I don’t usually suggest that people drop what they are doing and read something because I read something. That tradition in mind, I am going to link to an article by Javier Vinos. He is author of the book Solving the Climate Puzzle, which I have sitting two feet from me. It is in a stack of books I have read for which I intend to look over Post-It flags and review, maybe even transcribe them. This, for me, is a memory device. Maybe it helps, maybe not. Vinos has written an article at the Judith Curry website called The 2023 Climate Event Revealed the Greatest Failing of Climate Science.
I do remember from reading the Vinos book about heat transport mechanism that move from the tropics to the poles, primarily the Arctic. When, in winter, there is no sunlight, most of that transported heat is dissipated into space in the form of OLWR, or outgoing long-wave radiation. Climate alarmists have used an assumption called Tropical Hot Spot theory, that the upper troposphere is warming faster than the lower troposphere, and that the lower is warming faster than the surface. This assumption was shown to be without evidence** in a comment on EPA’s repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by Wallace III, MacDougald, and Menton. (Menton, for anyone interested, is also known as the “Manhattan Contrarian“. That is a blog where I am moderated, but not yet banned.)
I do not suggest you read this article. I don’t care what you do. I have my reasons for writing about it here – 1) I’ve long been curious about the effects of the December of 2021 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption, which released 150 megatons of water into the stratosphere. For anyone wondering how much water that is, it is a lot. I saw one estimate that it was the equivalent of 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. I cannot fathom that number. 2) And, as I read along with the author I found his writing to be understandable and decipherable. That is not always the case with scientific-based writing. If I can grasp it, so can anyone with a reasonable intellect.
From the Vinos article, here is a list of events in 2023 that cannot be explained by Climate Science as we know it:
- Extraordinary ocean warming that models can’t explain.[1]
- Record-low Antarctic sea ice.[2]
- A record-breaking Amazon drought in 2023.[3]
- 31 atmospheric river events in the western US from November 2022 to March 2023. Nine made landfall in California marking the record in the 70-year database.[4]
- The snowiest season in 71 years occurred in California after a 1-in-54-year event.[5]
- NYC had the least snowy season on record, breaking a 50-year record on latest first snow.[6]
- Cyclone Freddy in the Indian Ocean was the longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever.[7]
- ITCZ displacement and unusual rains in the Sahara in 2024.[8]
- The first half of the 2024 hurricane season was surprisingly quiet, and models can’t explain it.[9]
- In 2023, 42% of the globe experienced heat exceeding two standard deviations. Louisiana, for example, had its hottest summer in 129 years of records.[10]
- 2023 was the warmest year on record, and 2024 was even warmer.
- In October 2024, the North Polar Vortex was the weakest in 40 years. The three sudden stratospheric warming events that occurred in the same season are a one-in-250-year event according to models.[11]
- The biggest global low cloud cover anomaly ever recorded occurred in 2023.[12]
The problem is that Hunga Tonga is not a routine, predictable event. It is, as Vinos explains, perhaps the most significant climatic event since the 1815 eruption of Tambora. Many will know that event to have caused the 1816 “Year Without a Summer”. Hunga Tonga was as significant, but climate models used by the UN and IPCC cannot fathom such a thing, as it is not routine. In the same manner, these same models cannot recreate, in retrospect, the Tambora effects. If it is not routine, modem climate science cannot do anything with it. Ergo, climate scientists place little importance on Hunga Tonga. I would suggest that climate models be shelved, as they have not accurately predicted anything, as seen below.
The spaghetti lines are predictions by UN/IPCC climate models through 2015. The blue and green line on the bottom are satellite and weather balloon data. This is a large discrepancy, so large that even AI tells us that we have a problem:
In summary, satellite and weather balloon data consistently show a slower rate of warming than climate models predict, with no evidence of the expected hot spot or increased radiation trapping. These observations suggest that current climate models may overestimate the magnitude of future warming, highlighting the need for improved model calibration and validation against real-world data.
Generally speaking, AI regurgitates current propaganda on almost every topic of interest to skeptics, but not this. I was surprised to read that.
Again, I don’t’ care if anyone reads the Vinos piece. I thought it worth writing about.
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** The EF was based on three assumptions, the Tropical Hot Spot, global surface temperatures, and UN/IPCC climate models. The comment, submitted to EPA in Trump’s attempt to remove the Endangerment Finding, trashes all three assumptions.
Piece of Mindful 