and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration,” they argued.
All of which, of course, helps knock on the head the fast-emerging pseudoscience of weather attribution. These whackadoodle weather findings of computer models attributing individual events to long-term changes in the climate caused by humans feature heavily in mainstream media. In the absence of scientific backing, notably from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change despite its usually alarmist outlook, their political job is to help catastrophise natural events such as hurricanes, flooding and droughts. They are pseudoscience since their claims cannot be disproved or falsified. They are outside the scientific process and are simply opinions. The distinguished climate writer Roger Pielke Jr. calls them “weather attribution alchemy”. It says it all that they are now the main instrument used to alarm and scare populations into believing in a non-existent climate crisis.
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Yes, well, this site was pointing out the obvious flaws and inconsistencies of the “whackadoodle weather findings” years ago, calling them out as pseudoscience and pointing out that extreme weather was now being being used as “the main instrument to alarm and scare populations into believing in a non-existent climate crisis.” So thanks Chris and Roger but we got there before you, by some measure. Oh, and it wasn’t El Nino, unless you are willing to accept the violation of the law of causality.
Yours slightly peeved,
JJ
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Bit O/T but as an example of “alarm and scare populations” – The Gulf Stream is on the verge of COLLAPSING, leading climate change scientists warn – plunging the UK into a new ice age | Daily Mail Online
“The network of ocean currents which keep the Earth’s climate stable could be about to collapse, scientists have warned. In an open letter, 44 of the world’s leading climate scientists say that key Atlantic Ocean currents – including the Gulf Stream – are on the brink of failure.
The scientists caution that the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could lead to ‘devastating and irreversible impacts’ which will affect ‘the entire world for centuries to come’.
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dfhunter,
Actually, although global warming leading to UK freezing might seem counter-intuitive, it’s the bit (possibly the only bit) about climate change that much worries me. If melting ice leads to cold water in the North Atlantic pushing the Gulf Stream to the south, then the UK’s temperatures could well fall substantially – we here in the UK do enjoy rather balmy conditions given how far north we are. I’m far from convinced that it’s imminent, however.
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PS – should have added this quote – “In the face of these threats, the authors of the open letter are calling on the leaders of Nordic countries to seriously consider the risk of an AMOC collapse and put pressure on their global partners to stick to the aims of the Paris Agreement.”
Can’t find a link to who the “44 of the world’s leading climate scientists” are for some reason!!!
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Naturally the Guardian has that story too:
“‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/23/we-dont-know-where-the-tipping-point-is-climate-expert-on-potential-collapse-of-atlantic-circulation
It’s actually quite an interesting article, IMO.
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Mark: a few counter-arguments to the slowing Gulf Stream scare:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=gulf+stream
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Mark – I agree, so boiling to death may slip down the crisis list for the UK & energy security move up. Found this from 2003 – Will global warming trigger a new ice age? | Bill McGuire | The Guardian
Same theme/message 20yrs ago, not to say it’s wrong.
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Mike H, thanks for the alternative narrative. I’m not saying that I agree with the alarmists; rather, that if confronted by alternative “climate crisis” scenarios, namely a degree or two of UK warming or a collapse in the Gulf Stream, which will render the UK much colder, then it’s the latter that would bother me.
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Mark: quite agree with that sentiment! Cold is far worse than gentle warmth. It’s baffling that anyone would set the conditions of the little ice age as the temperature benchmark just because it’s contemporaneous with the start of the Industrial Revolution.
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Mike H, exactly. Hence: https://cliscep.com/2023/06/28/a-yeomans-diary/
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From the “science is settled” group including Gavin Schmidt:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/climate-change-heat-planet.html?searchResultPosition=2
We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing
Yet the unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range).
While there have been many partial hypotheses — new low-sulfur fuel standards for marine shipping, a volcanic eruption in 2022, lower Chinese aerosol emissions and El Niño perhaps behaving differently than in the recent past — we remain far from a consensus explanation even more than a year after we first noticed the anomalies. And that makes us uneasy.
Makes us uneasy too if you can’t quantify the effect of volcanoes. We were given to understand there was a consensus.
The public would benefit from more definitive knowledge on what is going on, too.
Well yes!
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There are so many places I could have posted this….
“World’s 1.5C climate target ‘deader than a doornail’, experts say
Scientists say goal to keep world’s temperature rise below 1.5C is not going to happen despite talks at Cop29 in Baku”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/18/climate-crisis-world-temperature-target
In the end, I decided to post it here, thanks to this:
...Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.
“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”...
Soul-searching maybe, but no questioning of the man-made climate crisis narrative here, no doubts as to the causes, even though they don’t understand what’s happening and why, no discussion of natural causes like Hunga Tonga. No, it has to be us wot dun it.
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It seems the science isn’t settled:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/12/record-heat-climate-crisis
Scientists are still puzzling over the reasons behind a streak of unexpected, record heat that scorched 2023 and into this year, sparking fears that the climate crisis could be moving faster than previously thought.
Is it the clouds? Or shipping? Or maybe a huge volcanic eruption?
A parade of climate researchers presented potential reasons for the apparent surge in global heating at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington on Tuesday, although none were able to claim a full understanding of what has happened with the world’s climate since the start of last year...
…“There is something to explain, there is still work to do,” said Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climate scientist who co-chaired the session and asked attendees to raise their hands if they thought the heat anomalies had been fully explained. Only a few out of several hundred did so.
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“Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climate scientist who co-chaired the session and asked attendees to raise their hands if they thought the heat anomalies had been fully explained. Only a few out of several hundred did so.”
Reminds me of a cartoon (which I wish I could find) where the speaker at a climate conference says:
“We argue that natural variation is the major cause of climate change. So we should all go home and start looking for real jobs.”
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MikeH – not sure I get – “We argue that natural variation is the major cause of climate change. So we should all go home and start looking for real jobs.”
Anyway, from Mark’s Guardian article, we get a Thu 5 Oct 2023 link to ‘Gobsmackingly bananas’: scientists stunned by planet’s record September heat | Climate crisis | The Guardian
Quote –
“While human-caused global heating and El Niño are the biggest factors causing the record-breaking temperatures, other factors may be contributing small increases as well, Hausfather said. These include an uptick in the 11-year solar cycle, cuts in sun-blocking sulphur emissions from shipping and industry and a volcanic eruption in Tonga that released a large amount of water vapour, which traps heat.
In August, the Guardian asked 45 leading climate scientists from around the world about the record-breaking temperatures. They said that, despite it certainly feeling as if events had taken an alarming turn, the broad global heating trend seen to date was entirely in line with three decades of scientific predictions.
Increasingly severe weather impacts had also been long signposted by scientists, although the speed and intensity of the reality and the unexpected vulnerability of many populations scared some. The off-the-charts sea temperatures and Antarctic sea ice loss were seen as the most shocking events.
The scientists said that the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year in just a decade, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. The researchers overwhelmingly pointed to one action as critical: slashing the burning of fossil fuels down to zero.”
You can then link to ‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate? | Climate crisis | The Guardian
But why spoil the festive spirit 🙂
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dfh,
They want to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand it’s scary, scary, scary, off the scale, much worse than we thought. On the other hand, the clever models predicted this, and it’s in line with expectations.
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A strong contender for the sudden warmth in 2023, continuing into 2024, is a reduced planetary albedo, caused by a reduction in low level cloud cover – which continues a trend beginning at the start of the 21st century, albeit that the 2023 ‘jump’ in temperature was itself caused by a more rapid decline beginning in December 2020. That is the conclusion of a recent paper, but it raises more questions than it answers.
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/surface-albedo-anomaly-2023
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Hi Jaime – thanks for your link & post, very relevant, interesting & informative.
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It rumbles on dfh. They’re going to find it hard to sweep 2023/24 warming spike under the carpet, like they managed to do with the 1998-2013 Pause.
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“Sediment is a time capsule that shows how past climate change altered our landscapes – and hints at their future”
https://theconversation.com/sediment-is-a-time-capsule-that-shows-how-past-climate-change-altered-our-landscapes-and-hints-at-their-future-243201
An unusually interesting article at the Conversation. This was the paragraph that caught my eye:
…Pollen and diatom analyses revealed that the mid-Holocene (7,000-5,000 years ago) had a very warm climate, and is also known to be a period of time with increased volcanic activity.…
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“Unexpectedly warm January puzzles climate scientists”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyjk92w9k1o
Last month was the world’s warmest January on record and raised further questions about the pace of climate change, scientists say.
January 2025 had been expected to be slightly cooler than January 2024 because of a shift away from a natural weather pattern in the Pacific known as El Niño.
But instead, last month broke the January 2024 record by nearly 0.1C, according to the European Copernicus climate service.
The world’s warming is due to emissions of planet-heating gases from human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels – but scientists say they can’t fully explain why last month was particularly hot.
It continues a series of surprisingly large temperature records since mid-2023, with temperatures around 0.2C above what had been expected.
“The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News.
“The specifics of exactly why 2023, and 2024, and [the start of] 2025, were so warm, there are other elements involved there. We’re trying to pin those down.”...
It seems the science isn’t settled, after all.
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“Weatherwatch: volcanic eruptions pose challenge for wind energy, says study
Climate models show 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia would have resulted in 9% drop in wind energy”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/06/weatherwatch-volcanic-eruptions-pose-challenge-for-wind-energy-says-study
…The drop in wind speed went largely unnoticed at the time, but a similar tropical eruption today would hit hard. “For wind energy-reliant regions like North America, Australia, and North Africa, this could have devastating economic and energy consequences if such an eruption occurred today,” says Shen.
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‘Unexpectedly warm’ = cooling as expected after the occurrence of two entirely natural events in 2023/24. The BBC is gaslighting and deflecting yet again.
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P.S. I still haven’t had a reply to my complaint to the BBC – they have failed to respond in 10 working days. Chewing on a wasp no doubt.
(comment before this one has disappeared as usual!)
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Apologies, Jaime , just found your earlier comment in spam and set it free. I saw that graph on your substack yesterday and did wonder about the claims that January saw record-breaking heat.
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“EXCLUSIVE: Sensational Findings Point to Hunga Tonga Eruption as Prime Suspect Behind Recent Temperature Spike”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/08/exclusive-sensational-findings-point-to-hunga-tonga-eruption-as-prime-suspect-behind-recent-temperature-spike/
…Curiously, there has been remarkably little scientific work published into the climatic effects of the Hunga Tonga eruption – one suspects due to a politically contrived shortage of funds for academics trying to investigate natural explanations of the anomalous trends. But there have been sceptical champions and one of those taking an interest in Hunga Tonga is Javier Vinos. Writing in Dr Judith Curry’s blog, he observes that nothing even in alarmist models of the effect of recent small CO2 annual increases on climate could have led us to expect such a large abrupt warming. “There is no study to suggest that the gradual increase in CO2 could lead to a sudden increase in climate variability,” he notes. Writing in July 2024, he identified the Hunga Tonga volcano as the “prime suspect” for the warming spell.
The image above shows that the extra water vapour from the eruption took about a year to blanket the northern hemisphere, an effect that can be seen with the dark green tones. “Thus, there are dynamical events in the stratosphere that have the appropriate time lag to coincide with the abrupt warming in 2023,” he adds.…
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Daily Sceptic and Paul Homewood are both pointing to a ‘new study’ which points the finger of blame at Hunga Tonga for the 2023 spike in global warming. Only been saying it since August 2023, so nice to have other sceptics on board finally. However, one word of caution, as I’ve commented at NALOPKT:
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Jaime – thanks for your comment here & at NALOPKT on this (see some familiar names have chipped in).
Well out of my depth here, but when you caution wrt atmospheric radiative processes & also mention “That study doesn’t mention surface temperature specifically”, that has me wondering.
When we hear it’s the hottest year evva on record, take it are they only talking about the surface temperature & to what altitude? (makes sense because that’s where life is).
ps – are you self read about this stuff, if so, you “have the brain the size of a planet” 🙂
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dfhunter,
The thing is, everyone is out of their depth here, because an eruption like Hunga Tonga has never happened before – at least, not so as any of us puny human beings with pea-sized brains can observe and study using our new fangled satellite-mounted and ground-based instruments. Not even the ‘experts’ know for sure what the effect of such a massive instantaneous injection of sea water high into the stratosphere will be on global and regional climate and weather, and nobody as far as I am aware had even thought to speculate what the effect might be, in the years prior to it actually happening.
As far as the ‘experts’ go, they did model the possible effects of a gradual, long term increase of stratospheric water vapour, mainly because the ‘experts’ have been obsessed for many years by alleged man-made climate change and it was thought that an increase in the rate of water vapour escaping from the troposphere into the stratosphere (due to man-made climate change) might in turn cause more warming near the surface because of the radiative effects of that stratospheric water vapour feeding back down to the surface – if that makes sense! In other words, they were looking for a scary positive water vapour feedback, in addition to the scary positive water vapour feedback which they claim is happening in the troposphere due to the accumulation of CO2, which even the ‘experts’ can’t quantify exactly (hence the huge range of climate sensitivities in the models).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it seems highly likely that a sudden massive increase in water vapour in the stratosphere will warm the surface, but nobody really knows by how much because, surprise, surprise, the earth’s atmosphere is a very complicated thing! But amazingly, a lot of the ‘experts’ came out soon after the eruption and declared, very precisely, what the effect of Hunga Tonga would be on global mean surface temperature, and it was tiny, so all the ‘experts’ – and even a lot of sceptics – dismissed Hunga Tonga as a possible cause of the observed spike in global mean surface temperature starting June 2023. It’s been a panto ever since really! One that’s still playing.
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dfhunter, to get an initial understanding of these matters in about 200 pages I would recommend F.W. Taylor, “Elementary Climate Physics”, Oxford, 2005. Chapter 7 is called ‘Earth’s energy budget: The ‘greenhouse’ effect’. At page 115 there is a nice graph of what happens (in the steady-state) to stratospheric and tropospheric temperature profiles following a temperature disturbance.
This is an elementary (but not simplistic) level book so does not deal with Hunga Tonga type transient pulses. But planet-sized brains are not required – just an interest in applied (non-settled) atmospheric physics. In haste, John C.
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Jaime & John – thanks for both replies. John, your reading recommendation has sent me internet hunt for a free download version but to no avail (tight fisted Scot 🙂
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PS – in my quest for info after John’s prompt, think I found the perfect website aimed at kids, which even has games you can play to help save the planet & it’s free 🙂
Climate change – KS3 Geography – BBC Bitesize
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“Could an almighty eruption destroy a dreamy Greek island?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm25lz56rezo
This is an interesting article generally, but I mention it here for this:
…Prof Isobel Yeo, an expert on highly dangerous submarine volcanoes with Britain’s National Oceanography Centre, is leading the mission. Around two-thirds of the world’s volcanoes are underwater, but they are hardly monitored.
“It’s a bit like ‘out of sight, out of mind’ in terms of understanding their danger, compared to more famous ones like Vesuvius,” she says on deck, as we watch two engineers winching a robot the size of a car off the ship’s side...
…“Underwater volcanoes are capable of really big, really destructive eruptions,” she says.
“We are lulled into a sense of false security if you’re used to small eruptions and the volcano acting safe. You assume the next will be the same – but it might not,” she says.
The Hunga Tunga eruption in 2022 in the Pacific produced the largest underwater explosion ever recorded, and created a tsunami in the Atlantic with shockwaves felt in the UK. Some islands in Tonga, near the volcano, were so devastated that their people have never returned...
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REAL science makes a comeback! Who knew? Me, I guess.
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/3623/2025/
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https://notrickszone.com/2025/07/25/the-warming-of-2023-warming-was-due-to-natural-causes-not-man-made/
…We remember: by mid-2023, the data on global temperatures had shown a very marked increase. It had gotten warmer globally quite quickly, by an incredible 0.5°C compared to 2022. This led to a new record for the year being announced in 2024. The German public television Tagesschau (and many other media) did so in great detail.
The whole (climate) world asked about the cause. The Tagesschau correctly concluded that the (rather mediocre) El Nino could only make a very small contribution in the second half of 2023. Looking at the temporal change, the rise in global temperatures occurred simultaneously with the El Nino rise in ocean temperatures in the tropical East Pacific (an area called “Nino 3.4”) and that was already an indication that this could not be where the problem is: The lag is usually 3 months for global temperatures to follow Nino 3,4. Causality would have been violated.
It was already apparent in January 2022 that something was up. A volcano called Honga-Tunga-Honga erupted. It is an underwater volcano and large masses of water were hurled into the stratosphere. Here is a satellite image of it.
It has long been known that stratospheric water vapor causes temperatures on the ground to rise globally. But a volcano like this is a natural event, the warming effect is then added “on top” of the greenhouse gas effect. However, the “bump” itself was not man-made. Unfortunately, the news report did not mention this at all....
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If it cools much more, they’ll be erasing the 2023/24 sudden warming (and memory-holing the numerous studies which sought to explain it), just like they did with the infamous Pause. Naturally, because they ‘own the Science’!
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Jaime, is this the UN’s Melissa Fleming “owning the science” to which you refer?
In haste. Regards, John C.
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Yes John.
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