It’s been a vintage year for politicised climate fanatics playing their new pseudoscientific game of joining up the jots of individual weather anomalies and claiming we are all going to die unless we submit to a collectivist Net Zero Great Reset. “We are living through climate collapse in real time,” the UN’s unhinged Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the recent COP28 conference. Mainstream media hypes the idea it will be the ‘hottest’ year ever, with records smashed almost every month. All of this cherry-picking conveniently ignores the dramatic effect of natural variation that could have been caused by a strengthening El Niño global heat transfer, along with possible changes arising from the Hunga Tonga volcanic explosion. Examine the latest global temperatures calculated by NASA and it can be seen that the recent months-long pattern of increasing anomalies is consistent with a similar rising record for the last El Niño in 2015-16.
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. In an enlightening essay published recently by the online science publication Watts Up With That?, Larry Hamlin notes that the highest prior GISS measured temperature anomaly at 1.37°C was in February 2016 and this compared with 1.44°C recorded last November (‘hottest month ever’). This amounts to a higher anomaly of 1/14th of a degree centigrade. The author states that the GISS data shows that the 2023 El Niño is driving the current global temperature anomaly increases.
The effects of El Niño are far from completely understood. It is essentially a large heat transfer mechanism from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. Forecasting individual weather changes is difficult, since its effects feed into many other natural atmospheric and oceanic movements. But scientists do know that it can produce widespread variations in local weather patterns, making a mockery of attributing bad weather in a strong El Niño year to human activity. The current El Niño could even get a little stronger as it moves through the northern hemisphere winter. On the other hand, it could start to fizzle out.
The American weather service NOAA is currently uncertain about the future strength of the present El Niño, noting that while stronger events “increase the likelihood of El Niño-related climate anomalies, it does not imply expected impacts will emerge in all locations or be of strong intensity”.
There have undoubtedly been anomalous weather patterns this year, although the vast majority of drought/wildfire/hurricane agitprop makes sense only to long-time sandwich board wearers. Most extreme weather events are not increasing, and many have not done so for many years. In the meantime, the number of deaths caused by extreme weather has plunged over 90% in the last 100 years as humans, made vastly more prosperous by exploiting hydrocarbons, erect expensive protections from the ravages of Mother Nature.
This year there is another possible natural force at work in adjusting some of the usual weather patterns. In January 2022, the Hunga Tonga submarine volcano suddenly exploded depositing an astonishing extra 13% water vapour into the upper atmosphere. Water vapour accounts for around 4% of the atmosphere and although short-lived and constantly replaced, acts as a powerful gas trapping heat. Whatever the longer term consequences of the eruption turn out to be, it is likely to affect the natural hydrological cycle as the extra water precipitates out over the next few years.
Last year saw a flurry of scientific interest in Hunga Tonga, but it appears that recent published comments are downplaying its effects. Nevertheless a group of European scientists has noted that the unique nature and magnitude of the global perturbation caused by Hunga-Tonga “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”.
All of this shows that it is good science to examine every possible cause that could affect weather and longer term changes in the climate. The ‘settled’ science promoting Net Zero is junk science, since it fails to consider anything other than an unproven hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. As always, the wise words of atmospheric scientist Professor Cliff Mass of the University of Washington are worth noting: “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”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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