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- Hunga Tonga Eruption Behind “Record” Warming
- Video of the Week: 20 Years of Ocean Currents: What Climate Activists Got Wrong
- Math Debunks Climate Alarm—Net Zero Buys Inconsequential Temperature Reduction
- Forest Experiment Shows Benefits of Increased CO2
- Climate Comedy
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Hunga Tonga Eruption Behind “Record” Warming
The spike in temperatures over the past year has been much in the news, with dozens if not hundreds of “record-breaking month/record-breaking year/record-breaking streak” stories making headlines in the mainstream media. While climate change has been blamed for the phenomenon, sound analysis, as opposed to uninformed speculation, has been lacking.
Javier Vinos, Ph.D., the author of several books on climate change, including Climate of the Past, Present, and Future,Solving the Climate Puzzle, and The Frozen Views of the IPCC, An Analysis of AR6, undertook a review of the possible cause for the sudden, broad temperature increase reported in 2023, and in a post on Climate Etc., concludes the usual suspects, human-caused CO2 increases and El Niño, are likely not to blame. Neither is the recent cause de jour, the decrease in emissions of sulfate aerosols from cleaner shipping fuels. Rather, he suggests the massive increase in water vapor into the stratosphere from the Hunga Tonga eruption is the most likely culprit for the increase and, as water vapor draws down, so will temperatures, meaning the present increase is not a new normal; meaning that no climate catastrophe is in the offing.
Vinos explains that “El Niño is unlikely to be responsible for the simple reason that such abrupt global warming is unprecedented in our records.” El Niño, he explains, normally has large, but still largely regional, rather than global, effects. In addition, El Niño has happened many times in the past without inducing the kind of large-scale global warming experienced in 2023.
Concerning the impact of the recently adopted clean shipping fuel standard, Vinos points out, “a recent study, still under peer review, used a climate model to calculate that sulfur emission reductions from 2020 could cause global warming of 0.02°C in the first decade. Since the warming in 2023 was 10 times greater, it is difficult to believe that emissions reductions since 2020 could have been a major factor in the abrupt warming in 2023.” (Footnote omitted)
Nor is the increase in CO2 over the last year or two likely the causal factor for the rapid year-long temperature spike. As Vinos notes, 2023’s CO2 increase of approximately 2.5 parts per million from 418.5 to 421 ppm is in line with annual increases that have occurred for the past several decades (he does not add, but I will, that these sustained increases have occurred despite the trillions of dollars spent and restrictions on freedom imposed by governments—meaning all pain, no gain). In excluding CO2 as the cause of the unusual temperature rise, he points out that none of the physics of CO2 forcing, our knowledge of the past, peer-reviewed research, or climate model projections, suggests 2023’s temperature spike was or could have been caused by the observed increase in CO2.
“The proof is that scientists and models cannot explain what happened in 2023,” Vinos writes.
These facts, he argues, suggest the enormous Hunga Tonga sub-surface volcanic eruption is responsible for the temperature spike.
Just over a year before the abrupt warming, in January 2022, an extremely unusual volcanic eruption took place in Tonga. He lays out the evidence for his conclusion (footnotes and graphs omitted):
The Tonga eruption was a submarine explosion at very shallow depths, about 150 m below the sea surface. It ejected 150 million tons of water into the stratosphere. …
NASA scientists believe that the Tonga explosion occurred at the right depth to project a lot of water into the stratosphere … [with] the Tonga eruption [being] a once in 200-year event, probably less than once in a millennium. …
We know that strong volcanic eruptions, capable of reaching the stratosphere, can have a very strong effect on the climate for a few years, and that this effect can be delayed by more than a year. The eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 had a global effect on the climate, but it took 15 months for the effect to develop, during the year without a summer of 1816. These delayed effects coincided with the appearance of a veil of sulfate aerosols in the Northern Hemisphere atmosphere due to seasonal changes in the global stratospheric circulation.
Because the Tonga eruption is unprecedented, there is much about its effects that we do not understand. But we do know that the planetary greenhouse effect is very sensitive to changes in stratospheric water vapor because, unlike the troposphere, the stratosphere is very dry and far from greenhouse saturation.
As a group of scientists showed in 2010, the effect of changes in stratospheric water vapor is so important that the warming between 2000 and 2009 was reduced by 25% because it decreased by 10%. And after the Tonga eruption, it increased by 10% because of the 150 million tons of water released into the stratosphere, so we could have experienced much of the warming of an entire decade in a single year. …
Of course, we cannot conclude that the warming was caused by the volcano, but it is clear that it is by far the most likely suspect, and any other candidate should have to demonstrate its ability to act abruptly with such magnitude before being seriously considered.
Source: Climate Etc.
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Video of the Week
Climate activists and media allies often promote the idea that climate change will soon cause ocean currents to slow down, which would result in catastrophe for marine ecosystems. Now, the best available data suggest that ocean currents have actually sped up over the past 20 years, with no disasters.
Math Debunks Climate Alarm—Net Zero Buys Inconsequential Temperature Reduction
A recent paper by physicists Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Happer, Ph.D., emeritus professor at Princeton University; and William A. van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., York University in Toronto, shows that if the United States or even the world as a whole eliminated their respective human carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 (the much ballyhooed ‘net zero’), it would not make a significant difference in global temperatures—meaning no appreciable “climate change” is prevented.
They applied simple math to calculate the temperature impact of zero emissions based on real world data applied to the number of years until 2050 and the amount of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere annually.
“The only assumed datapoint is the sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2 increases,” reports Greg Wrightstone, in an article describing the findings at RealClearMarkets. In that regard, the researchers used a value almost the same as one commonly used “before global-warming alarmism became fashionable.”
“Straightforward calculations … show that eliminating U.S. CO2 emissions by the year 2050 would avoid a temperature increase of 0.0084℃,” the paper concludes, or approximately a warming 0.015℉. The amount of warming averted is too small to measure, much less for people to notice.
The paper points out that even if the climate sensitivity value is quadrupled to the sensitivity assumed in climate models and pushed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the amount of warming averted still is only 0.034 degrees Celsius.
With United States responsible for approximately 12 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, the scientists then calculated what would happen if the remaining 88 percent of human emissions went to zero. They found the amount of warming averted would be 0.07℃, using historically assumed sensitivity, or 0.28℃, using the inflated sensitivity assumptions embraced by the IPCC.
From the point of view of climate change, those numbers are “still inconsequential and certainly not worth destroying the world economy,” concludes Wrightstone.
Sources: RealClearMarkets; CO2 Coalition
Forest Experiment Shows Benefits of Increased CO2
Since 2017, researchers at The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) at the University of Birmingham have been conducting a giant real-world experiment called the BIFoR Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment in which they have been pumping CO2 throughout a Staffordshire woodland to simulate the atmosphere we’re predicted to have in 2050. The goal is to better understand how forests are affected by and impact climate change, including the effects on animals, plants, and insects dependent upon the forest ecosystem.
Specifically, the BIFoR researchers pumped excess CO2 (140 ppm above levels in the ambient air) into a 180-year-old oak forest. They found the increased CO2 produced a 9.8 percent increase in woody biomass over seven years.
Most of the CO2 was used and captured in the trees’ woody parts—the trunk, bark, and limbs—rather than the leaves, meaning it is stored for extended periods of time. In addition to increasing the woody biomass, the study found the higher CO2 led to enhanced nutrient cycling in the soil and improved the efficiency of roots, both of which tended to benefit the broader ecosystem.
To examine the effects of CO2 on the trees, the BIFoR researchers analyzed tree rings and conducted laser scans of the canopy to assess tree growth and carbon sequestration. The Electroverse Substack described some of the particular findings and their implications in more detail, writing:
Interestingly, while overall net primary productivity (NPP) increased by an average of 10.6%, most of this boost was attributed to wood production rather than to increases in other tissues. This suggests that mature temperate forests, previously thought to have limited responses to increased CO2, could play a more active role in carbon sequestration than expected.
Moreover, the study found that elevated CO2 resulted in a 43-63% increase in root exudation, which stimulates soil microbial activity and enhances nutrient availability, further improving forest growth dynamics and biodiversity.
Sources: Electroverse; The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is the director of The Heartland Institute’s Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
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Harris’s plan to introduce “gauging” controls ought to help lower risks from the likes of Hunga Tonga.
Isn’t that gouging? She doesn’t come across as the mensuration type
She’s better at reading a teleprompter than Biden, but still without comprehension.
From her speech per the video: “more competition“, but left out “except for fracking” and a dozen or so other issues that she will deal with by executive order, no need for “competition” from Congress on such.
/sarc
Hunga Tonga Eruption Behind “Record” Warming
Will the esteemed Michael E Mann Esq. agree?
State-of-the-art climate models show warming stops once we stop emitting carbon. That means there’s still time to stop the worst impacts of climate change.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/yes-we-can-still-stop-the-worst-effects-of-climate-change-heres-why
Unlikely.
Mann at least stopped pretending to be a Nobel Prize winner. Progress.
A nanometre, if that.
“. . . climate models show . . .”
That is a subtle, largely unrecognized, oxymoron depending on how one interprets “show”.
I would recommend “suggest” or “predict.”
In this case, my interpretation of “show” would be “A Tree Ringed Circus”
I see what you did there. +42 intergalactic credits!
The climate models are based on the assumption that CO2 causes the warming, so obviously they would show that the warming would stop if the CO2 stops. But, that doesn’t mean anything in the real world. The models are wrong and have always been wrong and always will be wrong, they are proof of nothing other than a complicated visualization of the preconceptions of the modelers.
From the second paragraph under the heading “Hunga Tonga Eruption Behind ‘Record’ Warming” in the above article:
“. . . he [Javier Vinos] suggests the massive increase in water vapor into the stratosphere from the Hunga Tonga eruption is the most likely culprit for the increase [in average global lower atmospheric temperature] and, as water vapor draws down, so will temperatures . . .”
IMHO, the basic problem with this hypothesis is that the water vapor that the eruption projected into the stratosphere would not persist as water vapor for more than a day or so. Any liquid water and (entrained) water vapor from the eruption plume would be relatively rapidly converted to ice droplets or crystals (similar to sleet and snow). The bulk of the mass of water would simply not persist as water vapor . . . there is a definite physical reason that the stratosphere is characterized as a very dry layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
1) According to the US Standard Atmosphere, at 20 km altitude (which is approximately the top of the troposphere over the latitude of Hunga Tonga) the expected air temperature is about -57 °C. Temperatures in the stratosphere range between about -50 °C near the tropopause to about -15 °C near the top.
2) Water ice forms normally (i.e., without any carefully controlled sub-cooling) at close to 0 °C, pretty much independent of ambient pressures lower than 100,000 Pascals (i.e., sea-level pressure).
3) Since the HT volcano launched a large (predominate?) mass of water into the atmosphere in liquid phase, nowhere near all as water vapor, that water would be frozen in the stratosphere very quickly as a result of (a) intense convective cooling from the cold air then existing in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, (b) the evaporative cooling created as the relatively warm liquid water boiled (evaporated) due to the low ambient pressure, and (c) additional bulk cooling created by formed ice that then sublimated due to the very low ambient pressure. The latent heat released by the phase change from liquid to ice would be rapidly absorbed by the resident gases in upper stratosphere and thinner stratosphere, with residual and continuing phase change heat being radiated to deep space at those altitudes.
Bottom line: the Hunga Tonga eruption almost certainly put a large amount of ice and ice crystals— but relatively small amount of water vapor—into the upper troposphere and even up into the stratosphere. Droplets/minidroplets of ice should have gravitationally settled out of the stratosphere rather quickly (days to months) . . . micro crystals of ice probably not.
I would expect ice crystals from the HT eruption to cause net atmospheric cooling, not warming, due to their specular reflection and refraction of incoming sunlight.
This is incorrect. You are not taking into account the low pressure in the stratosphere. Ice can only be found in the stratosphere near the poles, particularly the South Pole, where temperatures are very low, and close to the tropical tropopause. In the rest of the stratosphere, water is found as vapor.
And the reason the stratosphere si so dry is that air entering the stratosphere from the troposphere at the tropical tropopause is freeze-dried and becomes very dry. Most of the water in the stratosphere is being produced in the upper stratosphere through methane oxidation by high energy solar radiation, so the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere increases with altitude.
You should read my book, Solving the Climate Puzzle. The Sun’s Surprising Role. This is explained in Chapter 14.
I apologize for the confusion over my posted statements: I never meant to imply there was absolutely NO water vapor in the stratosphere (over the location of the HT volcano that would be above 20 km altitude). Even ice, when it sublimates, produces a measurable vapor pressure.
As the H2O line on the graph you posted shows, there is always some measurable water vapor in the stratosphere: it is typically at a volume fraction of less than 0.001% (< 10 ppmv), even though it may increase very slightly with altitude. The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) III instrument on the International Space Station (ISS) shows that WV in the stratosphere ranges temporally and spatially from 2 to 7 ppmv (https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/studying-earths-stratospheric-water-vapor/ ).
Some might consider that a distinction without a difference, in terms of saying the stratosphere is “very dry”.
But you have reinforced my point, any ice clouds that would have been forced to form in the stratosphere shortly after the HT eruption would not have persisted for very long. They would have relatively rapidly dissipated due to gravitational settling, horizontal atmospheric movement, and sublimation.
The mass of Earth’s atmosphere is estimated to be about 5.15e18 kg, with about 20% of that being in the stratosphere. If we assume an average of about 5e-6 ppmv H20 across the stratosphere, that is equivalent to about 3.1e-6 ppmw. Therefore the mass of water vapor in the stratosphere is about 5.15e18 * 0.2 * 3.1e-6 = 3.2e12 kg. So, even if we were to very conservatively assume ALL of the asserted 150 million (metric) tons of water from the HT eruption ended up evenly dispersed as water vapor in the stratosphere, it would amount to a maximum step change of only (1.5e8 tons * 1000 kg/ton)/3.2e12 kg = 4.8% of total water vapor (equivalent to less than 0.25 ppmv change), with some unknown decay rate in that change over the 2.5 years since the eruption.
Considering the math, it’s really hard to see HT as being as a significant contributor to the increase in GLAT as measured by UAH over the last year.
How could I reinforce your point when I say the opposite. There were no ice clouds in the stratosphere after the volcanic eruption, just water vapor. This water vapor is measured by satellites, so we know how much there is and where it is. You are absolutely wrong in your lucubrations about the effect of the volcanic eruption on the stratosphere’s water content.
Well, there is this scientific paper that indicates otherwise “The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Hydration of the Stratosphere” (available at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381 ):
“The Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) onboard NASA’s Aura satellite provides measurements of 15 trace gases, among them H2O, HCl, and enhanced volcanic SO2 . . . MLS is well suited to observe volcanic plumes since microwave radiances are largely unaffected by sulfate aerosols . . . MLS estimates of ice water content (IWC) are based on the differences between the measured radiances and the expected clear-sky radiances, with the residuals attributed to ice scattering and/or ice absorption. The clear-sky radiances are calculated using the retrieved atmospheric states; since most retrievals in the volcanic plume fail the QS {quality screening} in the days following the eruption, the derived IWC estimates are unreliable.”
Note the implication that the MLS instrument measured the presence of ice water content in the stratospheric plume, but could not reliably quantify the magnitude of that ice (cloud).
And there is this from “Transport of the Hunga volcanic aerosols inferred from Himawari-8/9 limb measurements” (available at https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/17/3751/2024/ )
“After experimenting with various combinations of the AHI visible and near infrared channels the ratio, ℛ was found to be a good discriminator of Hunga aerosols . . . When aerosols are present, the ratio is > 0 and its magnitude can be used to distinguish between predominantly liquid or ice aerosol content . . . Specifically, if the aerosol is predominantly liquid water then ℛ tends to be larger than if the cloud were predominantly ice . . . The same conclusion can be drawn that a higher value of ℛ suggests more liquid water (or sulfate aerosol) than ice. To make this analysis more quantitative requires radiative transfer modelling, which will be the subject of future work.”
The paper present a Figure 6 (a-d), copy attached to this post, that shows the gradual dissipation of stratospheric volumes having high ℛ values in favor of regions having low ℛ values, indicating that stratospheric ice resulting from the eruption is persisting to some degree for more than a month after the major eruption on January 15, 2022.
For reference when examining this attachment, the Hunga Tonga volcano is located at –20.6° latitude, so the figure also shows the generally northward drift as well as dissipation of the volcano plume at stratospheric altitudes.
Ice in the stratosphere evaporates into water vapor.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL067991
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/10/201/2010/acp-10-201-2010.pdf
Ice injected by the volcano would evaporate (sublimate) into water vapor. What the satellites measure is water vapor, not ice.
As you can see in the image, water vapor reached the Northern Hemisphere 45°N in 2023 and there’s still a large amount of it.
Well, I will agree that water ice at the lower pressures of the stratosphere sublimates into water vapor at some slow rate that is highly dependent on incident solar radiation.
As regards the nice color contour plot you presented, I note the following interesting points:
1) at 32 km altitude (well into the stratosphere) the rapid change in H2O concentration, about 0.50 ppm based on the color scale, starts in the last quarter of 2022 . . . that would be about 9 months AFTER the HT volcano injected what you and others assert to be a massive amount of water vapor into the stratosphere at 20°S latitude.
2) Why the relatively sharp cutoff in the concentration step change for altitudes below about 24 km? Seems to be too high to be the tropopause at 45°N.
3) As you note, the plot is water concentration vs. altitude for 45°N latitude. So, do you really believe that water vapor at the asserted elevated concentration level would take a full 9 months to move from 20°S to 45°N, and yet not reduce the gradient during this time? And why no comparable chart for 45°S (or even better 20°S) latitude . . . what might either of those show? After all GLAT is, well, global and not just what is happening around 45°N latitude.
4) The first arrival of the strong concentration gradient as plotted occurs at about 32 km, yet the strong concentration gradient arrives later for lower and higher altitudes. How is one to explain this altitude differentiation given that the stratosphere is asserted to have little convection and mixing due to its temperature stratification?
5) Taken on face value, the noted color-coded ppm scale (as a change in ppm relative to some zero baseline) would indicate that something caused a step change of about 0.5 ppm from the first-half-2022 average WV concentration level in the stratosphere, at least over the altitude range of 25–40 km. That step change is not inconsistent with my calculations posted above that predicted a change just under 0.25 ppm assuming uniform distribution of the claimed water injection across the full stratosphere . . . a calculation that you criticized without explanation in your post of August 24, 2024 12:40 pm.
6) Any explanation for the nearly-equivalent approximately 0.5 ppm step change that is indicated to start around April 2024 over the altitude range of 13–15 km? I don’t find any volcano becoming active around that time.
Gee . . . I never expected to be absolutely wrong, but I can easily appreciate that I might have approximation errors in my math calculations.
I can only only gently invite you to point out those errors.
The phase diagram of water makes it quite clear that any water in the stratosphere will be in liquid form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram
Not true . . . you better look again.
1) Pressure in the stratosphere ranges between 20,000 Pascals near the tropopause to 100 Pascals near the top.
2) Temperature in the stratosphere ranges between about -50 °C near the tropopause to about -15 °C near the top.
3) The triple point of water is at 0 °C; below that temperature for any stratospheric pressure only ice and/or water vapor can exist.
Per the attached phase diagram for water at reduced pressures and low temperature, bulk water will be in ice phase at any combination of this limiting conditions. However, it can and will have an associated low pressure of water vapor over it. For reference, the saturation pressure of water vapor over ice ranges from about 4 Pascals at -50 °C to about 160 Pascals at -15 °C.
TYS,
I am confused. Water entering the stratosphere is claimed to be cooled from what? let us say 5 deg C, to ambient 20 km altitude level of minus 50 deg C or less higher up. The usual way to cool water is to place it in thermal conductivity contact with a colder object. But the lower stratosphere has very few colder objects available to place in proximity. It is a rather light place density wise, with not many awaiting cold molecules to make ice crystals. Have you done the heat transfer math, even roughly, to see if it is possible? Or do you invoke radiative cooling for this incoming water?
Also, if new ice crystals formed in the stratosphere, would there not be evidence able to be photographed?
Geoff S
You took the words out of my mouth. Ice crystals should up as clouds. Where is the satellite evidence of increased cloudiness in the stratosphere? Everything else is simply opinion on the water vapor turning to ice.
Only if they have sufficient density to reflect a detectable amount of ambient light (aka sunlight, or perhaps IR)
As to your question, please see my reply below to sherro01.
First, I will answer your question with a question: Have you ever seen—in person or on YouTube or equivalent— a person throw a cup of boiling (!) water up into the air when the ambient air temperature is something like -20 °F (-30 °C)? Hint: the cup of hot water turns into snow (ice crystals) and sleet before any water can hit the ground as liquid!
You state:
That is not correct. Air at STP is actually rather dense, weighting about 0.08 lbs per cubic foot. And its specific heat at STP is not bad at 0.24 BTU/lb/°F, about one-quarter that of water. As my lead paragraph above implies, very cold air is actually a very powerful heat sink.
So water, starting at approximately normal tropical ocean temperature (say, 80 °F, assuming the bulk of erupting water actually received little direct heating during its acceleration into the explosive plume) was injected through the troposphere before it could reach the stratosphere. If we reasonably assume the stratosphere starts at about 20 km altitude over at the latitude of the HT eruption and if we neglect the relative thin tropopause, that plume of exploding water vapor, volcano-overlying marine sediments, and overlaying and entrained liquid water will have to pass vertically through about 20 km of troposphere. For reference, per the standard atmosphere property profiles, air is at the freezing point of water at 2.3 km altitude, is at 0 °F at 5 km, is at -23 °F at 7 km, is at -58 °F at 10 km altitude, and is -70 °F at 20 km altitude.
Consequently, water and water vapor in the plume will be forcibly chilled down (and some amount around the periphery of the plume very likely frozen) during the plume’s passage through, and intense convective mixing with, the below-freezing gases over about 18 km of stratosphere vertical path.
No, I haven’t done even approximate heat transfer calculations because the boundary conditions for the plume (e.g., speed/drag profiles horizontally and vertically and their variations over time, volcano gas content, mass of liquid water versus water vapor, heat transfer coefficients under conditions of supersonic and subsonic turbulent mixing) are so unknown.
Yes, ice crystals if they are dense enough can form visible clouds that can be photographed (do a Web search on “nacreous clouds”, also called polar stratospheric clouds). I do not know if any orbiting weather or resource sensing satellites captured images able to resolve any such stratospheric ice clouds from, say, underlaying “normal” clouds in the lower stratosphere. However, in my post above of August 24, 2024 2:20 pm, I presented a sequence of four images from https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/17/3751/2024/ that reveal the presence of ice crystals in the stratosphere around one month following the HT eruption. This issue bears further scientific pursuit.
Are the molecules in the stratosphere less energetic (temperature is kinetic energy).or due to the much lower density of molecules (i.e. atmospheric pressure)?
Burnett is one of the formerly reliable conservative writers on climate who has morphed into a science denier. I had recommended every article of his for many years on my blog. Now I recommend none.
This time Burnett features science denier Vinos who claims Hunga Tonga had a lagging effect, from January 2022 to May 2023 before it started affecting the climate. That is silly science.
The strongest effect would have been in the first few months but there is no evidence of even a +0.1 degree increase of the GAT. Then the fantasy 16 month delay in the Vinos imagination.
Conservatives do not get taken seriously when spouting bizarre alternative climate theories … except here!
You have misunderstood what your are commenting on.
At the bottom of each of the three articles above that he compiled (but did not author), Sterling Burnett in a professional manner provides links to the sources of those articles.
He also, again in an unbiased professional manner, provides a convenient table of links to 42 websites/sources outside of WUWT so that readers have a variety of resources to consult related to the scientific study of climate.
Burnett as a “science denier” . . . hardly!
Now, you were saying something about people that spout bizarre alternatives here on WUWT . . .
When Burnett recommends even one science denier article in his weekly column, he is serving as a science denier editor. He never did that until 2024.
Richard,
“Science denier” is a pretty broad brush . . . could you be a little more specific.
And no, I don’t mean “more accurate” (hah!) . . . I’ll just settle for “more specific”.
Your continued anti-science comments leave your credibility at far less than ZERO.
You are locked into all the fake AGW-apologist memes, and don’t have the mental ability to break out of your anti-science miasma.
Sure, like the fantasy 15-month delay of the Mt. Tambora 1815 eruption in causing the universally accepted volcanic cooling of the 1816 “year without summer”. Talk about denying scientific knowledge.
This is water vapor in the stratosphere, not dust. The strongest effect would be in the first few months and it would gradually decline. There is no 16 month delay.
The effect at 16 months would be less than the effect in the first month
The effect in the first month on GAT was not observed
That 16 month delay is claptrap
The guy who wrote about ice was wrong too.
The extra water vapor will gradually decline for years.
Which, of course, ignores that there is anything called physical inertia (especially thermal inertia) associated with the 5e18 kg of mass associated with Earth’s atmosphere.
There is also the time delay associated with widespread (i.e., global) dispersal of a originally-localized perturbation.
ROTFL.
This reply by “the guy who wrote about ice”.
So you say, but he evidence shows otherwise so, you must be wrong.
Let me propose a test: if water vapor was responsible for the heat records in 2024 as posited by Javier, then we should observe rapid cooling in the next two years. We should postpone this debate until we have more observations.
Your point is valid . . . but where’s the fun (or scientific merit) in postponing fact-based reasoning about cause and effect?
Yet even if there is significant cooling, that would not prove this water vapor hypothesis, but it would leave the hypothesis intact and plausible.
I’ve been thinking about that and I will be introducing the Hungatongameter in a few days in my X account to measure the effects of the volcano over time.
@JVinos_Climate
Leftist AGW-apologists like you should never be taken seriously, sprouting AGW rhetoric but never any evidence.
It is you that is a denier of science.. all you have is your ignorance of science.
It took until early 2023 for the stratospheric WV to get over the higher latitudes where it slows the cooling effect.
Is “slowing the cooling effect” the same as causing a spike in the overall trend of GLAT warming? I think not.
Separately, if by “higher latitudes” you mean north of the equator, it then begs the question of how long it took for the atmospheric WV (from the HT eruption) to disperse over the southern hemisphere . . . you know, that part of the planet responsible for half of the average global atmospheric temperature.
El Nino release, probably helped along by the water temperature increase from the HT eruption
The WV in the stratosphere has slowed the dissipation of energy. increasing the period of the El Nino effect.
High latitudes, I mean north and south. It actually took longer to spread to the northern high latitudes, than in the SH, but is still hanging about
Thank you very much for presenting the graph of stratospheric water vapor versus latitude for the time periods before and after the HT volcano explosion in early-January 2022. I find it fascinating!
I have attached a graph of UAH (Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer) data for the trend in GLAT that I annotated to show the delay in the “spike” in global warming that started some 14-16 months AFTER the HT eruption.
Your graph shows that in the nine months following the eruption, the approximately 0.5 ppm step change in water vapor in the stratosphere had spread throughout the southern hemisphere (isn’t it strange that despite that dispersal, the indicated step change remains at about 0.5 ppm and is even higher for latitudes south of about 40 °S . . . but I digress 😉 ).
As I previously posted, GLAT is, well, global. So what is the scientific rationale to explain why a 0.5 or higher ppm step change in stratospheric WV spreading across Earth’s southern hemisphere did not result in any increase in GLAT in fourteen months as measured by UAH? It doesn’t make sense.
Last but certainly not least, note that during those same nine months, the ~0.5 ppm step change in WV hadn’t diffused north of about 25 °N, but then very suddenly (i.e., within a month or less) the same ~0.5 ppm step change is shown extending all the way up to 75 °N (and probably goes even further north). The reason for that incredible rapid northward dispersal (given the earlier, gradual southward dispersal that is documented) defies scientific reasoning . . . i.e., it too doesn’t make sense.
If the data from the Acura spacecraft MLS is accurate (and right now I have to seriously question that it—or at least the color scale contour plots representing such data—is accurate), then the graph you presented of that data certainly indicates a woeful lack of scientific knowledge about how air circulates in the stratosphere and about how perturbations in WV content there disperse over time.
Ooops . . . last paragraph . . . make that “If the data from the
AcuraAura spacecraft . . .”Fingers (and perhaps mind) on auto when I typed that, apparently.
In addition to my previous response (above), the following should be the “final nail” in the coffin for the debate over the HT injection of water/water vapor into the stratosphere being the cause of the recent “spike” seen in GLAT as indicated by UAH satellite data trending:
The natural variation in global stratospheric WV content for Earth’s equatorial region seen between August 2017 and January 2018 (i.e., over six months) as measured by the SAGE III instrument aboard the ISS (see attached graphs from https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/studying-earths-stratospheric-water-vapor/ ) is about 2.4 ppmv. That’s about five times greater variation in stratospheric WV concentration than the ~0.5 ppmv worst-case change calculated for 150 million tons of water said to be injected into the stratosphere from the HT volcano explosion as dispersed across the full volume of the stratosphere) as well as the ~0.5 ppmv step-change in stratospheric WV content as measured by the MLS instrument on the Aura spacecraft (based on the graph that you posted).
Even the semi-annual natural variation in stratospheric WV at 40° N is seen to be about 0.6 ppmv, of course greater than 0.5 ppmv.
If a 0.5 ppmv change in stratospheric WV content is responsible for the claimed spike in GLAT, then why isn’t the magnitude of a much greater semi-annual change seen as a very strong annual variation in GLAT?
Well, of course – the models simply do not work.
That is why no serious forecast of any change in climate has EVER come to pass, whether it is sea level rise, devastation of the Maldives – which earned them huge Paris Agreement funds now being spent on building five new airports at near beach level – supposed loss of all Alpine glaciers which are of course still here, children in Europe never supposedly seeing snow again (when the UK was later smothered in what became an epic photograph), supposed Greenland ice loss when it is clearly increasing, the massive regrowth of Australian coral just as forecast by Prof Ridd – who lost his job for telling the truth it goes on and on and still no explanation or apology for the alarm that a new ice age was thought imminent in the fifties. Now of course in the USA (mainly) we have government entities demonstrably falsifying historical temperatures to show non existent rises all of which can be shown by anyone. Story tip?
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy this explanation, either. It is destined to join the list of all the other climate fantasies like CO2 and El Nino. I’m not sure why people are so anxious to latch onto HT to explain recent warming trends. What is the proposed mechanism, greenhouse warming? That seems to suffer from all the flaws the CO2 greenhouse theory suffers from, and worse.
“Vinos explains that “El Niño is unlikely to be responsible for the simple reason that such abrupt global warming is unprecedented in our records.”” and “In addition, El Niño has happened many times in the past without inducing the kind of large-scale global warming experienced in 2023.”
Wrong, the recent 2023 El Niño and ocean warming was similar in size to the 1997 El Niño warming.
Oh the irony, the 2023 annual HadSST4 increase of 0.235°C was not “unprecedented” as claimed, as there were years since 1877 with at least higher or similar changes, within the margin of uncertainty.
It was not necessary to invoke Vinos’ special pleading with his underdeveloped mechanism again.
So based on your El Nino comparison we will expect the temperature to return to the value existing prior, -0.04, Vino’s explanation would suggest otherwise, so we’ll see in a couple of months.
Phil, that would be a false criteria imo, as this ENSO won’t likely finish the same as ’97/98 did, it will be more like post-2016, as another step SST change due to high solar irradiance.
Vinos’ explanation suggests nothing at this point.
The 2023 El Niño was similar to the 1997 El Niño without a preceding HTHH, therefore there is no reason to think HTHH had any effect in 2023 nor should it have any effect after the El Niño.
So you compared the two El Niños saying they were “Two similar El Niño” but don’t expect them to continue similarly? So you say that HTHH should have no effect “after the El Niño” so why will this El Niño not finish like ’97/98?
There is a problem with your explanation. El Niño is accompanied by positive PDO conditions in every instance except in 1991 and 2024. In both cases after a volcanic eruption.
This indicates that it was not El Niño who was responsible for the warming, but the warming who was responsible for El Niño.
Further confirmed because in every instance of El Niño, the warming in the Niño 3.4 region precedes the global ocean warming except in 1991 when there was ocean cooling and in 2023-24 when the Niño 3.4 region warmed with the rest of the ocean.
You should not be using UAH LT Ocean to make points like this, as it lags HadSST4.
The 12-month-average-change function (12ma∆) naturally detrends the original timeseries, allowing for direct cross-correlation analysis, as I showed earlier.
The 2023 RONI lead 2023 HadSST4 by 2 months, one month faster than before 2023, faster due to the high SC25 solar irradiance boost.
It couldn’t be any more cut and dry despite your protests.
“This indicates that it was not El Niño who was responsible for the warming, but the warming who was responsible for El Niño.”
You aren’t very observant. Don’t you read? The Relative ONI data posted in my first comment specifically removed the global warming effect.
Your PDO claim is thus irrelevant.
The Hunga Tonga eruption was not given much coverage in the media.
Patagonia was reported to have had a large number of livestock deaths
the past months. Is that related to the eruption? Might be. It seems to
me that an event of this magnitude will have an impact over several years.
Argentine army helps farmers as snowstorms threaten livestock in Patagonia region
Modulation of the Northern polar vortex by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and associated surface response
https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2024/egusphere-2024-1909/
“Modulation” of the northern polar vortex from the location of the HT volcano at a latitude of about 21° south of the equator?
Doubtful.
Data shows that the stratospheric water injected by HTHH spread across the whole globe during the following year. The paper referred to says: “ We show that in early 2023 the excess WV caused significant negative anomalies in tropical upper-stratospheric/mesospheric ozone and temperature, forcing an atmospheric circulation response that particularly affects the Northern Hemisphere polar vortex (PV). The decreased temperature gradient leads to a weakening of the PV, which propagates downward similarly to sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) and drives surface anomalies via stratosphere-troposphere coupling.”
Seems plausible.
Simply not true.
Did you not see—more importantly, understand— the contour plot of stratospheric water vapor content from the Aura spacecraft MLS instrument that bnice2000 posted above on August 25, 2024 5:26 pm?
That data clearly indicates that it took slightly more than one full year for the step change of about 0.5 ppm WV to show up far (i.e., >25° N latitude) into Earth’s northern hemisphere.
Your quoted excerpt states “We show that in early 2023 the excess WV caused . . .” Well the major eruption of the HTHH volcano occurred on January 15, 2022.
Yes I am well aware of the AURA data, the plot you refer to shows the water vapor moving north of the equator to 75ºN in early 2023.
So why is my statement “Simply not true”?
And what is wrong with the statement: “ We show that in early 2023 the excess WV caused significant negative anomalies in tropical upper-stratospheric/mesospheric ozone and temperature, forcing an atmospheric circulation response that particularly affects the Northern Hemisphere polar vortex (PV). The decreased temperature gradient leads to a weakening of the PV, which propagates downward similarly to sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) and drives surface anomalies via stratosphere-troposphere coupling.”
By early 2023 the graph shows that the WV had reached the Northern polar region.
It is not true because you clearly posted “Data shows that the stratospheric water injected by HTHH spread across the whole globe during the following year.”
“During” means over the course of, or over the interval of.
The Aura MLS contour plot of WV concentration vs latitude and time shows, as I clearly stated previously, that there was no significant change in WV concentration north of 25 ºN from mid-January 2022 through early January 2023. That time periods meets the definition of “during the following year” when taken in context, and thus clearly falsifies your statement “stratospheric water injected by HTHH spread across the whole globe during the following year”, my bold emphasis added.
It’s that simple.