The Science Is Clear: Warming Since 2000 Is NOT Due To Man-Made GHG Emissions

Hunga Tonga and Natural Cycles Most Probable Cause

Silly Met Office. Not following the most up to date science.

No, I haven’t. I really do like my old diesel Skoda (one of only five on the road in Britain) and this is why I ain’t giving it up any time soon - so on yer bike Met Office!

I have been banging on about Hunga Tonga as the most likely cause of the 2023/24 warming spike since the beginning of August 2023. At first I thought the warming was due mainly to radiative forcing via the injection of a large amount of sea water direct into the stratosphere by the extremely powerful submarine explosion. Then, as I read more, and as more research was published, it became clear that the dynamical circulation changes induced by the eruption - which I also pointed out early in August 2023 - might not only affect patterns of extreme weather occurring across the globe, but might also in fact contribute significantly to overall warming itself. This is now confirmed basically, by two papers published recently. This is what I wrote on the 3rd August 2023:

It was later confirmed that indeed, Hunga Tonga could be expected to affect the pattern of extreme weather across the globe for several years after the eruption, but the authors of that scientific study nevertheless toed the party line and stated that the eruption could not have contributed significantly to the spike in global warming starting in May/June 2023, which I was sceptical about. I wrote about it here, and said at the time:

So, the authors find very large positive (and negative) seasonal temperature anomalies due not only to radiative forcing but also to changes in global circulation - which is something I have been pointing out for some time now. All the studies computing only the direct radiative forcing associated with the stratospheric water vapour neglect to account for significant changes in circulation patterns, resulting in warm winters and extreme weather events across the globe. The climate alarmist brigade want it both ways though: whilst simultaneously claiming that Hunga Tonga was not responsible for the 2023/24 warming spike (a very dubious assumption), they tell us that melting Arctic ice, heat waves and even cold spells etc. are due to the recent ‘sudden acceleration’ (“uncharted territory”) in global warming, which must be due to CO2, because it wasn’t Hunga Tonga! This ‘new’ study at least points to the fact that Hunga Tonga may be influencing weather across the globe. But it’s the claim that HTHH was not responsible for the extraordinarily rapid warming in 2023/24 which I find extremely suspect.

Then in June of this year, I had an online conversation here with Andrew Dessler, who is the co-author of two papers which supposedly demonstrate that the Hunga Tonga eruption had little to no effect upon global mean surface temperature. I said to him then that I believed, even if water vapour radiative forcing could not explain all of the observed increase in global temperature starting in 2023, then the knock-on effects of changes to dynamical circulation induced by the stratospheric water vapour might account for the remainder. The conversation ended there.

Now we know that global atmospheric circulation patterns have been disrupted by the Hunga Tonga eruption and we know that this resulted in a sharp decrease of low level cloud cover in 2023 - which was itself just the exclamation mark at the end of a long term trend which began in 2000 and accelerated in 2015. I wrote about that very recently:

Although the authors explained the trend warming and the sudden warming in 2023 in terms of increased solar heating due to decreased cloud cover, and they suggested that natural internal variability may account for the trend, they pointedly failed to explain why that trend in decreasing cloud cover accelerated so alarmingly in 2023. The most obvious answer is Hunga Tonga and its disruption of global circulation. We know that the HTHH water vapour in the stratosphere has destroyed ozone and we know that this affects the large scale circulation. This is one mechanism; there may be others.

Now we have another preprint study which also points the finger at reduced cloud cover as the main contributor to global warming post 2000 and the principal cause of the 2023/24 warming spike. The Abstract:

Observations of the Earth’s energy budget from the CERES instrument have shown that since the beginning of the 21st century the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth has been increasing at a rate of about 0.45 W/m2 per decade, caused primarily by a decrease in sunlight reflection by clouds. This increase is a main component of the increase in the Earth’s Energy Imbalance by about 0.5 W/m2 between the first and second decades of the century. We analyze the CERES radiative budget trends of the past 23 years, with the objective to separate the contribution to those trends of changes in the large-scale atmospheric circulation and in local-scale cloud controlling processes. Regimes of large cloud cover and strong cloud radiative cooling are defined in the low latitude and the high latitude zones, representing the tropical rainy zone and the midlatitude storm zones respectively, and the trends in the areal coverage of those regimes over the past 23 years are examined along with the trends in the cloud solar radiative effect within each regime. This allows the decomposition of the global solar cloud radiative trends into circulation induced changes and those induced by local-scale processes. The results show that the circulation component of the cloud radiative changes, which manifests itself as a contraction of the midlatitude storm zones and the tropical rainy zone, is the dominant term in the solar reflection trend causing decreased sunlight reflection of 0.37 W/m2 per decade. The discovery of this component provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the 21st century increase of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance and points to the large effect that even small atmospheric circulation changes have on the Earth’s warming climate.

Not CO2, not methane from cows farting - changes to global circulation, most likely as a result of multidecadal internal variability (AMO/PDO). But it’s not just 21st century warming, it’s the accentuated, exceptional, extraordinary, sudden and unexpected warming in 2023/24:

The present study shows that, due to the contraction of the world’s storm cloud zones, the large-scale circulation component constitutes the dominant term of the recent increases in absorbed solar radiation and provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the 21st century increase of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance and the large heat anomaly of 2023 (Schmidt 2024). The large SWCRE differences between the large-scale circulation regimes defined in this work, implies that changes of only a few percent in the relative coverage of the regimes produce large cloud radiative signatures that can dominate the radiative balance trends, and this makes it imperative to understand and simulate correctly the future evolution of the current trend of storm-cloud area contraction.

This should be the final nail in the coffin of the man-made global warming scam and it should dispel any ignorant, moronic chatter about the two record warm years of 2023 and 2024 being due to some hitherto unanticipated and terrifying acceleration in greenhouse gas warming starting in 2023, but we all know it won’t; there’s just too much money riding on the continuation of the ‘climate crisis’ fraud and what we supposedly need to do to ‘fight’ it. They just can’t leave it alone:

Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes. They also need to tackle a more alarming question: whether the trend is a feedback of climate change that might accelerate warming into the future, says Michael Byrne, a climate dynamicist at the University of St. Andrews. Although some models have predicted the cloud changes, Byrne says, “I don’t think we can answer this question with much confidence.”

Stevens, for one, is increasingly worried. “If the trend holds up, we’re in trouble,” Stevens says. “We hope, hope it changes its direction tomorrow.”