What's Going On? It's Now Ole Humlum's Turn To Downplay The Influence Of Hunga Tonga On 2023 Record Warmth And Claim Instead That It Was El Nino!

I mean, good grief, how many times does a theory have to be debunked before people stop citing it as fact? I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions how it is highly unlikely that El Nino could have had any significant influence on the inception and continuation of the huge temperature spike beginning in June 2023. Come February 2024, the strong El Nino which peaked in December/January was almost certainly boosting global mean surface temperature, but it wasn’t responsible for the sudden rise in GMST beginning June 2023. It’s in the peer reviewed literature: El Nino was very unlikely to be the cause of 2023 warming:

None of the predictions for global mean temperature in 2023 (which are generally fairly accurate and do take into account ENSO conditions) got anywhere near predicting the extraordinary warmth in 2023.

Something very unusual happened, so why are so many people (climate sceptics and global warming cultists alike) so keen to insist that nothing out of the ordinary happened and to deny the influence of an unprecedented submarine volcanic eruption? I’m starting to believe it’s a mass psychosis!

I’m having trouble processing Ole Humlum’s words in his latest State of the Climate 2023 Report published by GWPF. It just doesn’t make any bloody sense!

The global average surface air temperature for 2023 was the highest on record for all databases considered in this report (Figure 1). The year was affected by a warm El Niño episode (Pacific Ocean;see Section 5).

Near the Equator, surface air temperatures were generally above the average for the previous 10 years, reflecting the ongoing El Niño episode in the Pacific Ocean. This explains 2023’s high average global temperature; no less than 50% of the planet’s surface is located between 30°N and 30°S.

The influence of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on 2023 meteorological conditions is still uncertain. The eruption, which occurred in the southern Pacific Ocean in January 2022, released an enormous plume of water vapour into the Stratosphere, but there is little evidence that this had an influence on atmospheric temperatures (see also Figure 16).

Summing up, global average surface air temperatures in 2023 were at record highs relative to long instrumental records (since 1850), a result of the still ongoing El Niño episode.

This is just nuts. It pains me that the GWPF would publish this and actually endorse its poorly evidenced and researched assertions re. El Nino.

“Uncertain” if Hunga Tonga had any influence? Well it’s not ‘settled science’ if that’s what you mean Ole: such scientific Holy Writ is reserved exclusively for the pushers of the Man Made Global Warming dogma. “Little evidence that this [Hunga Tonga] had an influence on atmospheric temperatures”? Try this list of peer reviewed scientific literature just for starters Professor Humlum and then come back and claim there is little evidence!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00618-z
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1182488
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00652-x
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU23/EGU23-12992.html
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL104634
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-016-3231-3

Here is Fig. 16 which Humlum claims backs up his assertion of ‘little evidence’:

Two big warming spikes in the stratosphere coincident with the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions which did not inject water vapour into the stratosphere, but did inject huge amounts of sulphur aerosols, far more than Hunga Tonga. Hunga Tonga did inject sulphur aerosols but only about one fiftieth of the amount exploded into the stratosphere by Pinatubo. So naturally you would not expect from Hunga Tonga anywhere near the stratospheric temperature warming associated with Pinatubo or the slightly less explosive El Chichon. There is evidence of a slight cooling of the stratosphere in fact around the time of the Hunga Tonga eruption and it is cooling which would be expected as a result of the injection of water vapour. Admittedly though, there is no evidence of a massive stratospheric cooling but there is evidence of a huge lower tropospheric warming - which Humlum attributes to El Nino, even though it is 8 months out of phase with expected warming.

All in all, this is a very disappointing whitewash of the extraordinary temperature spike we witnessed in 2023 and an unjustified dismissal of one of the most likely causes of that warming.