Archives par mot-clé : 2023

better to know...?, climate-debate

Open peer review: State of the Climate 2024

by O. Humlum, Mar 14, 2025 in GWPF

We are keen to receive review comments for our new draft paper which is now available for open peer review here.

Ole Humlum: State of the Climate 2024

This report on the state of the climate in 2024 has its focus on observations, and not on output from numerical models. The observed data series presented here reveals a vast number of natural variations. The existence of such natural climatic variations is not always fully acknowledged, and therefore often not considered in contemporary climate conversations.

Global average surface air temperature for 2024 was the highest on record for all databases considered in this report. The years 2023 and 2024 were both affected by a warm El Niño episode. Towards the end of 2024 the most recent El Niño episode declined. 

Submitted comments and contributions will be subject to a moderation process and will be published, provided they are substantive and not abusive.

Review comments should be emailed to: harry.wilkinson@thegwpf.org.

The deadline for review comments is 4 April 2025.

climate-debate

The 2023 global warming spike was driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation

by S.P. Raghuraman et al., Oct 2024 in EGU-APCPapers

Abstract

Global-mean surface temperature rapidly increased 0.29 ± 0.04 K from 2022 to 2023. Such a large interannual global warming spike is not unprecedented in the observational record, with a previous instance occurring in 1976–1977. However, why such large global warming spikes occur is unknown, and the rapid global warming of 2023 has led to concerns that it could have been externally driven. Here we show that climate models that are subject only to internal variability can generate such spikes, but they are an uncommon occurrence (p = 1.6 % ± 0.1 %). However, when a prolonged La Niña immediately precedes an El Niño in the simulations, as occurred in nature in 1976–1977 and 2022–2023, such spikes become much more common (p = 10.3 % ± 0.4 %). Furthermore, we find that nearly all simulated spikes (p = 88.5 % ± 0.3 %) are associated with El Niño occurring that year. Thus, our results underscore the importance of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in driving the occurrence of global warming spikes such as the one in 2023, without needing to invoke anthropogenic forcing, such as changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or aerosols, as an explanation.

Received: 24 Jun 2024 – Discussion started: 08 Jul 2024 – Revised: 04 Sep 2024 – Accepted: 23 Sep 2024 – Published: 10 Oct 2024
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climate-debate

El Niño fingered as likely culprit in record 2023 temperatures

by P. Voosen, Oct 10, 2024 in Science

For the past year, alarm bells have been going off in climate science: Last year’s average global temperature was so high, shooting up nearly 0.3°C above the previous year to set a new record, that human-driven global warming and natural short-term climate swings seemingly couldn’t explain it. Some, like famed climate scientist James Hansen, suggestedEarth is entering an ominous new phase of accelerated warming, driven by a rapid decline in sunlight-dimming air pollution. Others, like Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the rise might represent a “knowledge gap,” some new climate feedback that might tip the planet toward a future even warmer than models predict.

Now, a new series of studies suggests most of the 2023 jump can be explained instead by a familiar climate driver: the shifting waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The combination of a 3-year-long La Niña, which suppressed global temperatures from 2020 to 2022, followed by a strong El Niño could account for the unexpected temperature jump, the work suggests. “Earth can do this,” says Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led one study.

During La Niña, strong trade winds push warm surface water west along the equator toward Indonesia and pull up a fountain of deep, cold water in the eastern Pacific that helps cool the planet. During El Niño, the winds collapse, allowing warm water to slosh east and shut off the ocean air conditioner. Continuer la lecture de El Niño fingered as likely culprit in record 2023 temperatures →

climate-debate

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

by G. Schmidt, Mar 19, 2024 in Nature

Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

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unclassified

The extraordinary climate events of 2022-24

by J. Vinos, March 24, 2024 in ClimateEtc

The unlikely volcano, the warmest year, and the collapse of the polar vortex.

The climate events of 2022-24 have been were truly extraordinary. From an unlikely undersea volcanic eruption to the warmest year on record to the collapse of the polar vortex after three sudden stratospheric warming events. This rare convergence presents a unique learning opportunity for climatologists and climate aficionados alike, offering insights into a climate event that may not be repeated for hundreds or even thousands of years.

  1. January 2022, the unlikely volcano

Never before have we witnessed an undersea volcanic eruption with a plume capable of reaching the stratosphere and depositing a large amount of vaporized water. This extraordinary event occurred in January 2022 when the Hunga Tonga volcano erupted. The conditions for such an event are rare: the volcano must be deep enough to propel enough water with the plume, but not too deep to prevent it from reaching the stratosphere. Most undersea volcanoes do not produce plumes at all, which makes Hunga Tonga’s eruption all the more remarkable.

The Hunga Tonga volcano occupied a unique “sweet spot” at a depth of 150 meters the day before the eruption. In addition, the eruption itself must be exceptionally powerful for water vapor to rise into the stratosphere. The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga was the most powerful in 30 years, since the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.

Figure 1. The Hunga Tonga eruption from space.

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  1. 2023, the hottest year on record

Beginning in June 2023, the last seven months of the year marked the warmest period on record, significantly exceeding previous records. Such an event is quite remarkable, given the considerable temperature variability observed from month to month. But how unlikely is it?

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  1. January-March 2024, the collapse of the polar vortex

The polar vortex is a circular wind pattern that develops on rotating planets with an atmosphere. It results from the conservation of potential vorticity, a property depending on the Coriolis force and the potential temperature gradient. The potential temperature refers to the portion of the temperature of an air parcel that is not affected by its potential energy, and is often defined as the temperature the parcel would have if it were brought to the surface (1,000 hPa).

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  1. What can we expect in the near future?

The unlikely volcanic eruption is the likely cause of the extraordinary warming, which in turn led to the occurrence of the unprecedented three SSW events. Our understanding of the effects of these events supports this interpretation.

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climate-debate

UK Rainfall In 2023

by P. Homewood, Jan 7 ,2024 in NotaLotofPeopleKonwThat

image

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/monthly/HadEWP_monthly_totals.txt

Last year was a wet one in England & Wales, the 7th wettest on record. (The UK series has a similar result).

We routinely hear claims that the climate is wetter because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, (while also being told we will get more droughts!). However the fact that we have had similarly wet years in the distant past, such as 1768, 1852, 1872, 1877, 1882, 1903 and 1960, rather demolishes that argument.

The major factor behind last year’s high rainfall was that the number of rain days was also one of the highest on record since 1931, when Met Office daily data begins. In short, annual rainfall was high because of weather, not climate.

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climate-debate

2023: Global temperature, statistics and hot air

by D. Whitehouse, Dec 20, 2023 in NetZeroWatch

While 2023 will be the warmest year of the instrumental era, nobody knows why or what it means for the future of climate trends.

As can be seen from the year-to-date graph from NOAA below, 2023 started off with non-exceptional global temperature average – but from June onwards all months broke global records. Such was the cooler start to the year that it was only in September that it became apparent that 2023 could be the warmest year, surpassing the previous holder – 2016 – another El Nino year.

Clearly El Nino has a lot to do with it, coming after an unusual three years of La Nina events that tend to absorb heat in the oceans, releasing it in a subsequent El Nino, as has now happened. So as far as this represents “accelerating climate change” (as NOAA contends) it is debatable as it is mostly a delayed heat distribution, but time will tell.

It is pertinent to say that climate scientists were a little puzzled at this year’s sudden temperature surge as they cannot quite explain it: their models neither predict it nor are they able to account for the surprise. Other factors have contributed to it including the ongoing lifting of the aerosol pollution, especially by China, and the use of new formula ship fuels. The Hunga Tonga explosion that injected water vapour into the stratosphere might have had an effect, though probably a minor one. The Sun reaching the peak of the solar cycle will also have had a small influence.

All this means that 2024 could be another record year if the El Nino progresses, but 2025 will probably see global temperatures fall somewhat. Some have speculated that this will make 2024 the first year to surpass the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C threshold, although a single year is not indicative of a long term trend.

But how would we know we have passed this threshold?

Redefining Climate

Continuer la lecture de 2023: Global temperature, statistics and hot air →

better to know...?, energy and fields

More coal burned on Earth in 2023 than ever before in human history

by Jo Nova, Dec19, 2023 in JoNova

The best kept secret in the world is that humans are using more coal than ever

So much for the “stranded dead asset”. In 2022 the world set a new all-time record for coal use — reaching 8.4 billion tons. In 2023, despite all the Net Zero billions in spending, despite the boom in windmills and solar panels, global demand for coal will top 8.54 billion tons.

The IEA is the “International Energy Agency” — supposedly, the impartial servant of 31 nations worth of taxpayers. Yet they decided to ignore the world record and instead tell us how coal is set to decline. It’s what they think the taxpayers need to hear.  Their press release:

Global coal demand expected to decline in coming years

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unclassified

The 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season Was Average–Not 4th Busiest

by P. Homewood, Dec 1, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

As even CBS own chart shows, the number of hurricanes and major hurricanes has only been average.

Instead it is those named storms, which did not reach hurricane strength, that have been above average. And as we know, this is simply because we are able to spot many more of these short lived, weak storms with the help of satellites, along with the fact that many storms are now named which would not have been categorised as Tropical Storms in the past.

First, let’s look at the actual data.

The best record we have is for US landfalling hurricanes, with reliable data back as far as the 1900. According to the US Hurricane Research Division (HRD):

Because of the sparseness of towns and cities before 1900 in some coastal locations along the United States, the above list is not complete for all states. Before the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts became settled, hurricanes may have been underestimated in their intensity or missed completely for small-sized systems (i.e., 2004’s Hurricane Charley).

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climate-debate

Hottest Evah September!!

by P. Homewood, Oct 6, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

The latest of many heat records broken this year is putting the world on course for its hottest year ever, and is a sign of what is to come in future, according to scientists.

Last month was not only the hottest September on record, new data has confirmed, but it was higher by a margin described by stunned scientists as “extraordinary”, “huge” and “whopping”.

https://news.sky.com/story/september-2023-was-worlds-hottest-september-on-record-by-extraordinary-margin-new-data-confirms-with-scientists-blaming-more-than-climate-change-12976750

I’ll ignore the ignorance of journalists who think that the world started in the 19thC, during the Little Ice Age. And the fact that a “global average temperature” is a meaningless construct, which assumes you can average completely different things.

According to satellite data, the temperature anomaly last month was 0.24C higher than the previous peak in 2016:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

The idea that GHGs can make such a difference in such a short period of time is utterly absurd. But the Sky report does give us a clue:

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climate-debate

Greenland Icecap – 2023

By P. Homewood, Sep 2, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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As can be seen, the rate of loss in the last decade is similar to the 1930s, 50s and 60s. During the 1970s and 80s, Greenland’s climate grew much colder, and the ice mass loss almost stopped completely.

Significantly the rate of loss now is not accelerating, as you may have assumed from what the media have told you. On the contrary, the rate of loss has been slowing down since 2012.

The average annual loss between 2013 and 2022 was 184 Gt, which equates to 0.51mm sea level rise a year.

In short there is nothing alarming or unprecedented about the tiny amount of ice melt in Greenland.

climate-debate

State of the climate – summer 2023

by J. Curry, Aug 15, 2023 in WUWT

A deep dive into the causes of the unusual weather/climate during 2023.  People are blaming fossil-fueled warming and El Nino, and now the Hunga-Tonga eruption and the change in ship fuels.  But the real story is more complicated.

Observations

Starting in June, the global temperatures are outpacing the record year 2016 (Figure 1).

Figure 1.  From Copernicus ECMWF

Here is the time series of the monthly surface temperature anomalies from the ERA5 reanalysis (Figure 2).  The July 2023 spike was of comparable magnitude to the winter 2016 anomaly which occurred in late winter.

Figure 2.

Here is the time series of the monthly lower atmospheric temperature anomalies from the UAH satellite-based analysis.  The July 2023 temperature anomaly remains slightly below the peak 2016 temperature anomalies and comparable to the peak 1998 temperature anomaly.

Figure 3. Plot from Roy Spencer

The spatial variation of July temperature anomalies is shown below (Figure 4). The ERA5 is the long-standing standard for global reanalyses; the JMA-Q3 (Japan) is a new product that uses a more sophisticated data assimilation process, and I expect it to be at least as good as the ERA5.  Superficially, the spatial variability looks pretty much the same, but it is informative to compare the regional amounts of warming which differ significantly between the two reanalyses. Warming is greatest in the Antarctic, and lowest in the Arctic. The warming is also very strong over the NH midlatitude oceans.

The polar regions are of particular interest. The Arctic sea ice is healthy – Arctic sea ice extent for July was only the twelfth lowest in the satellite record.  Greenland mass balance (snow accumulation minus melt) for July is above average relative to 1980-2010.  The Antarctic is a different story.  Antarctic winter sea ice is extremely low, much lower than any wintertime observations since the beginning of the satellite record in 1980.  The warm anomaly near Antarctica is an effect the reduced sea ice extent, not a direct cause. The Antarctic ozone hole is opening very early.

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climate-debate

Why A Strong El Niño In 2023 Is Unlikely

by R. Cutler, May 25, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Global warming completely stopped in 2018. Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030.

A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely.

I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts. [emphasis, links added]

NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niñoin late 2023.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”

Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this. Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”

Rather than taking the well-worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperaturesover the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.

Two empirical, or black-box models were created to predict global temperature. The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO).

The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels. Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.

Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976. The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram.

It looks complicated, but it’s really not. It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude. The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism.

Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.

climate-debate

UAH Global Temperature Update for February, 2023: +0.08 deg. C

by Dr R. Spencer, Mar 4, 2023 in WUWT

From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog

The Version 6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February 2023 was +0.08 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean. This is up from the January 2023 anomaly of -0.04 deg. C.

The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.13 C/decade (+0.11 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

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