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.
One of the main indicators of the progress of El Niño, and its related La Niña oscillation, is the temperature of the water at the surface and near surface. The graph below shows the very rapid recent drop in the sub-surface temperatures for the western tropical Pacific down to much cooler levels.
Atmospheric scientist Professor Cliff Mass of Washington University observes that the entire character of the northern winter has been characterised by a strong El Niño. He notes that in America the impacts have included low snowpack over Washington State, huge snowpack and heavy rain over California and warm temperatures over the Upper Plains States. Of course, similar unusual weather patterns have been recorded over many parts of the planet, along with the ubiquitous pseudoscientific claim that the climate is collapsing and it is all the fault of humans and their wicked ways.
The El Niño effects were largely behind the reports that last year was the hottest 12 months in at least 125,000 years. This was despite scientific evidence pointing to periods of much higher past temperatures, notably between 10,000 to 5,000 years ago when ice disappeared across vast swathes of the northern hemisphere. In fact it transpired that last year’s hottest ever claim in the modern era did not apply to large areas of the world including Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, East N. Pacific, Hawaiian region, Arctic and Antarctica. Investigative science writer Larry Hamlin consulted the figures published by the U.S. weather service NOAA and found that the much hyped hottest ever averaged temperature anomaly did not apply to 58% of the Earth’s land surface where 73% of the world’s population live.
Apart from the rapidly cooling oceans, there is more bad news for alarmists since it appears a La Niña cooling oscillation could be on its way by the middle of the year. There is an historical tendency for a strong El Niño to be followed by La Niña. For global heating enthusiasts the news could hardly be worse. The strong El Niño in 1998 was followed by a temperature pause that lasted 13-14 years, while the 2016 event ushered in a near nine year hiatus. Indeed without the El Niño boosts, it appears that global temperatures have barely risen over the last 25 years, and have certainly plateaued from the lively two-decade spike at the end of the 20th century.
As regular readers will recall, the Met Office abolished the 2000-2014 pause by adding a retrospective 30% extra heating to its HadCRUT global database. Last month the Daily Sceptic obtained a list of the Met Office’s 380 U.K. temperature recording stations, together with a note of their class rating from the World Meteorological Office. It was found that potential heat corruptions in almost a third of the stations meant there were ‘uncertainties’ of recording up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the stations came with uncertainties of up to 2°C. The global temperature has been measured accurately by satellites since 1979 and a monthly update is published on the blog of compiler Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The UAH record has accurately represented the El Niño-induced heat over the last year, and has even been mentioned in the mainstream media. Alas, it also shows the two 21st century pauses and this appears to have been its undoing. Dr. Spencer’s temperature blog page was banned in 2022 by Google AdSense on the grounds of “unreliable and harmful claims”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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