From 'The Experts Are Baffled' Files: "2023's record heat partly driven by 'mystery' process," says NASA scientist
Gee, thanks guys, this is fun. Climate scientists haven’t provided us with this much entertainment since the highly embarrassing Global Warming Pause Which Wasn’t A Pause but which hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and papers tried to explain, which was then subsequently erased by ‘adjustments’ to global temperature datasets and not spoken about ever again. We’ve now got a sudden acceleration in global warming which has them equally baffled and is not going to be so easy to erase retrospectively. Gavin Schmidt has been interviewed by the people at Phys.Org (or someone) and this is what he had to say (excerpt):
Can you put what we saw in 2023 into perspective?
It wasn't just a record. It was a record that broke the previous record by a record margin.
We started with La Niña, this cool phenomenon in the tropical Pacific. That was still around until March. And then in May, we started to see the development of an El Niño, the warm phase of that cycle.
It normally affects the temperatures in the following year. So that would be 2024. But what we saw in 2023 was that the temperatures globally seemed to go up with the El Niño event, in a much greater way than we'd ever seen it before.
The long term trends we understand, and it's being driven by the greenhouse gases, it's being driven by anthropogenic effects. We're expecting that to continue, decade by decade, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which we haven't done yet.
But what happened in 2023 was that, and then plus something. And that 'plus something' is much larger than we expect, or as yet can explain.
What are the leading hypotheses for that 'plus something'?
There have been emails and conversations going on around the world, among the scientists who are looking at this, and people say, 'Oh, let's look at the Earth's energy imbalances. Let's look at the aerosols, let's look at the El Niño, at what's happening in the Antarctic, in the North Atlantic.' And everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn't quite add up.
It may be that El Niño is enough. But if I look at all of the other El Ninos that we've had, none of them did this. So either this El Niño is really super special, or the atmosphere is responding to this El Niño in a very special way. Or there's something else going on. And nobody has yet really narrowed these possibilities.
That long-term trend is still within the bounds of what we've been predicting for many years. But the specifics of what happened in 2023 are a little mysterious.
What should we expect for 2024?
It matters why 2023 was the way it was, because does that mean it's going to continue? Does that mean the impacts are going to start to accelerate? We don't know! And that's problematic.
2023 did not follow the old patterns. If the old patterns come back, and 2023 was just a blip, then 2024 will be very close to 2023. If it's not a blip, if it's something systematic that's changed, or that's changing, then you would expect 2024 to actually be warmer. Because you have the warmth that you would expect, and then there's this extra thing.
And that has implications for the weather, and heat waves, and intense rainfall, and coastal flooding, and all the rest of it, that we can expect this year.
That’s strange. After admitting previously that Hunga Tonga may have something to do with the extraordinary heat, Schmidt appears to leave out that explanation in his summary of the ‘baffled’ emails being bounced around by puzzled scientists. It’s just a ‘mysterious something’ which ate the experts’ moderate 2023 global warming projections for breakfast and spat them out in a fit of ‘global boiling’ at the end of the year. Schmidt amusingly says it might be El Nino wot dunnit but if it did, then it was an El Nino which ‘violates the laws of atmospheric physics as we know it Jim’:
There have been emails and conversations going on around the world, among the scientists who are looking at this, and people say, 'Oh, let's look at the Earth's energy imbalances. Let's look at the aerosols, let's look at the El Niño, at what's happening in the Antarctic, in the North Atlantic.' [Wot, no submarine volcano?] And everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn't quite add up.
It may be that El Niño is enough. But if I look at all of the other El Ninos that we've had, none of them did this. So either this El Niño is really super special, or the atmosphere is responding to this El Niño in a very special way. Or there's something else going on. And nobody has yet really narrowed these possibilities.
Hilarious. Schmidt and his climate bosom buddies are twisting themselves into Pretzels in order to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room.
Pivot to the "Aliens" thing perhaps.... Or maybe blame the warming on Iran.... These sound silly but keep in mind how stupid we saw the majority was during The Madness....
"...And history rhymes again…"
Pardon me. I mangled that quote from Mark Twain without attribution, if I were President of Harvard, I could get fired for that.
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“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Mark Twain said that and we need not wonder how things worked out for Solzhenitsyn, we know what happened, we seem to be living in an echo of those times.
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