2023 Warming Spike: Yet Another Ridiculous 'El Nino Dunnit' Paper Gets Published

The Hunga Tonga Denial Syndrome (HTDS) is strong in this one. Our pesky planet-warming volcano doesn’t even get a mention. Cos it’s all because of El Nino apparently. Simples. Ryan Maue should have given it a bit more thought before endorsing it on X:

Cos it’s not “obvious” Ryan. What is obvious is that the authors of that paper have violated the law of causality and put effect before cause in order to assume that ENSO ‘drove’ the 2023 spike in global mean surface temperature. I mean, it’s nuts. How could such a basic error in reasoning pass peer review? Because it did:

Check for yourself: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/11275/2024/

Here’s the 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.

They used a climate model driven by internal variability (ENSO) only to show that the global warming spikes were driven by internal variability and not anthropogenic warming. Hmm, slightly circular reasoning there, not that I think for a moment that had they included anthropogenic forcings, the result would have been any different. I don’t know what data they used in their model or how they processed that data, but it’s blindingly obvious from their own graph that their conclusions re. 1976/77 and 2023 warming spikes are nonsense.

The top left shows Oceanic Nino Index (ONI), light grey, plotted against GISTemp global mean surface temperature, black.

In 1976/77, the increase in ONI clearly precedes the rise in temperature, whereas in 2023, the peak in temperature precedes the rapid increase in ONI! Conclusion: the switch from La Nina to El Nino in 2022/23 could not have caused the rapid acceleration in global warming which began in the oceans as early as February 2023 and was in full swing by May, with global temperature taking off in June. I’ve been through this numerous times before on this Substack. El Nino usually peaks in December (hence ‘the Boy Child) and global warming as a result peaks several months later in Feb-May of the next year. That is not what happened in 2023. But for those still not convinced, let’s look at the actual data. First, 1976/77. This is NOAA ONI data for those years:

ONI peaked in October-November-December of 1976 and was neutral by Feb-Mar-Apr of 1977. Nothing unusual about that. It’s what El Nino does. So what about temperature? Here is the GISTemp data:

The numbers are the global mean surface temperature anomaly in units of 0.01 degrees C (ref. period 1951-80). If we look at the three monthly averages (last four columns), we note that temperature peaked in Mar-Apr-May of 1977, several months after the ONI peak. Again, nothing unusual in that.

Now let’s look at 2023:

ONI peaks slightly later in Nov-Dec-Jan 2023. Again, not unusual.

However, global mean surface temperature averaged over three months, peaks strongly in Sep-Oct-Nov of 2023. That is very unusual! If you look at the monthly figures, you will see that temperature peaked at an all time high in September 2023, then fell back slightly, then peaked again, slightly lower, in February 2024. Undoubtedly, that second peak was probably boosted by El Nino, but the first peak was not. To claim that it was defies logic and it defies causality. Something drove the very rapid acceleration in global mean surface temperature starting June 2023, but it was not El Nino and this continuous insistence that it was El Nino is pseudoscientific garbage and highly suspect in my opinion.