Surface ocean temperatures are plunging rapidly around the world with scientists reported to be puzzled at the speed of the recent decline. Less puzzlement was to be found when the oceans were ‘boiling’ during the last two years. Plebs flying to Benidorm for an annual holiday and causing ‘global heating’ was a favourite explanation, although mainstream media put it in marginally more polite terms. For almost two years, this boiling ocean trope has been a reliable standby for every alarmist spiv promoting the Net Zero insanity. But expect the scare to be parked for a while along with coral reefs, polar bears and Arctic sea ice. It is a very good bet that nobody in mainstream media is going to report the oceans are cooling at what are remarkably dramatic rates. Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news.
Until recently, the surface sea temperature (SST) graph below showing measurements up the Arctic and down to Antarctica was rarely out of the public prints.
This year the temperature shown by the black line flatlined until April compared with the substantial rise in orange for 2023. It then fell more sharply than last year and is now 0.2°C lower.
In the Atlantic, the turnaround has been even more dramatic. Temperatures have cooled quickly since May and in the central equatorial region are up to 1°C colder than average for this time of year. The American weather service NOAA notes that the high SSTs at the start of the year were the strongest warm event since 1982. The rapid transition from warm to cold SST anomalies (current temperatures compared over a longer past trend) was said to be remarkable. “Never before in the observed record has the eastern equatorial Atlantic swung so quickly from one to another extreme event,” observes NOAA.
It is not unusual for waters in these parts of the Atlantic to cool in the summer months as seasonal southern winds drag surface waters away from the equator and expose deeper colder water. The process is called ‘upwelling’, but this year it coincided with a weakening of the trade winds which should have led to warmer anomalies. “As of now, these atmospheric conditions… are quite perplexing.” NOAA says it will need to dig deeper to reveal the exact causes of this “seemingly unusual event”.
These days we must of course welcome any outbreak of scientific head-scratching in the usually ‘settled’ climate business. Temperatures suddenly go down and scientists are seemingly clueless as to why it happens. Yet temperatures go up and it is all due to global warming and humans must return, instanter, to a pre-industrial societal and economic hellhole. In fact, scientists have little idea how a great deal of weather suddenly changes and how the sea and atmosphere warms and cools. Over 100 super-computer models are simply not up to the job of explaining natural variation in a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere. The fact that some scientists are perplexed when temperatures go down, but full of fear-mongering explanations when they go up, says it all.
It is not only in the Atlantic that surface temperatures are plunging. In the Pacific, a strong El Niño natural variation that warms the ocean and affects weather across the planet has dissipated. The higher SST anomalies recorded over the last year have fallen sharply as the latest figures below from NOAA show. The blocks record the anomaly on a rolling three-month basis with the last figure of 0.2°C referring to May, June and July 2024. As the latest figures along with records that go back much further show, recent changes in SSTs due to El Niño are nothing out of the ordinary. It is shameful how the figures have been used incessantly to whip up unnecessary alarm and anxiety around the world. Everyone from UN Secretary General Antonio ‘Global Boiling’ Guterres to GB News climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale should hang their heads in shame.
The recent El Niño was powerful although the natural distortion in the centigrade anomaly record was not as large as those produced by a previous El Niño around 2015-16. Over the last 25 years, all of the global temperature boosts – apart from those retrospectively added by state-funded compilers – have occurred at around the same time as El Niño formations. Strong oscillations have been recorded in 1998, 2016 and 2024. As we have seen, alarmists have taken full advantage of the changes wrought by the latest El Niño effect, particularly the warmer ocean temperatures that have arisen. As with most natural variation, that process is being reversed – what goes up, usually comes down.
According to NOAA, SSTs in three of the four locations around the Pacific used to determine the presence of an El Niño are now below the long term trend. Temperatures have also dropped considerably in many parts of the Pacific down to 300 metres as the graph below for the central and eastern area shows.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for narrative-driven messengers such as the BBC’s Georgina Rannard. Last August she claimed that while scientists have known that the sea surface would continue to warm up because of greenhouse gas emissions, “they are still investigating exactly why temperatures have surged so far above previous years”.
What a difference a few months makes in the climate alarmism business.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.