by Javier Vinos
We have been fortunate to witness the largest climate event to occur on the planet since the advent of global satellite records, and possibly the largest event since the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. It is clearly a naturally occurring, externally forced climate event. However, mainstream climate scientists are not treating it appropriately. This is because climate science does not function like other sciences and is subject to strong confirmation bias. The first step to learning from the 2023 event is accepting its exceptional nature, which many fail to do.
- An externally forced extraordinary event
If you are still not convinced of the extremely anomalous nature of the climatic event of 2023, let’s review some of the events of 2023-24. Taken together, they make it clear. The following list is incomplete and comes from my notes:
- Extraordinary ocean warming that models can’t explain.[1]
- Record-low Antarctic sea ice.[2]
- A record-breaking Amazon drought in 2023.[3]
- 31 atmospheric river events in the western US from November 2022 to March 2023. Nine made landfall in California marking the record in the 70-year database.[4]
- The snowiest season in 71 years occurred in California after a 1-in-54-year event.[5]
- NYC had the least snowy season on record, breaking a 50-year record on latest first snow.[6]
- Cyclone Freddy in the Indian Ocean was the longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever.[7]
- ITCZ displacement and unusual rains in the Sahara in 2024.[8]
- The first half of the 2024 hurricane season was surprisingly quiet, and models can’t explain it.[9]
- In 2023, 42% of the globe experienced heat exceeding two standard deviations. Louisiana, for example, had its hottest summer in 129 years of records.[10]
- 2023 was the warmest year on record, and 2024 was even warmer.
- In October 2024, the North Polar Vortex was the weakest in 40 years. The three sudden stratospheric warming events that occurred in the same season are a one-in-250-year event according to models.[11]
- The biggest global low cloud cover anomaly ever recorded occurred in 2023.[12]
Figure 1. ERA5 Zonal-mean anomaly in low cloud cover suggests that 2023 planetary albedo may have been the lowest since at least 1940.12
No one seems to be connecting the dots indicating that a series of extraordinary atmospheric events took place in 2023–24. These events suggest that an external factor significantly impacted atmospheric circulation. Climate science focuses heavily on a relatively uninformative and uncertain parameter called surface temperature anomaly, which is the variation in the average of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures across widely disparate areas. Nevertheless, even this inadequate parameter reflects the unusual nature of the 2023 event.
Figure 2. The 2023 climate event can be seen most clearly in the global sea surface temperature anomaly (NOAA, 60°N–60°S, baseline 2021). It began in December 2022. By November 2025, 90% of the warming from the 2023 event has disappeared.
Many 2023 temperatures were not only record temperatures, they also broke the previous records by the largest margin in the datasets, as I pointed in the article I wrote for Climate Etc. in July 2024 “Hunga Tonga volcano: impact on record warming”. Rantanen and Laaksonen (2024) selected September 2023 in ERA5 reanalysis as the 2023 record warming month by the largest margin and, using the CMIP6 ensemble for the likely transient climate response, as recommended, found only a 0.2 % probability that it could be due to the unforced internal variability and the forced greenhouse gas-induced trend.10 They conclude that an external forcing is required and point to the Hunga Tonga eruption and the removal of sulfur pollution from ships as possibilities.
- Rounding up the usual suspects in an unusual crime
One might think that the lack of precedents for such an unusual event would make scientists skeptical of the factors affecting the climate over the last hundred years, since nothing similar appears in the records. However, to publish another paper, scientists must explain what happened, and the models are incapable of providing explanations outside their programming. This programming obviously does not include extraordinary events of which we had no prior knowledge.
Therefore, it has been argued that El Niño in 2023 may have been one of the main causes. However, in my article of 2024 I presented two compelling reasons why the 2023 El Niño cannot be held responsible. First, the warming of the globe oceans occurred simultaneously with El Niño, rather than subsequently, as was the case in previous Niños. Second, unlike all other Niños except the one caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1992, the PDO was in a negative state during the 2023 El Niño.
Despite supporting ENSO’s involvement in what happened, Minobe et al. (2025) provide further arguments.[13] First, they demonstrate that the extraordinary warming event of 2023 started in the Southern Ocean in November 2022, which was four months prior to the tropical Pacific’s warming and the onset of El Niño. A consequence cannot precede its cause. Second, they demonstrate that the Earth’s energy imbalance anomaly between 2022 and 2023 was over 75% larger than during the onset of similar recent El Niño events. This unprecedented event first impacted the top of the atmosphere and began in 2022. Furthermore, the set of atmospheric and oceanic indicators included in the multivariate El Niño index (MEI) suggests that the 2023 El Niño event was not particularly intense. An El Niño event like many others cannot cause an unprecedented event.
Figure 3. a) Global top of the atmosphere anomalies of shortwave (downward) and longwave (downward) radiation and Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI). A strong increase in shortwave radiation started in 2022. Global warming caused a strong increase in upward longwave radiation in 2023 in advance of an average intensity El Niño. b) Monthly anomaly time series of sea surface temperature in selected regions of the Southern Ocean and the Tropical Pacific. The anomaly started around November 2022 in the Southern Ocean, about 4 months before El Niño started in the Pacific.13
Those who believe ENSO played a significant role in the 2023 event point to the three years of La Niña preceding it. They claim this overloaded the heat system, causing it to explode with the 2023 El Niño event. However, there are precedents for three consecutive Niñas in the records, in 1974-1976 and 1999-2001, yet nothing like the 2023 event occurred. While explanations can be sought as to why the three Niñas produced such a different result this time, given that things never repeat exactly the same way, these explanations are still ad hoc with no evidence to back them up.
More surprising is the argument that the event was caused by anthropogenic factors. Anthropogenic forcing is small and constant, and can only produce noticeable changes over long periods of time, decades or centuries. Interannual changes, by definition, are due to natural factors or internal variability. As an example, after 50 years of global warming, it is still unclear what changes we can expect in the ENSO system if the warming continues for another 50 years.
One exception to this long-term anthropogenic forcing is the reduction in sulfur emissions due to the maritime fuel regulations that came into force in 2020, and was therefore abrupt. However, we can rule this out as a cause of the 2023 event because the reduction is permanent, whereas the ocean warming that occurred in 2023 was essentially reversed in 2024 and 2025 (see Figure 2).
- Most scientists are ignoring the cooling that has taken place since the 2023 event.
The truth is that climate scientists have much more difficulty explaining cooling than warming when CO2 levels increase. This inherent bias embedded in the models probably indicates that there are fundamental aspects of the climate that are not well understood. This may explain why the 2023 warming generated a multitude of headlines and articles, while the 2024 and 2025 cooling is characterized by scientists’ silence in the face of something equally spectacular.
For example, the annual scientific reports titled “10 New Insights in Climate Science” by the Future Earth organization, publisher of the journal Anthropocene, are worth highlighting.[14] Two of the ten insights in each of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 reports refer to abrupt warming. However, despite cooling beginning in early 2024, no article refers to it.
It is difficult to find any mention of ocean cooling. In 2024, New Scientist magazine reported that a part of the Atlantic Ocean was cooling at a record speed:
“Over the past three months, temperatures in that part of the Atlantic cooled off more rapidly than at any time in records extending back to 1982. This sudden shift is perplexing because the strong trade winds that normally drive such cooling have not developed, says Franz Philip Tuchen at the University of Miami in Florida. ‘We’ve gone through the list of possible mechanisms, and nothing checks the box so far.’”[15]
We can add ocean cooling as another anomaly that remains unexplained in terms of its magnitude, speed, and cause.
When an El Niño event transitions to a La Niña event, the equatorial Pacific usually cools rapidly. However, the cooling in 2024 was global. Although La Niña conditions occurred in the winter of 2024–2025, they were not intense enough and long enough to qualify as an actual La Niña event. In other words, the tremendous cooling of the planet’s oceans has included the equatorial Pacific, but the equatorial Pacific has not induced it.
- The only known extraordinary factor is the eruption of Hunga Tonga.
According to Occam’s razor, a climatic event of unparalleled magnitude in modern records requires an exceptional cause. The factors responsible for normal climate variability are insufficient. The only extraordinary factor preceding the 2023 event was the explosion of the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano. The 150 megatons of water vapor that it released into the stratosphere are without precedent in our records. We do not know all the effects this may have had on the climate. Eruptions that reach the stratosphere have radiative, chemical, and dynamic effects. However, only the first two are well known.
There are several aspects of the Tambora eruption in April 1815 that scientists have not yet explained satisfactorily. First, the effects were delayed, as the anomalies that led to the year without a summer in 1816 did not begin until 15 months after the eruption. The usual explanation is that atmospheric dynamics delayed the radiative effects in the Northern Hemisphere. However, this explanation conflicts with the second unexplained aspect: the climatic effect on the Northern Hemisphere was much greater than on the Southern Hemisphere. The cause of this inequality between the hemispheres is unknown since volcanic aerosols and their radiative effects are distributed across both hemispheres in a tropical eruption.
Figure 4. The inability of models to reproduce the climatic effects of large volcanic eruptions calls into question the reliability of their diagnosis that the Hunga Tonga eruption had little effect on the surface climate. a) All models reproduce a cooling effect in the southern hemisphere as a result of the 1815 Tambora eruption, but this effect is not supported by evidence.[16] b) The models greatly exaggerate the cooling of sea temperatures that occurred as a result of the 1815 Tambora eruption and a previous one in 1809. The observations (in black) show a much smaller cooling.[17]
Climate models do not adequately reproduce the effects of the 1815 Tambora eruption, suggesting that dynamic atmospheric changes caused by stratospheric eruptions or other factors have a much greater impact on climate than previously thought. It is striking that the evolution of the ocean temperature anomaly generally coincides with the evolution of water vapor anomalies in extratropical middle-stratospheric latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere but not in the entire stratosphere.
Figure 5. The global sea surface temperature anomaly (NOAA, 60°N–60°S, baseline 2021) is shown in red over a background image of the water vapor anomaly in the stratosphere at 45°N.
Because models cannot adequately incorporate the effects of stratospheric eruptions on atmospheric circulation dynamics, the conclusion that the Hunga Tonga eruption had minimal effects on the surface climate is not convincing.[18] This conclusion is based primarily on knowledge of the radiative properties of water vapor. Studies support a relationship between these eruptions and changes in global atmospheric circulation, the polar vortex, El Niño–Southern Oscillation, evaporation, and cloud cover.
Without a doubt, we know that the climatic event of 2023 was caused by a drastic decrease in global cloud cover, the largest in at least 40 years (see Figure 1). This reduction caused the planet to absorb more solar energy and warm up. However, we do not know what controls changes in clouds. It’s astonishing that we claim to understand the cause of recent climate change yet remain ignorant of such a fundamental aspect.
Clouds cannot form without evaporation. In their recent work, Fajber et al. (2023) present compelling evidence that the evaporation gradient between the tropics and the poles controls the amount of heat transported through the atmosphere.[19] However, they made the common mistake of assuming that evaporation is controlled by temperature via the Clausius–Clapeyron relation. This error stems from the assumption that wind is constant at the global level. The Clausius–Clapeyron relation is accurate at the microscopic level, at the interface between water and air. However, at the macroscopic level, wind speed has a greater impact on evaporation than temperature or humidity. In a cold, humid environment, clothes hung out to dry will dry if there is enough wind. However, few climate scientists have experience hanging clothes out to dry in the wind. Furthermore, wind speed is not constant; rather, it exhibits significant changes and opposing trends over oceans and land. These changes lead to important changes in evaporation, cloud formation, and their transport and distribution.[20]
If changes in the clouds caused the temperature changes, then we cannot use the temperature changes as the cause of the cloud changes. The most likely cause is the change in atmospheric circulation, which occurred due to the atmospheric anomalies that have taken place since the end of 2022, as discussed in Section 1.
For anyone who is not committed to the explanation of climate change due to the radiative properties of greenhouse gases, the Hunga Tonga eruption is currently the best explanation for the 2023 climate event. In July 2025, I analyzed that “if Hunga Tonga is responsible for the 2023-24 warming event, a clear prediction is that we should observe most of this warming disappear in 3-5 years.“[21] This projection does not arise from any of the other considered causes. By December 2025, four years after the eruption, this prediction had come true: the ocean temperature anomaly in November was only 0.05°C higher than in November 2021, before the eruption. 90 % of the ocean warming from the 2023 climate event has disappeared.
- The greatest failure of climate science
Climate science has failed the test of an externally forced natural climate event. Most scientists who have published studies on the 2023 climate event have not recognized its nature. Any climatological manifestations of the event that do not align with the dominant consensus have been treated as either natural variability or rare events whose probability has increased due to anthropogenic climate change. No studies have addressed the climatic event in all its manifestations or analyzed its possible causes without relying on models clearly not designed to shed light on something we did not know was possible.
Rather than trying to determine the causes of the event, scientists have attempted to fit it into the dominant theory using models. In light of evidence of major natural climate change, this approach reveals its greatest flaw: the theory relies on an excessive focus on greenhouse gases and aerosols as the cause and temperature changes as the effect.
Personal note:
2026 will mark the tenth anniversary of my first post on Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog. Believe it or not, I began researching climate change in 2015 because I was concerned about its potential impact on our society. As a scientist from a different field entirely, I trusted my fellow scientists, learned societies, and scientific journal editors to evaluate the risk. As an avid reader of scientific literature from many disciplines, I immersed myself in hundreds and then thousands of papers, convinced that evidence of dramatic human-caused climate change was there. However, I came away empty-handed and profoundly skeptical of everything I had been told without ever being shown the evidence. I realized natural climate change is greatly misunderstood and insufficient effort is being done to correct that. Over these past 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to straighten out the science of climate, and I will spend 10 more years doing so if necessary. If you would like to hear more often from me, you can find me on 𝕏 @JVinos_Climate
[1] Schmidt G (2024). “Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory” Nature, 627, 467.
[2] Gilbert E & Holmes C (2024). “2023’s Antarctic sea ice extent is the lowest on record” Weather, 79, 2, 46-51.
[3] Espinoza JC et al. (2024) “The new record of drought and warmth in the Amazon in 2023 related to regional and global climatic features” Sci Rep 14, 8107.
[4] Kawzenuk B et al. (2023) “Mesoscale analysis of landfalling atmospheric rivers in California during December 2022 and January 2023” Atmospheric River Reconnaissance Workshop 2023.
[5] Marshall AM et al. (2024) “California’s 2023 snow deluge: Contextualizing an extreme snow year against future climate change” PNAS 121, 20, e2320600121.
[6] Silive.com (2024) “2023 least snowiest year in NYC on record, says National Weather Service“.
New York Post (2023) “Snowless NYC breaks 50-year record of longest winter without flurries“.
[7] NOAA (2024) “Australia to Africa in 36 days: Tropical Cyclone Freddy (2023), the longest-lasting tropical cyclone in history“.
[8] Live Science (2024) “Sahara desert hit by extraordinary rainfall event that could mess with this year’s hurricane season“.
[9] Klotzbach PJ et al. (2025) “The Remarkable 2024 North Atlantic Mid-Season Hurricane Lull” Geophys Res Lett, 52, 19, e2025GL116714
[10] Rantanen M & Laaksonen A (2024) “The jump in global temperatures in September 2023 is extremely unlikely due to internal climate variability alone” Clim Atmos Sci 7, 34.
Yale Climate Connections (2023) “Summer 2023 broke dozens of all-time monthly heat records“.
[11] Severe Weather EU (2024) “Unusually weak Polar Vortex is developing in the Stratosphere, linked with the Weather patterns over the United States and Canada“.
Met Office UK (2024) “One in 250-year event underway high in the atmosphere“.
[12] Goessling HF et al. (2024) “Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo” Science, 387, 6729, 68-73.
[13] Minobe S et al. (2025) “Global and regional drivers for exceptional climate extremes in 2023-2024: beyond the new normal” Clim Atmos Sci, 8, 138.
[14] 10 New Insights in Climate Science.
[15] New Scientist (2024) “Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why“.
[16] Neukom R et al. (2014) “Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium” Nature Clim Change, 4, 362–367.
[17] Brohan P (2012) “Constraining the temperature history of the past millennium using early instrumental observations” Clim. Past, 8, 1551–1563.
[18] APARC (2025) “Hunga Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report” APARC Report No. 11, WCRP Report No. 10/2025.
[19] Fajber R et al. (2023) “Atmospheric heat transport is governed by meridional gradients in surface evaporation in modern-day earth-like climates” PNAS, 120, 25, e2217202120.
[20] Yu L (2007) “Global Variations in Oceanic Evaporation (1958–2005): The Role of the Changing Wind Speed” J Climate, 20, 21, 5376–5390.
[21] Vinós J (2025) https://x.com/JVinos_Climate/status/1941827393368281431
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
But all good True Believers ignore water vapor. As it is not related to human action, it
cannot be a moral failing that must be denounced.
Now, if we could only come up with a scheme to blame humans for vapor and add a global tax on top,
it would be declared a pollutant and become the main source of global warming by tomorrow.
Until this happens we will have to try to find ways to blame the shockwaves that the eruption caused to the atmosphere somehow on co2.
Gaia is upset, so of course it was human caused. We need to sacrifice a virgin or do NetZero, whatever looks more rigorous.
Sacrificing a virgin would be a waste of a precious human resource.
Doing NetZero is also a waste of precious resources, both natural and human.
But think of the drama!
I was thinking of the grass skirt, actually. 🙂
If you want drama, it’ll have to be a ‘trans’ virgin that gets sacrificed… 😝
Nah. That would be a waste of human resource, but not of a precious human resource.
We can manufacture ‘trans.’
Humans are to blame for everything wrong with the world according to eco zealots who appear to believe in original sin.
You’ve nailed it. Can’t tax and regulate sunlight, Can’t tax and regulate water vapor. So, CO2 is the problem ‘cause it can be taxed and regulated.
Amendment 28
Section 1
Congress shall make no law to regulate,
tax, sequester or license atmospheric
carbon dioxide.
The right of the people to freely emit
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from
any source, from any place at any time
in any amount shall not be interfered with.
Section 2
All activity commercial or private within
the United States and all territory subject
to the jurisdiction thereof for the purposes
of altering climate is prohibited.
The Congress and the several States shall
have concurrent power to enforce this article
by appropriate legislation.
A minor improvement:
All activity commercial, private, or governmental be it Local, County, State, or Federal…
Interesting. I wasn’t aware that Svante Arrhenius was performing radiative transfer calculations with the secret goal of laying the foundation for 21st century carbon markets.
Arrhenius made zero measurements in the atmosphere.
His baseless conjecture of CO2 warming was based on a totally erroneous and non-Earth simplistic model of the atmosphere.
That simplistic and erroneous model was taken up by Manabe, then promulgated to the FAKE EARTH in current climate models.
Climate models are computer games based on a planet somewhere…
… but not this one. !
ps.. Did you know that Arrhenius actually supposed that the slight warming and the extra CO2 would be highly beneficial.
It was good he got at least that correct.
He wasn’t.
Back then it was called science, now it’s called activism.
But then you, like others pimping the “climate crisis” nonsense, ignore the most important parts of what your hero Arrhenius said.
He said that IF humans could manage to make the climate warmer by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that in doing so we would IMPROVE THE CLIMATE.
And that was the most accurate thing he said about it!
And tied to ENERGY USE. That has always been the game. The climate nonsense has always been a false front to hand the political classes control over energy use – through which they can control EVERYTHING.
There was a UN official from the Environmental group (can no longer find the link and forgot his name) who stated, in reference to the impeding mini ice age, words to the effect of “I do not know if CO2 is the cause, but it is something that can be quantified and taxed.”
Careful, mate, they’ll be wanting to tax hot showers next.
Already trying to, or doing so, by making the means of heating water more expensive…
Mr. S: Images of steam rising from cooling tower (a sign of great progress to me) compel me to say- please don’t give them any ideas!! Anti- oil is a very thin disguise for the anti-nuke activist within!
The water molecule has an interesting physical attribute. Due to its non-linear arrangement (approx. 104.5 degree v shape) H2O has a molecular dipole moment.
The dipole moment reacts to electro magnetic fields gaining kinetic energy. This is why a micro wave oven cooks your food.
As such, in addition to EM wave pressure, H2O gains kinetic energy from solar radiation and therefore goes up in temperature. Temperature being defined as the average kinetic energy of molecules impacting the thermometer.
It also means the incoming solar radiation energy is depleted by the same amount of energy gained by the H2O.
The H2O dipole moment is one of several factors that result in solar EM raising the temperature of the planet surface (including oceans).
CO2 does not have a molecular dipole moment. So score one for H2O!
The climate models do not take into account EM fields and waves theory. A major deficiency in addition to all the others including the brilliant assessments by Javier Vinos.
The dipole interaction of H2O with solar radiation is a small piece of the puzzle surrounding the explosion of the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano.
The dipole interaction of H2O with solar radiation is a small piece of the puzzle surrounding clouds and their effects on solar radiation at the planet’s surface.
In addition, water in clouds is not pure H2O. As such is conducts electricity, albeit weakly. EM fields and waves theory is proven time and again. An EM wave impacting a conductor induces current into that conductor. Radio, motors, generators all are based on this. But a cloud is not part of a closed circuit, so static charge builds up. Eventually that is conducted to earth (lightning) although sometimes to space and sometimes cloud to cloud.
The point is, there are many aspects of the earth energy system that are not well understood. Until EM fields and waves equations are brought into the mix, there will still be aspects not well understood.
One can only claim consensus when one does not know what one doesn’t know and refuses to consider alternatives. The beauty of Mr. Vinos article is it explores alternatives.
A+
Excellent point. When climate science says “We have enough data to make prognostications”, one should be very, very leary about accepting that as truth.
“The dipole moment reacts to electro magnetic fields gaining kinetic energy. This is why a micro wave oven cooks your food.”
I use my microwave several times/day and always wonder how the hell it works. Thanks for the explanation. I had a clue but not about the dipole moment.
Strictly speaking, the interaction of EM with water vapor increases the vibrational energy of the molecule, some of which is then converted to rotational energy. This “internal energy” is then transferred to surrounding water molecules as kinetic energy i.e. heat during collisions.
Strictly speaking, that is bogus science created to prove CO2 can “trap” heat.
The vibration modes are based on models, the assumption that valence and covalence are springs and an atom in a molecule can be impacted by a discrete photon. In addition, it assumes something is holding down one end of the molecule while the other is struck.
All of those assumptions are false.
If a wavefront of an EM file intersects a molecule, all atoms are equally affected. Therefore no induced vibration, but rather wave pressure.
Valence and Covalent bonds are electro static and have no elasticity.
A photon is a quantum of energy, not a particle.
Well there’s a couple of hundred years of thermodynamics disproven in one go.
Something that isn’t generally recognized is that water has a very high dielectric constant. As a consequence, water can experience a force acting on it resulting from a non-uniform electric field, known as dielectrophoresis, which is different from electrostatic forces.
Quite true. Electro static forces are a bit different that electro magnetic fields, similar but not identical.
Liquid water drips out of your car’s tailpipe so WV is there too. Condensed WV is visible as contrails. They ignore WV because the general populace would laugh at them if they said we must get to”net zero” on water.
If the general populace was better informed, they would know water vapor is by far the most significant “greenhouse gas” and that therefore, the notion that humans can control the hypothetical “greenhouse effect,” in totality, is a joke, given more than 70% of the Earth’s surface being covered in oceans of water.
“the climatic effect (of the 1815 eruption) on the Northern Hemisphere was much greater than on the Southern Hemisphere. The cause of this inequality between the hemispheres is unknown since volcanic aerosols and their radiative effects are distributed across both hemispheres in a tropical eruption.”
The cause is as easy to understand as looking at a globe. There’s a lot more ocean in the southern hemisphere, which acts as a large moderator on the climate. The heat inertia of all that water makes the southern climate more temperate.
Conversely, Antarctica has generally colder temperatures than the Arctic because the continent fits almost perfectly within the Antarctic Circle, getting next to zero heat input from water convection. The Arctic has a lot of area that’s ice over water, including a large area at and around the North Pole.
Why do so many people involved with the study of climate and weather seem to either be ignorant of these facts or deliberately ignore them? “We don’t know…” BS! You do know, or would if you just looked at a simple map.
Well, sorry, but this is taken into account by models that hindcast a strong 1815 Tambora effect on climate in the Southern Hemisphere, obviously. This hindcasted effect is absent in the evidence. So the explanation is not just that.
Consider also, the earth is an oblate spheroid with the SH having the greater girth.
The North Atlantic marine heatwave of 2023 was driven by a strong negative North Atlantic Oscillation regime. Indirect solar forcing of the NAO played a role, the large number of failed and weaker solar coronal hole streams through the summer:
https://solen.info/solar/coronal_holes.html
The 1982 and 1991 major volcanic eruptions led to El Nino episodes, why not Tambora too?
There is a growing body of evidence that increased deep-earth heat flow, such as hydrothermal vents and spacing between tectonic plates is a major cause of El Nino.
There is plenty on large tropical volcanic eruptions promoting El Nino conditions too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00755-6
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL102183
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/37/8/JCLI-D-23-0408.1.xml
Not to mention that there are probably hundred of thousands submarine volcanoes and seamounts that are point sources, in addition to the plate spreading centers that are line sources.
Alarmists would have nothing without cherry picking. Ignoring data that conflicts with their false beliefs is what they do best.
The all sky declining trend in down-welling long wave radiation during the modern warm period is clear evidence that CO2 is not running the show. Some negative feedback is preventing the clear sky increase in down-welling radiation in CO2’s signature 15 micron band from creating an enhanced greenhouse effect.
I would strongly advise everyone against attaching climate significance to the HT event.
The majority of Vinos’ bullet list and other glorified claims made here were consequences of absorbed solar radiation in step with solar activity with the warming exceeding the 1.5°C limit as I predicted it likely would do in my 2022 NASA LASP Sun Climate Symposium poster.
The Hunga-Tonga eruption was something special, but it didn’t cause the warming spike.
The record increase in water vapor is mainly due to solar-induced evaporation during the El Niño. The low point in water vapor in 2022 was due to the ongoing effect of the triple dip La Niña.
The 2023/24 El Niño spike was very similar to the ’97/98 spike, ie, not unprecedented as claimed.
Certainly the sun is the dominant player and I have said so for years, but I refuse to accept a single factor explains all. I will continue to attach climate significance to the HT event. It is the scale of significance that warrants debate.
Back to the sun. My biggest issue is a constant solar temperature and a mean solar orbit being used in those flat earth energy imbalance models. Your data shows how wrong that assumption is.
Likewise the earth is not a smooth surface perfect sphere. Again, used by the flat earth models. The equator is 4000 miles closer to the sun than the day night terminator, yet those flat earth models assume the day-night terminator is good enough. The solar radiation incident to the planet’s surface is greatly affected by spherical geometry. I do not know if those UN climate models take that into effect, but that which is pushed on the public ignores it.
Yes, we will cool as we approach the next solar minimum. Energy is energy after all.
Mr. Vinos’ analysis may or may not be correct or may be partially correct or whatever. That is not the significance I perceive.
The significance I see is the addressing alternatives that have been blindly ignored.
This ‘alternative’ has not been blindly ignored, ie many papers published.
You’re refusing to accept a single factor? The sun also set the albedo via its influence on the tropics. The warming spike resulted from albedo + irradiance.
And the angle of incidence controls the specular reflectivity of water.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/12/why-albedo-is-the-wrong-measure-of-reflectivity-for-modeling-climate/
Thanx for the link. The Stefan-Boltzmann equation has an albedo term.
How would you change the S-B equation to accommodate your article’s point?
Sorry, I meant to say the Planetary Temperature Equation, a special application of the S-B equation, that has the albedo term, A:
“The Stefan-Boltzmann equation has an albedo term.”
Not exactly correct.
The SB equation has an emissivity term.
Angle of incidence affects how much solar energy is reflected and absorbed.
“You’re refusing to accept a single factor?”
Quote me correctly please.
“I refuse to accept a single factor explains all.”
The earth’s multiple coupled energy systems are too complex for a one size fits all answer.
Yes they are coupled as I delineated in my 2024 AGU poster and in my discussion here, where I showed the coupling between the sun and the ocean, and then from the ocean to the atmosphere, and clouds.
In fact I am the only one anywhere who has done that.
So I am going to ask you now to properly recognize that I do have multiple factors in my work, but with the sun at the center.
That is the point of my work altogether. Somehow you missed that.
You have hit on one of my skepticism concepts. Using averages is a waste of time when a T⁴ factor is involved along with trig functions for the radiation being absorbed. The flat earth is a simplistic non-scientific assumption that allows programmers and spreadsheet users to do simple math algebra while ignoring calculus and time varying gradients.
My new weather station tracks both insolation and temperature and sends it Weather Underground. At my location, insolation is highest at around 12 to 1 pm local time. However, Tmax occurs somewhere around 2 to 3 pm. Why the delay? There is an obvious gradient involved and finding the variables and their coefficients will be difficult. I may have to bury a soil temperature sensor. I suspect that soil temperature is the middle variable between insolation and air temperature.
I have mentioned in posts here that there is fundamental error in tave = (tmax+tmin)/2, which is exactly what you are alluding to.
My posts point out that 60 C and 0 C have the same average as 50 C and 10 C and goes on to point out that 30 C emissions do not equal 1/2 of the 60 C emissions plus 1/2 of the 0 C emissions. Ditto for 50 and 10 or any other min/max average of 2 temperatures.
Just as an aside, taking into account spherical geometry of a rotating planet, (tmax+tmin)/2 is at least 10% lower than a true time interval based average.
The latency you are detecting is due to the heat capacity of the ground. Energy warming the surface raises the temperature of the matter below the surface and thermal energy flows towards the cooler “dirt.” It takes time to warm the bulk and until the thermal energy flow underground occurs, the ground will be cooler and emit less into the atmosphere (convection and EM).
Your idea of planting a sensor underground is valid. If you have sufficient sensors, do them at several depths, equal depth intervals, and track the warming and cooling under the surface.
I do not know if you have the technology to measure moisture content. If you can, you should consider that, too.
Keep in mind that permafrost can go down 20 feet. That gives an idea of the thermal gradient one could anticipate finding. The surface to depth delta temperatures involved in your experiment are much less, so deeper does not buy anything.
As a guess based on childhood sandbox memories, 6 inches to 12 inches should be sufficient.
You say the 23/24 heat spike was a consequence of solar activity, but this UAH & Sunspot comparison graph does not support your claim. The nearly simultaneous peaks post-Tonga are coincidence. While surface data can be useful, UAH data is a much better measure of atmospheric change.
Your graph doesn’t support any particular idea at all. Your analysis of my position is faulty.
The ocean is warmed by sunshine, then the ocean warms the atmosphere, ie UAH LT. This was covered in my 2024 AGU poster. UAH LT lags the ocean (HadSST4) by 3 months, r=.92.
Both the El Niño SST spike and the UAH LT spike were part of the predicted decadal warming step induced by absorbed solar via albedo + SC25 irradiance.
Bob, how did you come up with the TSI value of 1361.25 W/m² as the Sun-Ocean Warming Threshold, please?
See my 2018 AGU poster.
The smaller El Nino can’t produce the larger heat spike, especially when the PDO was cooling.
ENSO value is only an indicator in a small central region.
It does not show how widespread the El Nino event was.
“Thin” can be widespread, and relatively insignificant. Looking at the bigger picture shows that “think” El Nino was most likely caused by the unprecedented Tonga volcano.
John you still haven’t shown any evidence supporting Tonga, just a label.
The SST and UAH temperature change in ’23/24 was similar in size to ’97/98.
Similar is your opinion, but the larger scale conditions point to Tonga as the forcing agent.
The argument here seems to be an either/or.. why not think both.
I would say, HT acted more as a trigger for starting the El Nino slightly earlier in the year…
… fed into the El Nino with some extra energy…
… and the extra stratospheric WV extended the El Nino, making the effect hang around a bit longer.
BTW.. HNY to all. Its 1/1/2026 down here
Even an eruption the size of HT is only a pimple on an elephant’s butt on the planetary scale. And statistical mathturbation to the nth degree is going to find that the known elephant pimple correlates to worldwide elephant stampedes or 3 ring circus bankruptcies (14 months later) or some such nonsense….ever since such records have been recorded. Javier is just wasting his and our time…..
Although I must say I appreciate the effort and pre-conception that went into his vertical cherry picked lines on his “randomness” graphs. I bought his book a year ago…it’s a good read.
“In December 2021, an eruption began on Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the Tongan archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean.[7] The eruption reached a very large and powerful climax nearly four weeks later, on 15 January 2022.”
Confusing to call it “The 2023 climate event” and then show all sorts of data that starts changing before 2023.
Agreed. Hunga Tonga was not a “climate event” as there is no such thing other than a ELI meteor hit or ELI level solar storm.
The eruption disturbed weather patterns for a while, but did not alter the climate. As the effects waxed and waned, we returned to our regularly scheduled program.
The temporary decrease in Antarctic sea ice is easily explained by the HT eruption.
The volcano was bubbly away for quite a while before the main event, and would have been putting a lot of heat energy into the ocean.
The Southern Gyre goes straight past this area, then flows directly to the Antarctic taking that energy with it.
Doesn’t take a large change in temperature to affect where the outer edge of the sea ice will form.
It is certainly possible it had an effect, but no single factor explains all.
Thank you Javier for putting together a coherent and comprehensive picture of the Tonga event and its after effects. It’s truly amazing that so many academic institutions (and media) ignore the smoking gun UAH graph and instead claim Tonga cooled the earth. They just can’t bring themselves to admit, or at least openly contemplate, that Tonga’s “water vapor” and not CO2 initiated a complex sequence of atmospheric events composed of radiative, chemical, and physical processes.
Please define the 2023 event.
“If the facts don’t fit the holy CAGW models, use a sledgehammer.”
Or alter the facts, whichever is easier.
/s
The temperature peak of 2024 is better explained by three factors associated with the Sun:
A. The Sun was at a peak in its northern excursion – similar to 1998 which was the highest Northern excursion since 1880.
.B. The Sun was at the peak of solar activity that was similar to 1998 and higher than 2015..
C. The sun was in the September to December quadrant so boreal winter sunlight was higher than average as well.
I like the sun. The sun is the “battery” for the earth’s thermal engines.
We have an Icelandic volcano in 536…Indonesia in 1257 and 1815 putting sulfur in the stratosphere to cause cooling to cause no summer years. Hmmmmmm, seems about every 6 centuries on that small data….4 more centuries to go…..stock up on canned goods……and winter coats.
Willis has shown repeatedly that the volcano-cause “no summer years” is a myth.
This article references the other big change once and then ignores it. But it is should not be dismissed.
The Clean Air Acts are huge and they now extend to shipping.
Everyone looks at the reduction in emitted Sulphur and assumed that this will seed less cloud cover and so warm the planet. But nothing is that simple.
We have recently reduced the food stock for ocean algae, plankton and the rest of the bottom rung of the food chain. This affects everything, including the planet’s albedo.
Every container ship was a fertiliser sprayer into the ocean’s in its wake. Now we have removed the S.
I didn’t ignore it. The sulfur reduction is permanent, but the warming from the 2023 event was not, so it is clearly not an effect from the permanent reduction in sulfur emissions.
Your post highlights that for every action there is one or more consequences.
This is especially true for our biosphere.
“This is because climate science does not function like other sciences and is subject to strong confirmation bias.”
Ergo, it ain’t a science. It’s a cult.
Here is the thing, I read a post here and think it makes sense and I am close to understanding it. But I know that won’t last once I read the comments, then it is more confusion than understanding. I am not concerned with the CAGW prophets of doom rather it’s the exchanges between the people I respect here on WUWT that confuse me. Not to say we shouldn’t disagree, I don’t have a problem with disagreement. It’s just that every time I think I’m understanding something a wrench gets thrown into it and I’m back to being confused. Climate isn’t an easy thing.
For myself, I’ve followed many of the back-and-forth debates over the true physics of climate change for eighteen years now. As far as I can observe, among climate skeptics there is nothing approaching a broad consensus concerning what the very low-level details of the true physics of the earth’s climate system actually are.
As for the future, I believe two things about it: (1) The earth’s climate system has been warming for the last 150 to 200 years, and it is likely to continue to warm, with ups and downs along the way, for another hundred years or more. (2) My descendants will still be driving my beloved 2010 Mazda 6 long into the future, assuming they remember to change the oil every 5,000 miles.
Maybe get synthetic oil and go 10,000 miles? 🙂
Still gotta change the filters.
Jeff, I use 10,000 mile Mobil 1 but still change the oil and filter every 5,000 miles. I keep my cars forever and more oil changes mean longer engine life. One other reason I do that is because the oil filter this particular car uses is small for a five-quart system. It all goes together when it goes.
Climate is definitely not an easy thing. And I say this after closely following this subject for 50 years.
It is much more complicated than it appears on the surface.
The obsession with CO2 has diverted attention from many important aspects of the Earth’s climate, and has caused a serious detour from the truth.
No. You are not back to being confused. You have learned an taken a step forward only to find the path is much longer than you were aware of previously.
This is to say, you have become enlightened that there is no climate “control knob” and the sciences involved are still in their infancies.
You are also becoming much more aware of what skepticism really is. In science, everything needs to be challenged. Questions need to be asked. What is not generally understood is science can not prove anything it can only disprove weak or irrelevant conjectures.
Nothing can be proven in absolute terms. Science can go with “beyond any reasonable doubts” but it cannot avoid doubts altogether.
The problem with anonymous interactions anywhere online is that they very quickly devolve into name-calling and beratement, instead of actual civil debate. Even when people use their real names, like me, it doesn’t matter. This always happens with discussions that aren’t face-to-face. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else.
New paper at NTZ
Warming rate from 1899-1940 was GREATER than the warming rate from 1983-2024.
Latter period had 8.5 times as many CO2 emissions.
Cooling from 1941-1982 with mid level CO2 emissions.
—–
There is no measured scientific evidence that CO2 has any warming effect whatsoever.
Yes, it is not any warmer today than it was in the 1880’s.
Even the high point of 2024 is within a few tenths of a degree of the high point of the 1880’s (within the margin of error).
Currently, temperatures are about 0.5C cooler than 2024 or 1880.
What we need to do, and unfortunately the political aspects make this an unacceptable approach, is stop trying to prove CO2 is not the cause and ferret out the real causes with evidence beyond any reasonable doubt..
This is all similar to the COVID-19 statistics that inflated death tolls by counting the virus as a/the cause of death for any mortality, regardless of the obvious, blatant cause. If someone died, and the virus had been present, it was a Covid death, period. Ignore the shotgun blast to the person’s chest, or any other blatant cause. You count only what matters for the “cause”, whatever is politically expedient.
Sorry to inject this topic, but that is what the Hamas Health Ministry does with casualty figures.
Indeed.
I think they just make up numbers. Most of them aren’t actual deaths.
Hi Javier, that’s an impressive list of unusual events that can plausibly be linked to the HT eruption. However the standard period used to define climate, which is the average of weather patterns, is 30 years, so these all belong under the category weather events, as most eruption aerosols last ~1-3 (5 max that I’ve read) years in the atmosphere before they fall back to Earth [1]. Even ever-alarmed Michael Mann dismissed the 2023 record temperatures as nothing significant. Some of these HT-related events form the final stages (icing on the cake) of true climate events that had been happening long before the eruption. For example the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures started increasing around ~1980, after the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation / Variation (AMO/AMV) reached its minimum negative value[2]. AMO switched to positive around 1995, concurrent with Arctic winter temperature increases/ sea ice melt. In order to make the case that HT is part of a climate event, you’d have to link geothermal events with a climate change event, e.g. increases in AMO. The good news is that it is possible. Many studies point to good correlations between solar cycles and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the geomagnetic field. The bad news is that such theories are next level in trying to convince the climate science community, even when compared to your post above.
The lack of “permanence” of a single eruption means it can at most form a single link in a chain of weather events that leads to climate change, which maybe is why you’re having trouble sparking interest from the greater community.
[1] Aubry, T.J., Staunton-Sykes, J., Marshall, L.R. et al. Climate change modulates the stratospheric volcanic sulfate aerosol lifecycle and radiative forcing from tropical eruptions. Nat Commun 12, 4708 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24943-7
[2] Zhang, R., Sutton, R., Danabasoglu, G., Kwon, Y.‐O., Marsh, R., Yeager, S. G., et al. (2019). A review of the role of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in Atlantic Multidecadal Variability and associated climate impacts. Reviews of Geophysics, 57, 316–375. https://doi.org/10.1029/ 2019RG000644
While the above article is interesting for acknowledging there are many things today’s climate “science” just cannot explain, I find it has this problem in logic:
First, the very first paragraph, leads with this:
“We have been fortunate to witness the largest climate event to occur on the planet since the advent of global satellite records, and possibly the largest event since the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.”
Therefore, logically, one has question that declaring the Hunga-Tonga volcano eruption (Jan 2022) to be possibly the “largest (climate) event since the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815” depends on (a) the change in measurement technology and (b) area of surface-measured that has occurred over those intervening 207 years?
For the sake of simplicity, let’s just avoid discussing modeled physical behavior (and drawing conclusions from such) because of GIGO . . . the known propensity for models to be no better than the inaccuracies/uncertainties associated with the necessarily-limited number of inputs PLUS the fact that their computations are always based on mathematical relationships/equations that only APPROXIMATE the detail processes that occur in non-linear, semi-chaotic, multiple positive- and negative-feedback driven natural processes, with resulting unavoidable propagation of errors for both hindcasting and forecasting.
Doing so, we then have this reduced listing from the above article, subsection 1. An externally forced extraordinary event that are asserted to make “events of 2023-24” exceptional, with my comment added in normal text font following each one:
Record-low Antarctic sea ice.
— There are no scientific records of Antarctic sea ice extent for the period of 1815-1820.
A record-breaking Amazon drought in 2023.
— There are no comprehensive scientific records of precipitation over the Amazon river and its associated rainforests for the period of 1815-1820.
31 atmospheric river events in the western US from November 2022 to March 2023. Nine made landfall in California marking the record in the 70-year database.
— The western US is a small—approaching insignificant—percentage of the surface area of Earth, and November 2022 to March 2023 is an, ahem, cherry-picked slice of time compared to “2023-2024”, let alone 1815-2024.
The snowiest season in 71 years occurred in California after a 1-in-54-year event.
— What is the relevance of a “1-in-54-year event”, when the comparison was to be over the interval from either 1815 to 2022, or 1815 to 2024?
NYC had the least snowy season on record, breaking a 50-year record on latest first snow.
— Seriously? . . . a “snowy season” over a single city, in a single state, on a single continent of Earth is asserted to be a material fact in this discussion?
Cyclone Freddy in the Indian Ocean was the longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever.
— “Ever” is a very long time. To establish the truth and relevance of this statement one would need to first establish when continuous, reliable measurements of cyclone activity over the entire Indian Ocean began . . . something I can’t find by Web search, but suspect was only made possible by satellite observations starting circa 1970.
ITCZ displacement and unusual rains in the Sahara in 2024.
— Those “unusual rains” in the Sarah in 2024 need this clarification from https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/weather/sahara-desert-floods-climate :
” ‘It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,’ Houssine Youabeb from Morocco’s meteorology agency told AP last week.” Again, the comparison interval that was supposed to make 2023-2024 “exceptional” was asserted to start in 1815, or 207 years ago, not 30 to 50 years ago.
In 2023, 42% of the globe experienced heat exceeding two standard deviations. Louisiana, for example, had its hottest summer in 129 years of records.
— Of course, the associated fact is that the majority of Earth’s surface, 58%, did not experience temperatures exceeding two standard deviations. AFAIK, there is no scientific tracking of heat content of land or atmosphere, only that of ocean water—and the degree-of-accuracy in determining global ocean heat content has been and continues to be debated among scientists.
— And cherry picking the hottest summer in the single US state of Louisiana in a discussion related to the asserted world-wide impact from the Hunga-Tonga eruption is . . . well . . . disingenuous.
2023 was the warmest year on record, and 2024 was even warmer.
In October 2024, the North Polar Vortex was the weakest in 40 years.
The three sudden stratospheric warming events that occurred in the same season are a one-in-250-year event according to models.The biggest global low cloud cover anomaly ever recorded occurred in 2023
— Need definition of what “on record” and “ever recorded” mean.
The sentence found in the second paragraph of the above article underneath the Figure 5 graphic:
“Without a doubt, we know that the climatic event of 2023 was caused by a drastic decrease in global cloud cover, the largest in at least 40 years (see Figure 1). This reduction caused the planet to absorb more solar energy and warm up.”
First, let’s just compare that statement to the title of the cited Figure 1 graphic (with my bold emphasis added:
“Figure 1. ERA5 Zonal-mean anomaly in low cloud cover suggests that 2023 planetary albedo may have been the lowest since at least 1940.12″
“Without a doubt” versus “suggests” and “may have been” . . . left to the reader to decide between the these.
Second, it is not at all certain that reductions in global cloud coverage cause the planet to “absorb more solar energy and warm up”. This is a subject of intense current debate in the climate “science” community. Some assert that high altitude clouds (e.g., cirrus) cause a net warming of global lower atmosphere temepratures (GLAT) while lower altitude clouds (stratus, cumulus and cumulonimbus) cause net cooling due to their reflection of incoming solar radiation (i.e., albedo increse). Reference Lindzen’s “Iris Hypothesis” and Eschenbach’s “Thermostat Hypothesis”.
This, from Google’s AI Overview (my bold emphasis added):
“Clouds have a dual role, causing both global warming (warming effect) and global cooling (cooling effect), depending on their type, altitude, and composition; low, thick clouds (like cumulus/stratus) tend to cool by reflecting sunlight, while high, thin clouds (like cirrus) tend to warm by trapping heat, but the overall net effect is complex and a major source of uncertainty in climate models, with recent evidence suggesting cloud feedbacks likely amplify warming.”
Bottom line: stating something to be “without a doubt” is bold, but fraught with peril without fully considering available scientific understanding.
Then too, one should always be mindful of this sage caution: correlation does not necessarily equate to causation.