Essay by Eric Worrall
… But we can’t consider it a Paris Agreement breach, because volcanic impacts on climate change are natural, not manmade.
Tonga volcano eruption raises ‘imminent’ risk of temporary 1.5C breach
12 January 2023 16:00
AYESHA TANDON…
In total, the study finds that the blast projected just 0.42m tonnes of cooling sulphur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere – a layer of the atmosphere begins around 10km above the surface of the Earth, and extends upwards for around 40km. Meanwhile, it expelled a total of 146m tonnes of water, raising the water vapour content of the stratosphere by 10–15%.
…
In 2015, the United Nations delivered the Paris Agreement – an international agreement to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, while aiming to keep warming below 1.5C. These temperature thresholds have been key benchmarks for progress on tackling climate change ever since.
…
However, it emphasises that the common interpretation of the Paris Agreement is that its temperature limits refer to the long-term global warming attributable to human influence – and not the added effect of natural climate variability caused by events such as volcanic eruptions. As such, temporarily crossing the 1.5C threshold over 2022-26 due to the Tonga eruption will not dictate the success or failure of the Paris agreement.
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Read more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/tonga-volcano-eruption-raises-imminent-risk-of-temporary-1-5c-breach/
The abstract of the study;
Brief Communication
Published:Tonga eruption increases chance of temporary surface temperature anomaly above 1.5 °C
Stuart Jenkins, Chris Smith, Myles Allen & Roy Grainger
Abstract
On 15 January 2022, the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) eruption injected 146 MtH2O and 0.42 MtSO2 into the stratosphere. This large water vapour perturbation means that HTHH will probably increase the net radiative forcing, unusual for a large volcanic eruption, increasing the chance of the global surface temperature anomaly temporarily exceeding 1.5 °C over the coming decade. Here we estimate the radiative response to the HTHH eruption and derive the increased risk that the global mean surface temperature anomaly shortly exceeds 1.5 °C following the eruption. We show that HTHH has a tangible impact of the chance of imminent 1.5 °C exceedance (increasing the chance of at least one of the next 5 years exceeding 1.5 °C by 7%), but the level of climate policy ambition, particularly the mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants, dominates the 1.5 °C exceedance outlook over decadal timescales.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2
I sincerely hope the 1.5C limit is breached this year, as soon as possible.
This has already been a year of massive embarrassment for climate alarmists, with the recent hilarious attempt to talk up the ongoing global warming coral reef threat in the midst of unprecedented coral cover. If we also breach 1.5C, let’s just say I’m really looking forward to writing that article.
“We show that HTHH has a tangible impact of the chance of imminent 1.5 °C exceedance (increasing the chance of at least one of the next 5 years exceeding 1.5 °C by 7%)…”
An increase of 7 freakin percent? And Nature published the paper? Oy vey!!
Regards,
Bob
PS: Eric, I no longer regularly plot global surface temperature data or keep track of such things. How close are we to surpassing the contrived 1.5 deg limit?
Regards,
Bob
Eric, I found the answer to my question at the NOAA webpage here:
Climate Change: Global Temperature | NOAA Climate.gov
“Averaged across land and ocean, the 2021 surface temperature was 1.51 °F (0.84 °Celsius) warmer than the twentieth-century average of 57.0 °F (13.9 °C) and 1.87 ˚F (1.04 ˚C) warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900).”
Regards,
Bob
PS: And the maroons who wrote that paper think global surface temperatures have a chance of rising almost 0.5 deg C in 5 years?
Didn’t the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 lower the global temperature by ~0.4-0.5 C though?
If one volcano can lower temperatures , and another one can possibly raise them, then it the climate is far more variable than they can know.
Apparently volcanoes have the exact same powers as CO2 molecules.
Both can make the planet hotter or colder. Make more droughts and more floods. Make more extreme storms and more calm weather.
Even kill off the coral reefs and cause the coral reefs to flourish!
>> eruption injected 146 MtH2O and 0.42 MtSO2 into the stratosphere.
It´s a matter of time constants.
The argument is that SO2 , dust and aerosols cool but dissapear rather quickly, leaving the warming H2O
But there a lots of assumptions and this being an underwater volcano changes the mixture.
The rather high energy of eruption also increases the deposition height of the water (clouds can be warming or cooling depending where they form)
So we have huge unknowns, but solid alamistic concerns for the next 5 years ..
A conveniently placed eruption that will do the opposite of most other eruptions and raise temperatures (temporarily) so that, even though the 1.5C threshold is breached, we still have time to act.
The water vapor that made it to the strat and meso would not be vapor anymore. It would be ice!
146MT of water into the atmosphere?? How can that possibly make any difference at all? That’s got to be like tossing buckets into the ocean, no one but you would notice.
Not “More Calm Weather”
Extreme Calm Weather
“Tonga volcano eruption raises ‘imminent’ risk of temporary 1.5C breach”
Presumably at that point Godzilla will also emerge from the sea and visit his wrath upon the Prophets of Davos.
Yea, and their pistes shall be laid bare and their fondue shall burst forth into flame as torrents of fire. Verily, they shall reveal to the grockles their plan that is the word of Gaia which involves coming back again same time next year.
Now be fair. The difference is that Krakatoa was (mainly) above sea level whereas Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai was entirely below sea level. Therefore they obviously had different effects.The main difference was that SO2 was absorbed by the water and much more water went up.
More similar than you suggest
‘ Krakatau volcano in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, Indonesia, had a major caldera collapse around 535 CE; this event formed a 7-km-wide caldera ringed by the three islands of Verlaten, Lang, and Rakata. A new island grew that was then destroyed in the 1883 caldera-forming eruption.’
https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=262000
They would have both blasted out the caldera a 1km or so below sea level . The island above sea level still small by comparison
And how was the SO2 absorbed by the seawater in the milliseconds that the ejecta was traversing the ocean level?
An increase of 0.1 K is about 0.03%.
These people really do need help with their mental health
They assert 146megatonnes water from the volcano.
Global average annual rainfall over ocean = 0.95metres
Global average annual rainfall over land= 0.70metres
Into mass = 4.38e14 tonnes per year
= 1.2e12 tonnes of rainwater falling from the sky per day every day. on average.
(I know I know, it’s all falling on California right now, but it’ll average out soon)
Presumably it evaporated away from somewhere first
And we’re told here that 1.46e8 tonnes, or 0.0122% of daily rainfall means The End of The World?
just what – how is it possible to have such empty lives?
Yes, there seems to be an implicit assumption that none of this water just fell back down … as water tends to do. Even if temporarily evaporated it is not going stay that way once it hits the cold upper atmosphere. Even the water a major volcano can lift is a pimple on the face of the gobal water cycle. This has to be about the most stupid claim since CO2 thermagedon itself.
Here is TLS, the lower stratosphere affected by the sulphate aerosols. We can just about see the glitch which this eruptions caused. If there was ANY surface warming due to extra WV blocking outgoing LWIR, there would corresponding cooling in TLS.
….”increased the water vapor in the stratosphere by 10-15%”…..it’s about the altitude.
One wears blinders and ear muffs. Keeps out the cacophany.
the long-tail CO2 scenario has become the long-tailed H20 scenario
A volcanic eruption is no longer a natural event – apparently….
“”How climate change triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes””
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/16/climate-change-triggers-earthquakes-tsunamis-volcanoes
Send for the log burning Moonbat!
So, according to The Guardian, the Tonga eruption was a feedback?
If the Hunga-Tonga eruption injected an extra 10%-15% of water vapour into the atmosphere common sense would suggest that the nett effect would be cooling, particularly in the SH.
Sorry Robert, does common sense know all about climate? You need to expand a bit on your argument.
A devastating volcanic explosion occurs in a remote part of the world.
Maybe Gaia is trying to show us just how bad our collective hubris is.
They are just preparing a tactical retreat from the ever more tenuous ‘the hottest year ever’. Just blame the volcano for eating your homework and hope that nobody notices your incapability of predicting the future.
Now their song is, “the 5th or 6th hottest year ever.” They, apparently, have reduced expectations.
The HTHH eruption happened exactly one year ago.
Meanwhile, temperatures are cooling, down 0.6C since 2016:
Now, NASA Climate and NOAA claim that 2016 was 1.2C above their average, and now that the temperatures have cooled 0.6C since that time, I think the temperatues are going to have to increase by 1C in the next five years for the predictions in this article of hitting 1.5C above the average to become true.
Meanwhile, the globe is cooling.
Thanks – you beat me to it! Exactly the comment I’d have made.
Like most volcanoes, you can’t find an effect on the temperature graph unless you know which year to look, like say 1991 for Pinatubo…or is that a variation that would have ocurred anyway ? Or did Pinatubo cause 0.2 C more cooling than would have occurred anyway, instead of the oft-stated 1.5 C ? (Check graph for measured value)
Really, the cliSciGuys are using very speculative numbers and doing more cherry picking than migrant workers.
I suspect that “migrant workers”, like homeless, is now non-PC, or soon will be, as soon as the Woke notice.
Well, if you arbitrarily pick the hottest month you can see and the last dot ( which is also arbitrary) but this discussion is not about monthly glitches.
The whole discussion of 2.0 or 1.5 is about 30y averages, so if if pops over or under is irrelevant to that metric. this whole study is BS, just to create media talking points.
Thank you. I had the same thought. Berkeley Earth’s Land and Ocean Summary from 1850 to the present shows about 1 °C warming above the “pre-industrial average”. A big El Niño can cause a brief temperature spike over a single year of up to 1 °C but the long term trend doesn’t show we will reach a persistent 1.5 °C above “pre-industrial” global temperatures for decades to come if the warming trend since 1975 continues and it looks like it may not. We are lousy predictors of Mother Nature’s behavior.
Huh? A ‘tipping point’ is a tipping point. Tipping points don’t keep track of who might have caused them, only uneducated humans do. Somebody here doesn’t understand high school science.
but they did not mention tipping points.
The claim is about short term – temporary – effects.
If we go over the limit will the stateys pull us over and give us a ticket?
The article is bullshit. An entire year has passed and the climate has been little affected. As time goes by sulfate aerosols and water vapor in the stratosphere from the eruption go down, not up, so their effects decrease. After 3 years nearly all sulfate aerosols are gone, but the decrease is logarithmic, so more than half is already gone.
The amount of sulfate from the HTHH eruption was quite low, and nobody could predict the effect of so much water vapor entering the stratosphere as there are no precedents. We are going to learn a lot about the stratosphere thanks to the HTHH, but every day it becomes clearer that it was an eruption with limited climate impact.
HTHH was boringly insignificant. Very disappointing. We need a decent Mt P sized even now we have better remote sensing in place.
What is more interesting is what happens AFTER aerosols drop out. See the last two major events. They left the stratosphere cooler, that suggests they caused surface warming but that is NOT in the models.
Since there were never any precidents to the HTHH eruption, all volcano parameters in all computer models are incorrect. It couldn’t be any other way as programmers are not psychic.
Since the effects cannot be known, all computer projections to this day are wrong and unfit for use for basing any policy action.
There is a year of satellite temperature data from the UAH data set. With the atmospheres of the norther and southern hemisphere not mixing much, you’d expect a sudden event like this to show up in the southern hemisphere data and a quick look doesn’t show much when you compare the 2021 and 2022 data. Am I missing something?
“As such, temporarily crossing the 1.5C threshold over 2022-26 due to the Tonga eruption will not dictate the success or failure of the Paris agreement.”
Crossing this threshold won’t mean a success for the man-made CO2-climate theory either.
However it will herald the success of my sun-climate work, as I predicted in my 2022 AGU presentation, the solar activity during this solar cycle will drive us to or above the arbitrary 1.5C limit, in about the same time period stated in the article, ie, in at least one of the next 5 years, 12-18 months after the solar cycle sunspot maximum.
Honga Tonga did not have the effect claimed by the authors. 2022 continued the trend from 2020 with many areas of Earth receiving higher amounts of sunshine due to less water vapor in the sky, due to the also-predicted by me (2018 AGU poster) solar cooling period (La Nina from low TSI cooling) ending this year or next thanks to higher solar activity, ie, from high TSI warming.
Sorry Bob, I don’t see any consistent correlation in any of that.
Follow the red and blue arrows on panel (d), the red up arrows for the Eq. OHC extremes coincide with TSI duration above the red threshold line from panel (f), and the blue down arrows from panel (d) coincide with TSI below the threshold line, panel (f).
This pattern occurred for every solar cycle shown, and has held into 2023.
A different way to express the sun-tropical connection more significantly is to look back at the last 9 solar cycles, looking at the eastern tropical step-up or down responses to solar minima and maxima.
Typically the ENSO region warms (cools) first, leading to general global ocean warming (cooling), following solar activity increases (decreases) above (below) the solar threshold, demonstrated below with ERSSTv5.
The odds are 1.9×10^11:1 against this pattern recurring 9 times in a row.
In his 2015 WUWT post Volcanic Legends Keep Erupting, Willis examines the huge 1815 Mount Tambora eruption’s impact on temperature and notes:
and
This year was a little warmer than one might expect during a full year La Nina. It is possible the HTHH eruption had some warming effect. OTOH, it is possible Antarctic sea ice levels had the biggest impact. The sea ice levels were below average most of 2022 and this allows the absorption of more solar energy by the Earth.
In fact, you can also see the reverse of this during the original pause. Antarctic sea ice increased to record highs leading to increased reflection of solar energy. The pause ended when the sea ice levels suddenly dropped. Coincidence?
Antarctic sea ice may be an under appreciated factor in global temperature.
We had a cold winter & now a cool summer in Australia 2022 / 2023.
Up until now volcanoes caused cooling. This one was huge and didn’t do squat. Suddenly water vapor effect in the stratosphere is speculated.
How about their calculation of aerosol cooling is JUST PLAIN INCORRECT ?
Which means their ECS prediction is even more incorrect compared to actual measurements.
It’s all one massive “paramater” rigging exercise they have dozens of poorly constrained parameters which they are free to fiddle to get the results they want.
One is the scaling of AOD to flux (W/m2). Larcis et al (NASA GISS) in 1992 derived a scaling of 30. Hansen et al 2001 dropped it 20 for no better reason that freely fiddling with values.
This means that to get the same temp drop they need to tweak a more sensitive model by fiddling elsewhere ( clouds, WV feedbacks, whatever ). They then find climate is more sensitive to CO2 as well and say IT’S WORSE THAT WE THOUGHT!
I live on the lee side of the Rockies where a Chinook wind can raise the temperature 30 degrees C in a day. I won’t wait one millisecond worrying about a 1.5 degree C rise in mythical global temperatures over 170 years. A bit warmer would be fine by me.
I am a lot more concerned about the staggering amount of overheated CO2 emitted by climate alarmists.
I call bullshit on the assertion that 146 million tons of water is 10-15% of the water vapor in the atmosphere.
The USGS says there are 12,900 cubic kilometers of water in the atmosphere. 1 cubic kilometer is 982 million tons of water. 12,900 * 982 million tons = 12.668 million*million tons of water i.e. trillions. 146 million / 12.668 trillion = 0.00115% of the water vapor in the atmosphere.
So they’re just off by a factor of 10000x.
Jenkins, Smith, Allen and Grainger are officially idiots.
I think they’re talking Stratosphere where Water vapour is a very few ppm, while at sea level it can be 20,000 ppm
Haven’t we been told that climatologists don’t worry about water vapor because it rains out in a few days?
Water vapor does not precipitate out of the stratosphere.
Wait a minute, I thought volcanoes LOWERED the temp, 1992 Pinatubo.
Typically yes. This is because of the SO2 released from them. However, HTHH in unique in that it injected only a small amount of SO2 and a large amount of H2O into the atmosphere.
One year after the eruption, it seems that an increase of 10 to 15% of WV in the atmosphere did not cause any significant change in global temperatures.
I wonder how much CO2 did the volcano emitted during this eruption … and why this subject is not taken into account in the article. Perhaps because those emissions, whatever their magnitude, did not make a dent in the Mauna Loa measurements ?
This eruption seems likely to cool, just like every other major eruption. If it also puts a lot more H2O into the atmosphere then it will provide a good test of the models. Extra H2O + global cooling = failed models.
If only …..
I know perfectly well that if they get extra H2O and global cooling they will still find a way to protect the models.
While the stratosphere is part of the atmosphere, some things seem to work quite differently there compared to in the troposphere.
Thought-provoking article that reminds me of something that has nagged at me for years.
According to my back-of-envelope calculations, water vapour discharged into the stratosphere by commercial and military jet aircraft is somewhere in the range of 200m tonnes per year. Human activity puts at least as much H2O into the stratosphere as Tonga every year.
Anthropogenic global warming by water vapour emissions? If they are right about Tonga-Hunga, then human H2O must have been a contributor to recent warming.
Using the same numbers, jet aircraft emit 450m tonnes of CO2 into the stratosphere annually, but that’s another discussion.
(Wiki says annual consumption of jet fuel was “95 billion gallons” in 2019. If you assume 1 gallon = 3.89L, jet fuel has a density of 0.8 g/ml and a mean composition of C13H28 — so C13H28 + 20O2 => 13CO2 + 14H2O — and you assume that 50% of the exhaust goes into the stratosphere, the calculation is a simple one. Perhaps only 40% goes into the stratosphere i.e. 160m tonnes)
(Figure S1 in the Nature paper implies that Tonga’s stratospheric water vapour stays in the stratosphere with a half-life of 2.5 years, and if you assume the same for jet-fuel water vapour – which is emitted every year – then you get into big numbers. I suspect that the half-life is much less because they may not have properly allowed for condensation of the water vapour; also jet exhaust only goes into the lowermost stratosphere, so it may condense out, or mix with the troposphere, a lot faster)
Smart Rock: “According to my back-of-envelope calculations, water vapour discharged into the stratosphere by commercial and military jet aircraft is somewhere in the range of 200m tonnes per year.”
Can you post those calculations and any literature used to support the calculation?
No observable warming by satellite for over 8 years might put a damper on that idea.
What Man does is a very tiny bit compared to what Nature does.
(And, isn’t what Man does also a part of what Nature does?)
WHAT IS COMING NEXT FROM THESE ALARMISTS?
We heard the eruption in New Zealand and wondered what the loud booms were.
What is wrong when these researchers try to link volcanic eruptions to global warming when in the past eruptions have caused cooling .
Why don’t they get a real job like cleaning volcanic ash off a solar farm .
It might not be very sexy but at least we would not have to read their trash.
it was a year ago, surely we would have noticed by now
also what exactly do they think the half-life of a water vapor plume is? 10 years lol?