The world of climate science is in shock following extraordinary findings from a team of high-powered NASA scientists that suggest most of the recent global temperature increases are due to the introduction of draconian fuel shipping regulations designed to help prevent global warming. The fantasy world of Net Zero is of course full of unintended consequences, but it is claimed that the abrupt 80% cut in sulphur dioxide emissions from international shipping in 2020 has accounted for 80% of global warming since the turn of the decade. Although the extra heat is described as “transient”, the warming is extraordinary and is expected to rise during the 2020s at a rate of 0.24°C a decade, 20% higher than the claimed warming trend since 1980.
The news is likely to cause considerable concern among the mainstream climate hoaxers in media, academia and politics. They have had a field day of late by pointing to rises in temperature as evidence for their evidence-free prediction that the climate is in danger of imminent collapse. But the NASA scientists, working out of the Goddard Space Flight Centre, predict a trend of rising temperatures due to the IMO2020 regulations going forward, and state, “the 2023 record warmth is within the ranges of our expected trajectory”.
The science behind the NASA findings, which have been published in Nature, is simple. Fewer fuel particles injected into the atmosphere reduce cloud droplet density and this leads to clouds that reflect less solar radiation back into space. As the scientists note: “IMO2020 effectively represents a termination shock for the inadvertent geoengineering experiment through a reverse marine cloud dimming through reducing cloud droplet number concentration.” In the course of their work, the team calculated large particle reductions in major shipping routes in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the South China Sea.
The NASA paper is likely to be fiercely contested, not least because it blows holes in all the attribution pseudoscience attempting to blame recent temperature rises and individual weather events on human-induced increases in carbon dioxide. Already the climate activists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact say the observation period is too short, and man-made greenhouse gases continue to play the decisive role in climate change. Much of this thinking, that provides the ’settled’ science base for the planned Net Zero collectivisation, is supported by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC promotes the view that almost all climate change since around 1900 is caused by the activities of humans. This unproven opinion looks shakier by the day. The NASA scientists have forced the issue of particles, or aerosols, to the centre of the climate debate, although there are other explanations for the recent rise in temperatures. These include a now departing strong El Niño, and possible changes in the upper atmosphere caused by the huge injection of water by the early 2022 Hunga Tonga submarine eruption.
The El Niño effect is well known and strong past oscillations, which involve global transfers of heat from oceans to the atmosphere, have shown short-term temperature spikes. As the current El Niño declines, to be likely replaced in short order by the cooling effects of a La Niña, there are signs that sea temperatures are falling. It will be up to the scientists to fight it out over what has played a more significant role in recent temperature rises – aerosols or El Niño – with some backing for third place Hunga Tonga. Moving further out in the betting – odds lengthening all the time, it seems – is the inventive notion that humans control the overall climate by burning hydrocarbons. What is clear, of course, is that climate is impossible to predict. The recent temperature rise is tiny and well within the natural variation seen across all known and reliable records. When it comes to making political decisions about human society, computer models that claim to replicate and forecast future climate trends need careful examination, while in the hands of powerful people with wrongheaded or even sinister agendas they are potentially dangerous.
The effect of the Hunga Tonga eruption continues to intrigue some scientists, although their curiosity is not reciprocated by the all-in mainstream CO2 promoters. Recently a team of Australian climatologists used the eruption, which increased the amount of water vapour in the stratosphere by up to 10%, as a ‘base case’ for further scientific work. Working out of the University of New South Wales, they reported that volcanoes blasting water vapour – a strong if short-lived ‘greenhouse’ gas – into the high atmosphere, “can have significant inputs on the climate system”. In fact they found that surface temperatures across large regions of the world could increase by over 1.5°C for several years, although some areas could cool by up to 1°C.
Yet more fascinating, conflicting and debatable climate science that under no circumstances should be drawn to the attention of the general public.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“Official Science” has this ability to bat away everything that does not fit. No matter what the study or report is, it gets hit for 6 by the government funded data adjusters. And ofcourse we know that the information contained in articles like this will never appear on mainstream media. All that will appear on BBC, SKY etc is “scientists say 2024 was the hottest ever” and “climate change is real and happening now”. There will be footage of the latest typhoon and floods in Bangladesh or a hot day in Mexico and endless claims of certainty about a climate emergency where there is NONE.———Real science on the other hand bats nothing away. Because it is only interested in what seems to be true, not what it wants to be true.
There is science then there is government funded science, one seeks to get to the truth the other to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Something that doesn’t get much attention is the claims of climate related mass migration, when in reality when there is some ecological disaster people don’t travel half way across the Globe, they mostly move to the next county like in India recently.
Climate related to migration is ofcourse another evidence free piece of scaremongering like every other claim based entirely on models projecting the future.
The bureaucrats and their agents are selective with the truth, to sustain their position.
While perhaps a poke in the eye for the climate hysterics, it still comes to the conclusion that mankind’s presence and/or actions are causing climate change.
Still not proven, lest we forget.
What is a related issue is the conflation of climate variation and environmental changes. It should be common knowledge that our activities can affect the local environment in various ways. E.g. what happens when there is urban development. That is not the same thing as the idea that we can change the weather on a large scale. However, both are often cobbled together by the usual journalists.
Journalists? Lousy, lazy hacks is far more accurate.
Climate loonies don’t understand that heat is not generated on Earth – it’s the Sun wot does it, and 97% of that heat is accumulated from sunlight in the oceans.
What affects weather is how that heat moves around the Earth, from the dynamic oceans to atmosphere, through the atmosphere and ultimately back into Space.
A large number of variable, interdependent and interacting factors are involved. Man’s input is negligable. The Earth’s climate system has been doing what it is now doing for billions of years, before Man started burning fossil fuels.
There has never been climate stasis – climate change is the natural condition.
It’s also important to keep in mind that man cannot create atoms. All carbon contained in coal and oil (and wood and anything else which burns) was originally atmospheric CO₂ plants split into C and 2 O, using the C for themselves and releasing the Os into the atmosphere. Hence, it’s physically impossible to increase the level of atmospheric CO₂ beyond what it was at some point in time in the past where life on this planet already existed.
Life on earth also managed to survive the oxygenification of the atmosphere due to plant growth and that was no mean feat as oxygen reacts aggressively with pretty much everything else and typically destroys it in the process, and oftentimes, quite violently so (fire is typical side effect of oxygen reacting with something).
The climate change people will say that we are releasing it back into the atmosphere faster that it was taken out. —–They say an awful lot of things and make an awful lot of claims, but when you compare what they say to observations then their claims are mostly falsified…..by the evidence.
And actually what causes storms is the difference in temperature between tropics and poles. If the world gets warmer that difference will be less so will get less storms, not more, and ofcourse the data reveals no increase in the frequency or intensity of storms, hurricanes etc. ———-It is very easy to tell an unsuspecting public the very opposite and get away with it.
You are nearly right, but, as geologist Prof Ian Plimer says, we should not neglect to look down as well as up for sources of heat. There is a lot of molten magma beneath the Earth’s crust, you know, occasionally gushing upwards through ocean-floor volcanoes. Along with deep-ocean turnover, this is the principal natural input to the Earth’s climate system that the alarmist’s computer models take no account of.
What an absolute pfizzer of a report from NASA.
What are “global temperature increases”?
Gibberish. 0.24°C where? Everywhere? Some places. In the Sahara? In the Amazon? In the middle of the Pacific? In Trafalgar Square? Complete meaningless shit.
Could, might, perhaps, possibly. Basically, more bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
I don’t care if it’s supposedly “good news” or “bad news”. The whole thing is complete made up bullshit.
Yes and does sound like another way of keeping alive the idea that we can do something to control a global average temperature to 100th of a degree C. In this case the removal of sulphur from ships exhaust caused a rise on global temperatures – really?
This will give the eco-lunatics, or those pretending to care about the environment, the opportunity to push expensive tax funded ‘solutions’ such as spraying sulphur into the atmosphere.
In 1800 there was one city of over 1,000,000 people, which was London. There are now well over 500 cities worldwide with several million people. This is where most of the measurable increase in surface temperature is happening exacerbated by the poorly sited weather stations.
Stewart the data adjusters put a thermometer under the earths armpit and take a reading.
I wouldn’t put it past them.
With a thermometer that’s accurate to 2 decimal places…
They’re calculating averages from temperatures readings of an ever changing set of different kinds of thermometers and create theories trying to explain why the result of one calculation was different from a result of another calculation, all based on It is a number! This must mean something!
As nobody can do experiments testing such theories, they’re obviously not scientific theories.
The whole thing is complete made up bullshit. Yes, I totally agree. But theres some grim satisfaction to be had from these pseudo scientific fraudsters quarrelling amongst themselves. I hope some of the one faction devour those of the other.
As a marine technology professional, I recognised the ‘acid rain’ scam in the 70’s for what it was and more recently, involved in the development of cost-effective flue gas SO2 scrubbers, realised that too was a scam.
Thanks – this made me chuckle over breakfast.
I keep thinking about how an average temperature might be meaningful. I keep thinking that what is useful is to know the range of climactic conditions you are likely to encounter over time in a given set of locations you are likely to find yourself in, so you know whether to take an umbrella, a jumper or install central heating in your house. The larger variety of locations you stretch that over, the less useful it becomes.
Even if you could measure the temperature of the planet by being God, how could this information be of use to anyone? I’d love to see an explanation of this from the proponents of what you refer to as Thermostat Theory.
Excellent tof.
I have always questioned the notion of an “average temperature” but as you point out what would its use be even if it existed?
There isn’t a number that represents the temperature of the earth. Temperature is a field. There are an infinite number of temperatures on earth, and you can record one anywhere you put a thermometer. Temperature is not an amount of anything, it is just a condition. If I take a reading in Edinburgh and another in Brisbane at exactly the same time then create some average from the two, the number I get is not actually the temperature of anything. It is just a statistic. ——People need to understand that when they hear on their TV news that global average temperature has gone up, they need to know that what is being referred to is “temperature anomaly”, not “average temperature”
It still seems pretty nonsensical to me
You’re visiting an area and you want to know whether to pack jumpers or t shirts or both – an average isn’t going to tell you that. What would be useful are average minimums and maximums for the places you are going to be staying in
This is nonsense. IMO rules implemented in 2020 have barely had any effect in the conversion of shipping to burning lower SO2 emitting fuels. Just more garbage from climate science cult.
An amusing reversal, but I’m afraid I dont believe them either. These groups searching for ‘the answer’ appear to me to be like Wordle players trying to solve Enigma codes.
I imagine the climate to be almost infinitely variable, based on and almost infinite number of parameters. We have been trying to forecast the weather using bigger and bigger computers since the 1960’s, and there’s not one of the meteorologists who would put their house on it raining two weeks on Thursday. Trying to forecast to 50 years in the future looks like just a wild guess to me. What is interesting is that their ‘expert’ wild guesses, don’t seem to be any more accurate than mine. Perhaps if I wore a white coat and had some letters after my name..?
Sulphur dioxide aerosols were also removed from the atmosphere after the great acid rain crisis of the 1970s/80s – coal -fired power stations being the alleged culprit – so power station and factory flues were fitted with SO2 scrubbers.
So is all the alleged global warming due to SO2 nit CO2?
Oh no! Not unintended consequences? Will ‘lessons be learned’?
Always the case when people tinker with mechanisms they don’t understand.
The immediate favourable consequences of that which is seen, and the fatal consequences of that which is unseen.
Also what warming was caused by the Clean Air Acts since the 1960’s when coal fires and industrial coal usage plus Sulphur in motor fuels was reduced dramatically to stop acid rain? I bet the majority of warming has been that plus Urban Heat Island. The CO2 saturation hypothesis is strengthened by this.
It is probably worth pointing out that shipping has not been the only source of sulphur emissions.
Historically, coal fired power stations and motor cars and trucks were bigger sources. Of course over the last 50 years, these have been cleaned up by fitting scrubbers and by ultra low sulphur fuel respectively. This was to prevent “acid rain”, which was harming forests across Europe.
So if removing sulphur emissions can warm the world, then the clean air efforts of the last half century would have had an even bigger effect than cleaning up shipping.