The accurate satellite record confirms that last month was an unusual weather period with higher than normal temperature recordings on both land and at sea. It was the warmest July since 1979, it tied with March 2015 for the second warmest departure from the norm and it was the warmest month for tropical land. Of course, the climate alarmists had a field day, with ‘global boiling’ now making an official UN appearance. Inexplicably missing from all the hysteria, however, was any mention that NASA scientists have recently confirmed that the Tonga volcanic eruption in January last year boosted water content in the stratosphere by a massive, and weather-changing, 10%.
Scientists have been shocked by the dramatic increase in water vapour spread around the globe by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai submarine volcano. Water vapour is the most powerful of all the greenhouses gases since, unlike the others, it traps heat across a wide part of the infra-red spectrum. It accounts for about 4% of all atmospheric gases, compared to 0.04% for carbon dioxide, but its effect is relatively short-lived since it re-enters the natural hydrological cycle. Nevertheless, Tonga water vapour and its associated clouds could last in the atmosphere for a few years, and scientists suggest both temperature increases and disturbed weather patterns will continue.
A group of NASA scientists have published a paper noting Tonga’s “high impact” consequences. Unlike most volcanic eruptions, Tonga released few aerosols such as dust and ash into the atmosphere which cause temporary falls in temperature. In 1815, Mount Tambora exploded on the island of Sumbawa causing widespread cooling and a subsequent “year without a summer”. In Tonga’s case, specific geological conditions threw vast amounts of super-heated water up to 50 kilometres into the air. Such is the “unprecedented” amounts of water involved, the NASA scientists believe it could remain in the atmosphere for serval years. The scientists say they will continue to monitor volcanic gases from this eruption, along with future ones, “to better quantify their varying roles in climate”.
Not that it is likely that the spoon-fed activists in the mainstream media will be much interested. Any warming will be gratefully seized upon to promote the so-called climate emergency, and the collectivist Net Zero political solution. The scientific jury is still deliberating on the effects of the Tonga eruption, but recent unusual weather changes occurring at a time when water vapour has been given such a massive boost, must rank as a possible cause. As the Daily Sceptic has often noted, the tragedy for any commentator too afraid to challenge the prevailing narrative about the climate is that whole areas of debate around physics, chemistry and geology are off limits for fear that alternative explanations will cast doubt on the carefully constructed political narrative.
Cliff Mass is the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington. He has long been critical of catastrophising about individual weather events. According to Mass, the golden rule of weather extremes is: “The more extreme a climate or weather record is, the greater the contribution of natural variability, and the smaller the contribution of human-caused global warming.”
Earlier work from a group of European scientists had drawn attention to the scale of the Tonga discharge. They concluded that the unique nature and magnitude of the global stratospheric perturbation caused by Hunga “ranks it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era, with a range of potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate”. They also observed that Hunga was likely to have been the most explosive event of the modern observational era, while comparisons were made to the eruption of Mount Krakatoa in 1883.
The latest work from NASA analysed satellite data showing the volume of water injected into the atmosphere between 12 and 53 kms. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” commented lead author Luis Millan. “We had to carefully inspect all the measurements in the plume to make sure they were trustworthy,” he added. Volcanoes rarely inject much water into the stratosphere. In the 18 years since NASA has been taking measurements, only two others produced appreciable amounts, but these were said to be “mere blips” compared with Tonga.
It seems that the smart alarmist money is backing the Tonga warming effect, with some shorting of the once promising El Nino boost becoming apparent. Signals from the latter stable are not wholly sanguine. Sea surface temperature departures from the norm, known as anomalies, are mixed, notes the U.S. weather service NOAA. “Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system reflected a weak El Nino” it adds. Odds can change – it is after all the weather. Forecasters are said to favour continued growth of the El Nino oscillation through the fall, peaking this winter with an 81% chance of “moderate-to-strong” intensity. In forecaster-speak, this translates as we haven’t a clue.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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This event has probably spoiled the nascent El Nino global warming event which climate alarmist propagandists were so looking forward to. It also puts them on the spot of having to confront the greenhouse gas effect of atmospheric water vapour.
Invoking the golden rule of Cliff Mass, this sudden spike in the UAH temperature series is an opportunity to mock anyone who claims it is due to human influence. There is no scientific mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 could cause such a sudden change. The same applies to recent El Nino spikes, e.g. in 1998 and 2016.
According to the UN IPCC (not that I believe their modelling at all), man-made CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming at a slow but steady rate of about 0.2°C ± 0.1 per decade https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/faq/faq-chapter-1/. The July spike is an increase of well over 0.2°C in a month, equivalent to a rate of over 24°C per decade.
Steve Milloy puts the latest spike in context: https://twitter.com/JunkScience/status/1686719167838228481?t=iabhXX61Z0BesYAGIaikWQ&s=19
Just had a look at that twitter link.
-” July 2023 was NOT the warmest month on the satellite record… an honor still held by February 2016. – July 2023 was about as warm as April 1998”. They are misleading us even by their own data, and their own data is junk.
I do not usually quote Wikipedia but here goes.
“Satellites do not directly measure temperature, they measure radiances (reflected radiation) which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature. As a result, different groups that have analysed the satellite data have obtained different temperature trends… The satellite series is not fully homogeneous – the record is constructed from a series of satellites with similar but not identical instrumentation… The sensors deteriorate over time, and corrections are necessary… Particularly large differences between reconstructed temperature series occur at the few times when there is little temporal overlap between successive satellites, making intercalibration difficult.”
In other words plenty of opportunity to create any temperature record you want. Pure junk!
It is absolutely obvious that satellite observation, covering at least 90% of the planet’s surface, are far more likely to yield a meaningful ‘average’ global temperature (if you believe that measure is really meaninful, anyway), than the alternative rag bag of thermometers and buoys.
At least, Typhoon jets taking off yards from a Stephenson screen at Coningsby, housing a dodgy electric probe, cannot adulterate the satellite record.
Obviously, different teams of “scientists” will have different abilities, different approaches and different political (or cultish) beliefs.
But (again), if you believe this global average means anything, all the satellite data and all the information from sondes and balloons, all of which are reasonably consistent, build up to contribute to a coherent picture of what the Climate is up to.
The “surface” readings from correctly sited screens are also valuable, but have been very widely and blatantly tinkered with, to produce headlines rather than weather data, let alone climate data.
But the absolute nadir, the lying elephant in the room, is the Garbage Out “climate” computer models.
The warming is all in the adjustments. The data has been adjusted more times than a prostitutes knickers.
Well at least Chris now accepts that last month was extraordinarily warm and all those extraordinary temperatures were not down to bad measurement. But I guess he had to when the “accurate” satellite figures confirmed it.
The question, as always, is why.
Sure – but it is a handy first step to accept there is something that needs explaining.
Even that is a stretch. We’ve only been measuring this stuff – badly – for the blink of an eye.
And look around you. Evidence of enormous climate change happening repeatedly on enormous scales from times before little old humans even existed.
We are nothing on this planet. To suggest otherwise is arrogance in the extreme. To suggest that we could design and execute ways to affect it is, well, insanity.
Of course there has been enormous climate change in the past – much of it caused by changes in GHGs and much of it disastrous for whatever life there was at the time.
The key thing is how quickly did it happen?
Yes. There is a great deal that we do not know.
And quite a lot that we do:
‘“It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive,”
“I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”.
“If you really go back far enough there were swamps near the North Pole, and the other thing to keep in mind is that we‘re coming out of a cold period, a Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850”.
Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington
The earth’s climate has been changing naturally for hundreds of milions of years.
There is no signficant relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and the change in climate in the past.
There is in the past no correlation between CO2 and temperature. It is totally random with high levels of CO2 even in an ice age. People like you who see only CO2 and nothing else are like a hammer that sees everything as a nail.
Regarding climate, there is a great deal that needs, has always needed, explaining. ‘The Science’ still has a long way to go:
‘The temperature trend at Syowa (Antartica), also called Showa, has been modestly downward since 1973′
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/obd/stats/etrn/view/monthly_s3.php?prec_no=99&block_no=89532&year=&month=&day=&view=
Last month wasn’t extraordinarily warm. It was extraordinarily cold for July (I had to turn the heating on several times) and very rainy for summer. Here’s a gratis clue for people spending too much time with M$-Excel: Weather is what happens outside and not in a spreadsheet.
The UK is not the world!
The world has no weather.
So no ice ages and the satellite record is a waste of time?
It’s difficult to put you straight, MTF. You are labouring under so many fundamental misconceptions that to find the right place to start is almost impossible.
Since when is ice age weather? The definition of ice age is permafrost regions exist on earth (ie, regions which remain frozen all year round).
When I recently looked this up, the averaged temperature of July was given as 16.95C, up 0.32C from July 2022 with 16.63C. Sixteen degrees centigrade is cold enough to be uncomfortable, not hot. A change of less than 1/3 of a degree from one year to another is no change for all practical purposes. Lastly, the notion of averaging temperatures measured in different location is still humbug. It was probably much hotter in the Arizona desert or in southern China. But these are localized phenomenons, not global ones.
A way to get an idea of global temperature trends would be to create a frequency distribution of temperature readings. A month could then said to have been hotter than another if the number of higher temperature readings increased by a significant margin (should occur for more than 50% of all readings). But that’s obviouslty already much too complicated for the climate pseudoscientists. They want a single number they can put into a screaming headline.
A typically idiotic comment from a Climate Cultist.
You think it was with how they bang on about the uk solving global warming!
Correct. Which is precisely why beggaring ourselves to stop our measly 1% contribution to global CO2 will achieve the square root of SFA.
But Europe and it’s wild fires are the world are they?
Oh for crying out loud – no one here seriously misunderstands the difference between weather and climate. RW is perfectly entitled to be fed up – as are a great many people in the UK in particular – hearing about how yet another record has been broken…hottest May/June/July ever blah blah blah, when a) the data is unrealiable, b) the data is a lot of crap, c) the data is manipulated, d) they can’t take the dog out again in Basingstoke because it’s pouring and cold and depressing. Experts, shmexperts – there’s a very good argument for ignoring the ‘experts’, sticking your head out the front door and seeing if the world is really burning up. I’ve asked this before: what are you so frightened of? Produce some evidence this time, rather than just making statements – because as we all know, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without etc etc. Very good of you to keep everyone on their toes, but actually you’re not very good practice. Other than Marseille and Toulon, France is in the mid- to low-twenties; Rhodes (as a friend who’s there right now) is not burning up – far from it; it’s very hot in Phoenix, Riyadh and Lahore – what’s new; and yesterday, in Dereham, Norfolk, it was 14C, windy, overcast and raining until midday, when it went up to about 17C – on August 4th. Today, no different but raining evening more. How you manage to be so terrified of heat when your own little world is so cold, wet and depressing is beyond me. CO2 – not dangerous. Methane – not dangerous. Sea levels – not dangerous. Hurrianes, floods, fires – nothing to worry about, data exaggerated. IPCC – dangerous lying gobshites. Get a grip MTF! YOU WILL MAKE IT THROUGH THE DAY!
In the climate scare agenda the proponents can and do say anything they want. There is no way to falsify any of it. So, they keep making evidence free pronouncements knowing that they can never be wrong. —-This is NOT science. There is huge amount more to climate than fossil fuels, but climate policy by western governments continues to act like hammer that sees everything as a nail. When you mix science and Politics you end up with —-Politics.
August hasn’t been much cop so far either, in my part of England.
Ditto Norfolk.
When something warms it does not automatically mean humans warmed it. —–But even in the last 2 thousand years there have been periods just as warm if not warmer. ——What caused those? There is nothing unusual about current temperature or climate. I often hear determined climate activists claim that we have warmed the planet by 1.2 C since 1860 or so. —-Nope. Half of that warming occurred before we were emitting much in the way of CO2 as only a few countries were starting to be industrialised. So, at most only about half a degree of warming could have been caused by us and that assumes that all natural variability has suddenly ceased and only our CO2 decides what the temperature is going to be. Even the IPCC admit they cannot see a human signal in the data. They cannot tell the difference between what would happen naturally and alleged changes caused by humans. ——You are getting mixed up between “science” and “official science”
To solve this new, unprecented volcano problem, we must introduce a new global tax which will fund Volcano Abatement Measures.
TheScience™ is clear – since humans began massively increased drilling into the earth’s crust, volcanic eruptions have become more frequent and more severe.
Kids, this is sarcasm.
Ah, but as Jeff Childers points out ‘Here’s why corporate media is ignoring the most dramatic climate even[t] in modern history: you can’t legislate underwater volcanoes. You can try, but they won’t listen. So what’s the fun in that? Corporate media only exists to further political ends. Since volcanoes aren’t subject to politics, why bother?’
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/overheated-friday-july-28-2023-c
The Summer in Europe climate change narrative is firmly centered on all of it turning into a desert due to rainfall stopping basically forever. Lots of rain due to lots of additional water in the atmosphere and cool weather conditions due to water vapour reflecting entering sunlight out of the atmosphere (seems likely) simply doesn’t fit into that.
Even more to the point, you can’t conceivably tax a volcano.
But you sure can tax “Carbon” (in the shape of the colourless trace gas CO2, essential to all life on Earth).
And your tax calculations, can be produced to demonstrate that Chinese CO2 is harmless, even if 30 times as great as UK CO2.
The aims of this 35 years of barefaced lies and fraudulent data, was behind the politicians adopting this racket.
First a tax unrelated to earnings, inherited wealth, spending etc. Secondly, yet another way of taxing BigOil. Thirdly a way of enriching themselves (e.g. David Cameron’s father in law, Sir Reginald Sheffield and his eight modest turbines sited in a corner of his estate, yielding a nice £1,000 per day). Fourthly a great way to frighten and control the plebs and make them pay for it all.
Lastly the way to destoy the West and boost Marxism, as admitted by Edenhoffer and Figueres.
“Volcano Abatement Measures”
VAMTAX!
So now we need to cut our water emissions, or we’re all going to DIE!
Add in food rationing to that and (planned) shortages because, er, we’re all going to die if we keep on eating what we normally eat…
Bugger no tea and coffee for me today. Infact there will probably be a kettle ban in future, kills two birds with one stone water vapour and CO2.
We should all start wearing suits as in the film Dune to prevent putting our water into the atmosphere. Then we take it to a collection point and it’s taken away to be safely stored underground.
After you’ve sorted it out into the correct bins!
Now, that’s a coincidence. Considering that we decidedly had a summer-without-summer in the UK (and also on the continent, cf W.O.A being closed to people with tickets due to too much rain), I jokingly said to someone about a fortnight ago: “Presumably, another volcano exploded somewhere and the news has been kept secret because it doesn’t fit into the climate change narrative.” If past events count as reference, we’re probably in for some global cooling now. If the mostly water statement is accurate (but there’s no reason to assume that it is), it hopefully shouldn’t become too severe.
Not long now before they start talking about anthropogenic global cooling and how we need to stop fossil fuels and blahblahblah…
Pah! Old hat, we had that in the 70s. We don’t realise it but we are 20 foot under the snow.
It’s probably 20 feet of asymptomatic snow.
Interesting stuff. Many thanks Chris for the informative article.
Puts the mockers on hydrogen fuel, as it ‘only’ produces water vapour as a bi-product ! Oh no! More steam in the atmosphere
The new threat is Global Steaming.
Fantastic! What’s more natural after global boiling than global steaming?
And then ,the biggest cup of tea ever poured!
It’s all a steaming pile of….
The biggest threat to the Planet Earth is the Planet Earth itself! We need to STOP THE PLANET EARTH!
On further reflection it occurs to me that Greenpeace activists out to climb to the top of this volcano and cover it with black cloth.
Just Stop Steam!
Brilliant. And if they could glue themselves to the crater’s edge, that would be splendid
And they need to do it to all volcanoes, everywhere. Especially those just about to blow!
The whole point, to me, of the climate “crisis” has never been whether there really is global warming or not, nor how much there is if there is, but what it might be due to. I always presumed that the Tonga eruption was a major recent factor but on the basis that it had caused major heating within the Pacific. What I hadn’t thought of was the water vapour release. So it’s nice to know I was right even if for the wrong reason.
Now onwards, to why goats cause deserts and what effect the drying out of the Aral Sea has has on weather patterns… oh, and the surface warming effects of wind farms!
Is there any way water content in the stratosphere can be measured?
I recall 1995. ——-In that year there were blue skies from April all the way through to the middle of September. ——When I say “blue skies” I don’t just mean some very nice days. I mean BLUE SKIES everyday. (Anyone can check this for themselves, as it was something that happened all over the Northern Hemisphere))——-Now let us suppose that instead of that happening in 1995, it actually happened this year and this years weather scooted back to 1995.————-Just think of the headlines on BBC. They would be ecstatic. They would be glowing with wide beams of confirmation bias on their faces. On SKY NEWS their “Climate Show” would be shifted to the peak 8 pm slot and be extended to one hour. The Guardian and Independent would have front page exclusives of dead cattle with birds falling from the sky due to dehydration.(All cartoons ofcourse because no such thing would be taking place)——- King Charles would be in Davos with Sunak and Starmer slurping on Caviar and telling Schwab that they were going to rip out all of our gas boilers by next Thursday. The silly activist groups would have the shops sold out of super glue and no sporting event would be able to get started for the hang gliders dropping in. ——Climate Change is the pseudo science and religious cult that relies on seeing every bit of weather they can regard as extreme, from anywhere in the world and assuming immediately that it was all caused by humans. But in the real world there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event.—OOOPS. So if there is no increase in extreme weather where is the “crisis”? ——There isn’t one. It is a manufactured emergency for political purposes using junk science, and as we all know when you mix science and politics you end up with POLITICS.
Here is a theory, just proven in Tonga. Water vapour causes cooling on a large scale, many degrees in Tonga. The answer is pure physics and therefore not understood by “climate scientists”. Did anyone notice that water (vapour or liquid) is a powerful transporter of heat? Probably not because it is all about energy, the least understood part of Physics to the masses. Water has a very high specific heat, therefore it transports a lot of energy when it moves, and move it does in the atmosphere. Mainly upwards when vapour, then downwards when it rains. But the water in cloude has already lost most of the heat when it has risen in the atmosphere. Simple enough surely?