Mainstream Media Jump on Extreme Weather Caused by Climate Change Bandwagon

The popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening be­cause of climate change has been bolstered in recent years by ever increasing hype in nearly all mainstream media coverage of extreme events, despite a lack of scientific evidence for the assertion. This month’s story by NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. is just the latest in a steady drumbeat of media misinformation.

Careful examination of the actual data reveals that if there is any trend in most weather extremes, it is downward rather than upward. In fact, a 2016 survey of extreme weather events since 1900 found strong evidence that the first half of the 20th century saw more weather extremes than the second half, when global warming was more prominent. More information can be found in my recent reports on weather extremes (here, here and here).

To be fair, the NPR story merely parrots the conclusions of an ostensibly scientific report from the AMS (American Meteorological Society), Explaining Extreme Events in 2021 and 2022 from a Climate Perspective. Both the AMS and NPR claim to show how the most extreme weather events of the previous two years were driven by climate change.

Nevertheless, all the purported connections rely on the dubious field of extreme-event attribution science, which uses statistics and climate models to supposedly detect the impact of global warming on weather disasters. The shortcomings of this approach are twofold. First, the models have a dismal track record in predicting the future (or indeed of hindcasting the past); and second, attri­bution studies that assign specific extremes to either natural variability or human causes are based on highly questionable statistical meth­odology (see here and here).  

So the NPR claim that “scientists are increasingly able to pinpoint exactly how the weather is changing as the earth heats up” and “how climate change drove unprecedented heat waves, floods and droughts in recent years” is utter nonsense. These weather extremes have occurred from time im­memorial, long before modern global warming began.

Yet the AMS and NPR insist that extreme drought in California and Nevada in 2021 was “six times more likely because of climate change.” This is completely at odds with a 2007 U.S. study which reconstructed the drought pattern in North America over the last 1200 years, using tree rings as a proxy.

The reconstruction is illustrated in the figure below, showing the drought area in western North America from 800 to 2003, as a percentage of the total land area. The thick black line is a 60-year mean, while the blue and red horizon­tal lines represent the average drought area during the periods 1900–2003 and 900–1300, respectively. Clearly, several unprecedently long and severe megadroughts have occurred in this region since the year 800; 2021 (not shown in the graph) was unexceptional.

The same is true for floods. A 2017 study of global flood risk concluded there is very little evidence that flooding is becoming more prevalent worldwide, despite average rainfall getting heavier as the planet warms. And, although the AMS report cites an extremely wet May of 2021 in the UK as likely to have resulted from climate change, “rescued” Victorian rainfall data reveals that the UK was just as wet in Victorian times as today.

The illusion that major floods are becoming more frequent is due in part to the world’s growing population and the appeal, in the more developed countries at least, of living near water. This has led to more people building their dream homes in vulner­able locations, on river or coastal floodplains, as shown in the next figure.

Depicted is what has been termed the “Expanding Bull’s-Eye Effect” for a hypothetical river flood impacting a growing city. It can be seen that the same flood will cause much more destruction in 2040 than in 1950. A larger and wealthier population exposes more individuals and property to the devastation wrought by intermittent flooding from rainfall-swollen rivers or storm surges. Population expansion beyond urban areas, not climate change, has also worsened the death toll and property damage from hurricanes and tornadoes.

In a warming world, it is hardly surprising that heat waves are becoming more common. However, the claim by the AMS and NPR that heat waves are now “more extreme than ever” can be questioned, either because heat wave data prior to 1950 is completely ignored in many compilations, or because the data before 1950 is sparse. No recent heat waves come close to matching the frequency and duration of those experienced worldwide in the 1930s.

The media are misleading and stoking fear in the public about perfectly normal extreme weather, although there are some notable exceptions such as The Australian. The alarmist stories of the others are largely responsible for the current near-epidemic of “climate anxiety” in children, the most vulnerable members of our society.

Next: New Observations Upend Notion That Global Warming Diminishes Cloud Cover

Recent Marine Heat Waves Caused by Undersea Volcanic Eruptions, Not Human CO2

In a previous post, I showed how submarine volcanic eruptions don’t contribute to global warming, despite the release of enormous amounts of explosive energy. But they do contribute to regional climate change in the oceans, such as marine heat waves and shrinkage of polar sea ice, explained a retired geologist in a recent lecture.

Wyss Yim, who holds positions at several universities in Hong Kong, says that undersea volcanic eruptions – rather than CO₂ – are an important driver of regional climate variability. The release of geothermal heat from these eruptions can explain oceanic heat waves, polar sea-ice changes and stronger-than-normal cycles of ENSO (the El Niño – Southern Oscillation), which causes temperature fluctuations and other climatic effects in the Pacific.

Submarine eruptions can eject basaltic lava at temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,200 degrees Fahrenheit), often from multiple vents over a large area. Even though the hot lava is quickly quenched by the surrounding seawater, the heat absorbed by the ocean can have local, regional impacts that last for years.

The Pacific Ocean in particular is a major source of active terrestrial and submarine volcanoes, especially around the Ring of Fire bounding the Pacific tectonic plate, as illustrated in the figure below. Yim has identified eight underwater eruptions in the Pacific from 2011 to 2022 that had long-lasting effects on the climate, six of which emanated from the Ring of Fire.

One of these eruptions was from the Nishino-shima volcano south of Tokyo, which underwent a massive blow-out, initially undersea, that persisted from March 2013 to August 2015. Yim says the event was the principal cause of the so-called North Pacific Blob, a massive pool of warm seawater that formed in the northeast Pacific from 2013 to 2015, extending all the way from Alaska to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico and up to 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep. Climate scientists at the time, however, attributed the Blob to global warming.

The Nishino-shima eruption, together with other submarine eruptions in the Pacific during 2014 and 2015, was a major factor in prolonging and strengthening the massive 2014-2017 El Niño. A map depicting sea surface temperatures in January 2014, at the onset of El Niño and almost a year after the emergence of the Blob, is shown in the next figure. At that time, surface temperatures across the Blob were about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.

By mid-2014, the Blob covered an area approximately 1,600 km (1,000 miles) square. Its vast extent, states Yim, contributed to the gradual decline of Arctic sea ice between 2014 and 2016, especially in the vicinity of the Bering Strait. The Blob also led to two successive years without winter along the northeast Pacific coast.

Biodiversity in the region suffered too, with sustained toxic algal blooms. Yet none of this was caused by climate change.

The 2014-2017 El Niño was further exacerbated by the eruption from May to June 2015 of the Wolf volcano on the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific. Although the Wolf volcano is on land, its lava flows entered the ocean. The figure below shows the location of the Wolf eruption, along with submarine eruptions of both the Axial Seamount close to the Blob and the Hunga volcano in Tonga in the South Pacific.

According to Yim, the most significant drivers of the global climate are changes in the earth’s orbit and the sun, followed by geothermal heat, and – only in third place – human-induced changes such as increased greenhouse gases. Geothermal heat from submarine volcanic eruptions causes not only marine heat waves and contraction of polar sea ice, but also local changes in ocean currents, sea levels and surface winds.

Detailed measurements of oceanic variables such as temperature, pressure, salinity and chemistry are made today by the worldwide network of 3,900 Argo profiling floats. The floats are battery-powered robotic buoys that patrol the oceans, sinking 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles) deep once every 10 days and then bobbing up to the surface, recording the properties of the water as they ascend. When the floats eventually reach the surface, the data is transmitted to a satellite.

Yim says his studies show that the role played by submarine volcanoes in governing the planet’s climate has been underrated. Eruptions of any of the several thousand active underwater volcanoes can have substantial regional effects on climate, as just discussed.

He suggests that the influence of volcanic eruptions on atmospheric and oceanic circulation should be included in climate models. The only volcanic effect in current models is the atmospheric cooling produced by eruption plumes.

Next: Climate Heresy: To Avoid Extinction We Need More, Not Less CO2

Ample Evidence Debunks Gloomy Prognosis for World’s Coral Reefs

According to a just-published research paper, dangers to the world’s coral reefs due to climate change and other stressors have been underestimated and by 2035, the average reef will face environmental conditions unsuitable for survival. This is scientific nonsense, however, as there is an abundance of recent evidence that corals are much more resilient than previously thought and recover quickly from stressful events.

The paper, by a trio of environmental scientists at the University of Hawai‘i, attempts to estimate the year after which various anthropogenic (human-caused) disturbances acting simultaneously will make it impossible for coral reefs to adapt and survive. The disturbances examined are marine heat waves, ocean acidification, storms, land use changes, and pressures from population density such as overfishing, farming runoff and coastal development.

Of these disturbances, the two expected to have the greatest future effect on coral reefs are marine heat waves and ocean acidification, supposedly exacerbated by rising greenhouse gas emissions. The figure to the left shows the scientists’ projected dates of environmental unsuitability for continued existence of the world’s coral reefs, assuming an intermediate CO2 emissions scenario (SSP2). The yellow curve is for marine heat waves, the green curve for ocean acidification.

You can see that the projected unsuitability rises to an incredible 75% by the end of the century for both perturbations, and even surpasses 50% for marine heat waves by 2050. The red arrow indicates the time difference at 75% unsuitability between heat waves considered alone and all disturbances combined (solid black curve).

But these gloomy prognostications are refuted by several recent field studies, two of which I discussed in an earlier blog post. The latest paper, published in May this year, reports on a 10-year study of coral-reef stability on Palmyra Atoll in the remote central Pacific Ocean. The scuba-diving researchers, from California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University, discovered – by analyzing more than 1,500 digital images – that Palmyra reefs made a remarkable recovery from two major bleaching events in 2009 and 2015.

Bleaching occurs when the multitude of polyps that constitute a coral eject the microscopic algae that normally live inside the polyps and give coral its striking colors. Hotter than normal seawater causes the algae to poison the coral that then expels them, turning the polyps white. The bleaching events studied by the Palmyra researchers were a result of prolonged El Niños in the Pacific.

However, the researchers found that, at all eight Palmyra sites investigated, the corals returned to pre-bleaching levels within two years. This was true for corals on both a wave-exposed fore reef and a sheltered reef terrace. Stated Jennifer Smith, one of the paper’s coauthors,  “During the warming event of 2015, we saw that up to 90% of the corals on Palmyra bleached but in the year following we saw less than 10% mortality.”

The rapid coral recovery can be seen in the figure on the left below, showing the percentage of coral cover from 2009 to 2019 at all sites combined; FR denotes fore reef, RT reef terrace, and the dashed vertical lines indicate the 2009 and 2015 bleaching events. It’s clear there was only a small change in the reef’s coral and algae populations after a decade, despite the violent disruption of two bleaching episodes. A typical healthy reefscape is shown on the right.

Another 2022 study, discussed in my earlier post, came to much the same conclusions for a massive reef of giant rose-shaped corals hidden off the coast of Tahiti, the largest island in French Polynesia in the South Pacific. The giant corals measure more than 2 meters (6.5 feet) in diameter. Again, the reef survived a mass 2019 bleaching event almost unscathed.

Both these studies were conducted on relatively pristine coral reefs, free from local human stressors such as fishing, pollution, coastal development and tourism. But the same ability of corals to recover from bleaching events has been demonstrated in research on Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef, many parts of which are subject to such stressors.

Studies in 2021 and 2020 (see here and here) found that both the Great Barrier Reef and coral colonies on reefs around Christmas Island in the Pacific were able to recover quickly from bleaching caused by the 2015-17 El Niño, even while seawater temperatures were still higher than normal. Recovery of the Great Barrier Reef is illustrated in the figure below, showing that the amount of coral on the reef in 2021 and 2022 was at record high levels, in spite of extensive bleaching a few years before.

Apart from making a number of arbitrary and questionable assumptions, the new University of Hawai‘i research is fundamentally flawed because it fails to take into account the ability of corals to rebound from potentially devastating events.

Next: Recent Marine Heat Waves Caused by Undersea Volcanic Eruptions, Not Human CO2

Climate-Related Disasters Wrongly Linked to Global Warming by Two International Agencies

Two 2022 reports by highly acclaimed international agencies – CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters), a Belgian non-profit, and the WMO (World Meteorological Organi­zation), a UN agency – insist that climate-related disasters are escalating as the world warms. But the evidence shows that such a claim is indisputably wrong.

The 2022 CRED report, which covers events in 2021, draws a strong link between global warming and climate disasters, the majority of which are floods and storms. The report pointedly comments that “… 2021 was marked by an increase in the number of disaster events,” and that the total of 432 catastrophic events was “considerably higher” than the annual average of 347 catastrophic events for 2001-2020. A breakdown of these numbers by disaster category is presented in the figure below from the report.

Both CRED statements, while literally true, are dishonest as they completely ignore statistics. Although the total of 432 events for 2021 was indeed higher than the 20-year average from 2001 to 2020, the total for, say, 2018 of 289 events was lower than the 19-year annual average from 2001 to 2018 of 333 events. The individual yearly totals are unrelated – independent events in the language of statistics – and any comparison of them to a long-term average is meaningless.

The statistical inadequacy of such a comparison is also made clear by examining the long-term trend in CRED’s data. The next figure shows the yearly number of climate-related disasters globally from 2000 through 2020 by major category. The disasters are those in the yellow climatological (droughts, glacial lake outbursts and wildfires), green meteorological (storms, extreme temperatures and fog), and blue hydrological (floods, landslides and wave action) categories.

The disaster data comes from CRED’s EM-DAT (Emergency Events Database). To be recorded as a disaster, an event must meet at least one of the following criteria: 10 or more people reported killed; 100 or more people reported affected; a state of emergency declared; or a call put out for international assis­tance.

What the figure shows is that the total number of climate-related disasters exhibits a distinctly declining trend from 2000 to 2020, falling by 11% over 21 years. Yet the same graph for the period one year later, from 2001 to 2021, shows a decline of only 1% over that 21-year interval. As any statistician knows, both the trend and the average value of a time series are highly sensitive to the endpoints chosen. Nevertheless, the disaster trend is clearly downward.

The 2022 WMO report makes the same error as an earlier CRED report and a previous WMO report in claiming that climate-related disasters have increased significantly since 1970. A key message of the 2022 report is that “weather-related disasters have increased fivefold over the last 50 years,” as purportedly shown by the WMO figure below. The WMO data is derived from the same EM-DAT database as the CRED data.

However, the WMO claim is nonsense and the figure is highly misleading. This is because, just like similar data in the earlier CRED report, the claim fails to take into account a major increase in disaster reporting since 1998 due to the arrival of the Internet. Climate writers Paul Homewood and Roger Pielke Jr. uncovered a sudden jump – a near doubling – in the annual number of disasters listed in EM-DAT in 1998 and the years thereafter. Surprisingly, CRED had acknowledged as much both in its 2004 disaster report:

Over the past 30 years, development in telecommunications, media and increased international cooperation has played a critical role in the number of disasters reported at an international level. In addition, increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters, especially smaller events that were previously managed locally.

and even more explicitly in its 2006 disaster report:

Two periods can be distinguished: 1987–1997, with the number of disasters varying generally between 200 and 250; and 2000–2006, with the number of disasters increasing by nearly a multiple factor of two. An increase of this magnitude can be partially explained by increased reporting of disasters, particularly by press organizations and specialized agencies.

That the impact of natural disasters is diminishing over time can be seen in data on the associated loss of life. The next figure illustrates the annual global number of deaths from natural disasters, including weather extremes, from 1900 to 2015, corrected for population increase over time and averaged by decade.

 Because the data is compiled from the same EM-DAT da­tabase, the annual number of deaths shows an uptick from the 1990s to the 2000s. It is clear though that disaster-related deaths from extreme weather have been falling since the 1920s and are now approaching zero. This is due as much to improved planning, more robust structures and early warning systems, as it is to diminishing numbers of natural disasters. And, as can be seen from the figure, it is earthquakes – entirely natural events – that have been the deadliest disasters over the last two decades.

Ignoring all the evidence, however, the press release accompanying the latest WMO report proclaims that “Climate science is clear: we are heading in the wrong direction,” the UN Secretary-General adding, with characteristic hype, that the report “shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction.”

A more detailed discussion of the erroneous claims of both CRED and the WMO can be found in my two most recent reports on weather extremes (here and here).

Next: The Scientific Method at Work: The Carbon Cycle Revisited, Again

No Evidence That Climate Change Is Making Droughts Any Worse

The hullabaloo in the mainstream media about the current drought in Europe, which has been exacerbated by the continent’s fourth heat wave this summer, has only amplified the voices of those who insist that climate change is worsening droughts around the world. Yet an exami­nation of the historical record quickly confirms that severe droughts have been a feature of the earth’s climate for millennia – a fact corroborated by several recent research studies, which I described in a recent report.

The figure below shows a reconstruction of the drought pattern in central Europe from 1000 to 2012, using tree rings as a proxy, with observational data from 1901 to 2018 super­imposed. The width and color of tree rings consti­tute a record of past climate, including droughts. Black in the figure depicts the PDSI or Palmer Drought Severity Index that measures both dryness (negative values) and wetness (positive values); red denotes the so-called self-calibrated PDSI (scPDSI); and the blue line is the 31-year mean.

You can see that historical droughts from 1400 to 1480 and from 1770 to 1840 were much longer and more severe than any of those in the 21st century, when modern global warming began. The study’s conclusions are rein­forced by the results of another recent study, which failed to find any statistically significant drought trend in western Europe during the last 170 years.

Both studies give the lie to the media claim that this year’s drought is the “worst ever” in France, where rivers have dried up and crops are suffering from lack of water. But French measurements date back only to 1959: the media habitually ignores history, as indeed does the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s Sixth Assessment Report in discussing drought and other weather extremes.

And while it’s true that the 2022 drought in Italy is worse than any on record there since 1800, the 15th century was drier yet across Europe, as indicated in the figure above.

Another study was able to reconstruct the drought pattern in North America over the last 1200 years, also from tree ring proxies. The reconstruction is illustrated in the next figure, showing the PDSI-based drought area in western North America from 800 to 2003, as a percentage of the total land area. The thick black line is a 60-year mean, while the blue and red horizon­tal lines represent the average drought area during the periods 1900–2003 and 900–1300, respectively.

The reconstruc­tion reveals that several unprecedently long and severe “megadroughts” have also occurred in western North America since the year 800, droughts that the study authors re­mark have never been experienced in the modern era. This is em­phasized in the figure by the comparison between the period from 1900 to 2003 and the much more arid, 400-year interval from 900 to 1300. The four most significant historical droughts during that dry interval were centered on the years 936, 1034, 1150 and 1253.

As evidence that the study’s conclusions extend be­yond 2003, the figure below displays observational data showing the percentage of the contiguous U.S. in drought from 1895 up until 2015.

Comparison of this figure with the yearly data in the previous figure shows that the long-term pattern of overall drought in North America continues to be featureless, despite global warming during both the Medieval Warm Period and today. A similar conclusion was reached by a 2021 study comparing the duration and sever­ity of U.S. hydrological droughts between 1475 and 1899 to those from 1900 to 2014. A hydrological drought refers to drought-induced decreases in streamflow, reservoir levels and groundwa­ter.

A very recent 2022 paper claims that the southwestern U.S. is currently experiencing its dri­est 22-year period since at least the year 800, although it does not attribute this entirely to climate change. As shown in the figure below, from another source, the years 2000-2018 were the second-driest 19-year period in California over the past 1,200 years.

However, although the third-driest period in the 1100s and the fifth driest period in the 1200s both occurred during the Medieval Warm Period, the driest (1500s) and fourth-driest (800s) periods of drought occurred during relatively cool epochs. So there is no obvious connection between droughts and global warming. Even the IPCC concedes that a recent harsh drought in Mada­gascar cannot be attributed to climate change; one of the main sources of episodic droughts globally is the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) ocean cycle.

Regional variations are significant too. A 2021 research pa­per found that, from 1901 to 2017, the drought risk increased in the southwestern and southeastern US, while it decreased in northern states. Such regional differences in drought patterns are found throughout the world.

Next: Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: (6) The Greenhouse Effect Doesn’t Exist, Revisited

Evidence for More Frequent and Longer Heat Waves Is Questionable

In a warming world, it would hardly be surprising if heat waves were becoming more common. By definition, heat waves are periods of abnormally hot weather, last­ing from days to weeks. But is this widely held belief actually supported by observational evidence?

Examination of historical temperature records reveals a lack of strong evidence linking increased heat waves to global warming, as I’ve explained in a recent report. Any claim that heat waves are now more frequent and longer than in the past can be questioned, either because data prior to 1950 is completely ignored in many compilations, or because the data before 1950 is sparse.

One of the main compilations of global heat wave and other tem­perature data comes from a large international group of climate scientists and meteorologists, who last updated their dataset in 2020. The dataset is derived from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre’s gridded daily temperature da­tabase.

The figure below depicts the group’s global heat wave frequency (lower panel) from 1901 to 2018, and the calculated global trend (upper panel) from 1950 to 2018. The frequency is the annual number of calendar days the maximum temperature exceeded the 90th percentile for 1961–1990 for at least six consecutive days, in a window centered on that calendar day.

As you can see, the Hadley Centre data­set appears to support the assertion that heat waves have been on the rise globally since about 1990. However, the dataset also indicates that current heat waves are much more frequent than during the 1930s – a finding at odds with heat wave frequency data for the U.S., which has detailed heatwave records back to 1900. The next figure shows the frequency (top panel) and magnitude (bottom panel) of heat waves in the U.S. from 1901 to 2018.

It's clear that there were far more frequent and/or longer U.S. heat waves, and they were hotter, in the 1930s than in the present era of global warming. The total annual heat­ wave (warm spell) duration is seen to have dropped from 11 days during the 1930s to about 6.5 days during the 2000s. The peak heat wave index in 1936 was a full three times higher than in 2012 and up to nine times higher than in many other years.

Al­though the records for both the U.S. (this figure) and the world (previous figure) show an increase in the total annual heat wave duration since 1970, the U.S. increase is well below its 1930s level of 11 days – a level that is only about 7 days in the Hadley dataset’s global record.

The discrepancy between the two datasets very likely reflects the difference in the number of temperature stations used to calculate the average maximum temperature: the Hadley dataset used only 942 stations, compared with as many as 11,000 stations in the U.S. dataset. Before one can have any confidence in the Hadley global compilation, it needs to be tested on the much larger U.S. data­set to see if it can reproduce the U.S. data profile.

A noticeable feature of the global trend data from 1950 in the first figure above is a pronounced variation from country to country. The purported trend varies from an increase of more than 4 heat ­wave days per decade in countries such as Brazil, to an in­crease of less than 0.5 days per decade in much of the U.S. and South Africa, to a decrease of 0.5 days per decade in north­ern Argentina.

While regional differences should be expected, it seems improbable that global warming would result in such large variations in heat wave trend worldwide. The disparities are more likely to arise from insufficient data. Furthermore, the trend is artificially exaggerated because the start date of 1950 was in the middle of a 30-year period of global cooling, from 1940 to 1970.

The 1930s heat waves in the U.S. were exacerbated by Dust Bowl drought that depleted soil moisture and reduced the moderating effects of evaporation. But it wasn’t only the Dust Bowl that experienced searing temperatures in the 1930s.

In the summer of 1930 two record-setting, back-to-back scorchers, each lasting eight days, afflicted Washington, D.C.; while in 1936, the province of Ontario – well removed from the Great Plains, where the Dust Bowl was concentrated – saw the mercury soar to 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) during the longest, deadliest Canadian heat wave on record. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, France too suffered during a heat wave in 1930.

Next: No Evidence That Climate Change Is Making Droughts Any Worse

Are Current Hot and Cold Extremes Climate Change or Natural Variability?

While sizzling temperatures in Europe have captured the attention of the mainstream media, recent prolonged bouts of cold in the Southern Hemisphere have gone almost unnoticed. Can these simultaneous weather extremes be ascribed to climate change, or is natural variability playing a major role?

It’s difficult to answer the question because a single year is a short time in the climate record. Formally, climate is the average of weather, or short-term changes in atmospheric conditions, over a 30-year period. But it is possible to compare the current heat and cold in different parts of the globe with their historical trends.

The recent heat wave in western and southern Europe is only one of several that have afflicted the continent recently. The July scorcher this year, labeled unprecedented by the media, was in fact less severe than back-to-back European heat waves in the summer of 2019.

In the second 2019 wave, which also occurred in July, the mercury in Paris reached a new record high of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 degrees Fahrenheit), besting the previous record of 40.4 degrees Celsius (104.7 degrees Fahrenheit) set back in July 1947. A month earlier, during the first heat wave, temperatures in southern France hit a blistering 46.0 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Both readings exceed the highest temperatures reported in France during the July 2022 heat wave.

Yet back in 1930, the temperature purportedly soared to a staggering 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Loire valley during an earlier French heat wave, according to Australian and New Zealand newspapers. The same newspapers reported that in 1870, the ther­mometer had reached an even higher, unspecified level in that region. Europe’s official all-time high-temperature record is 48.0 degrees Celsius (118.4 degrees Fahrenheit) set in 1977.

Although the UK, Portugal and Spain have also suffered from searing heat this year, Europe experienced an unseasonably chilly spring. On April 4, France experienced its coldest April night since records began in 1947, with no less than 80 new low-temperature records being established across the nation. Fruit growers all across western Europe resorted to drastic measures to save their crops, including the use of pellet stoves for heating and spraying the fruit with water to create an insulating layer of ice.

South of the Equator, Australia and South America have seen some of their coldest weather in a century. Australia’s misery began with frigid Antarctic air enveloping the continent in May, bringing with it the heaviest early-season mountain snow in more than 50 years. In June, Brisbane in normally temperate Queensland had its coldest start to winter since 1904. And Alice Springs, which usually enjoys a balmy winter in the center of the country, has just endured 12 consecutive mornings of sub-freezing temperatures, surpassing the previous longest streak set in 1976.

South America too is experiencing icy conditions this year, after an historically cold winter in 2021 which decimated crops. The same Antarctic cold front that froze Australia in May brought bone-numbing cold to northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil; Brazil’s capital Brasilia logged its lowest temperature in recorded history. Later in the month the cold expanded north into Bolivia and Peru.

Based on history alone then, there’s nothing particularly unusual about the 2022 heat wave in Europe or the shivery winter down under, which included the coldest temperatures on record at the South Pole. Although both events have been attributed to climate change by activists and some climate scientists, natural explanations have also been put forward.

A recent study links the recent uptick in European heat waves to changes in the northern polar and subtropical jet streams. The study authors state that an increasingly persistent double jet stream pattern and its associated heat dome can explain "almost all of the accelerated trend" in heat waves across western Europe. Existence of a stable double-jet pattern is related to the blocking phenomenon, an example of which is shown in the figure below.

Blocking refers to a jet stream buckling that produces alternating, stationary highs and lows in pressure. Normally, highs and lows move on quickly, but the locking in place of a jet stream for several days or weeks can produce a heat dome. The authors say double jets and blocking are closely connected, but further research is needed to ascertain whether the observed increase in European double jets is part of internal natural variability of the climate system, or a response to climate change.

Likewise, it has been suggested that the frigid Southern Hemisphere winter may have a purely natural explanation, namely cooling caused by the January eruption of an undersea volcano in the South Pacific kingdom of Tonga. Although I previously showed how the massive submarine blast could not have contributed to global warming, it’s well known that such eruptions pour vast quantities of ash into the upper atmosphere, where it lingers and causes subsequent cooling by reflecting sunlight.

Next: Evidence for More Frequent and Longer Heat Waves Is Questionable

No Evidence That Hurricanes Are Becoming More Likely or Stronger

Despite the claims of activists and the mainstream media that climate change is making major hurricanes – such as U.S. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – more frequent and stronger, several recent studies have found no evidence for either of these assertions.

In fact, a 2022 study reveals that tropical cyclones in general, which include hurricanes, typhoons and tropical storms, are letting up as the globe warms. Over the period from 1900 to 2012, the study authors found that the annual number of tropical cyclones declined by about 13% compared with the period between 1850 and 1900, when such powerful storms were actually on the rise.

This is illustrated in the figure below, showing the tropical cyclone trend calculated by the researchers, using a combination of actual sea-level observations and climate model experiments. The solid blue line is the annual number of tropical cyclones globally, and the red line is a five-year running mean. 

The tropical cyclone trend is almost the opposite of the temperature trend: the average global temperature went down from 1880 to 1910, and increased by approximately 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1910 and 2012. After 1950, the rate of cyclone decline accelerated to about 23% compared to the 1850-1900 baseline, as global warming increased during the second half of the 20th century. Although the study authors noted a variation from one ocean basin to another, all basins demonstrated the same downward trend.

The authors remark how their findings are consistent with the predictions of climate models, in spite of the popular belief that a warming climate will spawn more, not fewer, hurricanes and typhoons, as more water evaporates into the atmosphere from the oceans and provides extra fuel. At the same time, however, tropical cyclone formation is inhibited by wind shear, which also increases as sea surface temperatures rise.    

Some climate scientists share the view of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s Sixth Assessment Report that, while tropical cyclones overall may be diminishing as the climate changes, the strongest storms are becoming more common, especially in the North Atlantic. The next figure depicts the frequency of all major North Atlantic hurricanes back to 1851. Major hurricanes in Categories 3, 4 or 5 have a top wind speed of 178 km per hour (111 mph) or higher.

You can see that hurricane activity in this basin has escalated over the last 20 years, especially in 2005 and 2020. But, despite the upsurge, the data also show that the frequency of major North Atlantic hurricanes in recent decades is merely comparable to that in the 1950s and 1960s – a period when the earth was cooling rather than warming.

A team of hurricane experts concluded in a 2021 study that, at least in the Atlantic, the recent apparent increase in major hur­ricanes results from improvements in observational capabilities since 1970 and is unlikely to be a true climate trend. And, even though it appears that major Atlantic hurricanes were less frequent before about 1940, the lower numbers simply reflect the rela­tive lack of measurements in early years of the record. Aircraft re­connaissance flights to gather data on hurricanes only began in 1944, while satellite coverage dates only from the 1960s.

The team of experts found that once they corrected the data for under­counts in the pre-satellite era, there were no significant recent increases in the frequency of either major or all North Atlantic hurricanes. They suggested that the reduction in major hurricanes between the 1970s and the 1990s, clearly visible in the figure above, could have been the result of natural climate variability or possibly aerosol-induced weakening.

Natural climate cycles thought to contribute to Atlantic hurricanes include the AMO (Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation) and La Niña, the cool phase of ENSO (the El Niño – Southern Oscillation). The AMO, which has a cycle time of approximately 65 years and alternates between warm and cool phases, governs many extremes, such as cyclonic storms in the Atlantic basin and major floods in eastern North America and western Europe. In the U.S., La Niñas influence major landfalling hurricanes.

Just as there’s no good evidence that global warming is increasing the strength of hurricanes, the same is true for their typhoon cous­ins in the northwestern Pacific. Although long-term data on major typhoons is not available, the frequency of all typhoon categories combined appears to be un­changed since 1951, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. Yet a new study demonstrates a decline in both total and major typhoons for the 32-year period from 1990 to 2021, reinforcing the recent decrease in global tropical cyclones discussed above.

Next: Are Current Hot and Cold Extremes Climate Change or Natural Variability?

No Convincing Evidence That Cleaner Air Causes More Hurricanes

According to a new research study by NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), aerosol pollution plays a major role in hurricane activity. The study author claims that a recent decline in atmospheric pollutants over Europe and the U.S. has resulted in more hurricanes in the North Atlantic Ocean, while a boost in aerosols over Asia has suppressed tropical cyclones in the western Pacific.

But this claim, touted by the media, is faulty since the study only examines changes in aerosol emissions and hurricane frequency since 1980 – a selective choice of data becoming all too common among climate scientists trying to bolster the narrative of anthropogenic climate change. The aerosol pollution is mostly in the form of sulfate particles and droplets from industrial and vehicle emissions. When pre-1980 evidence is included, however, the apparent connection between aerosols and hurricanes falls apart.

Let’s look first at the North Atlantic. Data for the Atlantic basin, which has the best quality data in the world, do indeed show heightened hurricane ac­tivity over the last 20 years, particularly in 2005 and 2020. You can see this in the following figure, which illustrates the frequency of all major Atlantic hurricanes as far back as 1851. Major hurricanes (Category 3 or greater) have a top wind speed of 178 km per hour (111 mph) or higher. The recent enhanced activity is less pronounced, though still noticeable, for Category 1 and 2 hurricanes.

The next figure shows the observed increase in Atlantic hurricane frequency (top), from the 20 years between 1980 and 2000 to the 20 years between 2001 and 2020, compared to the NOAA study’s simulated change in sulfate aerosols during the same interval (bottom).

The hurricane frequency TCF is for all (Categories 1 through 5) hurricanes, with positive and negative color values denoting higher and lower frequency, respectively. A similar color scheme is used for the sulfate calculations. Both the Atlantic increase and western Pacific decrease in hurricane frequency are clearly visible, as well as the corresponding decrease and increase in aerosol pollution from 1980 to 2020.

But what the study overlooks is that the frequency of major Atlantic hurricanes in the 1950s and 1960s was at least compara­ble to that in the last two decades when, as the figure shows, it took a sudden upward hike from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. If the study’s conclusions are correct, then pollution levels in Europe and the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s must have been as low as they were from 2001 to 2020.

However, examination of pollution data for the North Atlantic reveals that the exact opposite is true: European and U.S. aerosol concentrations in the 1960s were much higher than in any later decade, including decades after 1980 during the study period. This can be seen in the figure below, which depicts the sulfate concentration in London air over the 50 years from 1962 to 2012; similar data exists for the U.S. (see here, for example).

Were the NOAA study valid, such high aerosol levels in European and U.S. skies during the 1960s would have decreased North Atlantic hurricane activity in that period – the reverse of what the data demonstrates in the first figure above. In the Pacific, the study links a supposed reduction in tropical cyclones to a well-documented rise in aerosol pollution in that region, due to growing industrial emissions.

But a close look at the bottom half of the second figure above shows the increase in pollution since 1980 has occurred mostly in southern Asia. The top half of the same figure indicates increased cyclone activity near India and the Persian Gulf, associated with higher, not lower pollution. The only decreases are in the vicinity of Japan and Australia, where any changes in pollution level are slight.

The NOAA study aside, changes in global hurricane frequency are much more likely to be associated with naturally occurring ocean cycles than with aerosols. Indeed, NOAA has previously linked increased Atlantic hurricane activity to the warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

The AMO, which has a cycle time of approximately 65 years and alternates between warm and cool phases, governs many extremes, such as cyclonic storms in the Atlantic basin and major floods in eastern North America and western Europe. The present warm phase began in 1995, triggering a more tempestuous period when both named Atlantic storms and hurricanes have become more common on average.

Another contribution to storm activity in the Atlantic comes from La Niña cycles in the Pacific. Apart from a cooling effect, La Niñas result in quieter conditions in the eastern Pacific and enhanced activity in the Atlantic. In the U.S., major landfalling hurricanes are tied to La Niña cycles in the Pacific, not to global warming.

Next: Why There’s No Need to Panic about Methane in the Atmosphere

“Rescued” Victorian Rainfall Data Casts Doubt on Claims of a Wetter UK

Millions of handwritten rainfall records dating back nearly 200 years have revealed that the UK was just as wet in Victorian times as today. The records were “rescued” by more than 16,000 volunteers who digitally transcribed the observations from the archives of the UK Met Office, as a means of distracting themselves during the recent pandemic. The 5.3 million digitized records boost the number of pre-1961 observations by an order of magnitude.

The new data extends the official UK rainfall record back to 1836 and even earlier for some regions. The year 1836 was when Charles Darwin returned to the UK after his famous sea voyage gathering specimens that inspired his theory of evolution, and a year before Queen Victoria came to the throne. The oldest record in the collection dates back to 1677.

As a result of the project, the number of rain gauges contributing to the official record for the year 1862, for example, has increased from 19 to more than 700. The rain gauges were situated in almost every town and village across the UK, in locations as diverse as lighthouses, a chocolate factory, and next door to children’s author Beatrix Potter's Hilltop Farm in the Lake District.

Raw data in the form of “Ten Year rainfall sheets” included monthly rainfall amounts measured across the UK, Ireland and the Channel Islands between 1677 and 1960. After digitizing and organizing the raw data by county, the volunteer scientists combined data from different decades and applied quality control measures such as removing estimates and duplicate measurements, and identifying rain gauge moves.

The outcome of their efforts, presented in a recently published paper, is depicted in the figure below showing the annual average UK rainfall by season from 1836 to 2019. The rescue data for 1836-1960 is shown in black and the previous Met Office data for 1862-2019 in blue. Both sets of data agree well for the overlapping period from 1862 to 1960.

 While the annual rainfall for all seasons combined is not included in the paper, the figure shows clearly that current UK rainfall is no higher on average than it was during the 19th century, with the possible exception of winter. This conclusion conflicts with statements on the Met Office website, such as: “… the UK has become wetter over the last few decades … From the start of the observational record in 1862, six of the ten wettest years across the UK have occurred since 1998 … these trends point to an increase in frequency and intensity of rainfall across the UK.”

In fact, the wettest UK month on record was in the early 20th century, October 1903. The rescue data for the 19th century reveals that November and December 1852 were also exceptionally wet months. December 1852 is found to have been the third wettest month on record in Cumbria County in northern England, and November 1852 the wettest month on record for large parts of southern England.

The next figure illustrates how much UK rainfall varies regionally in time and space, for the four wettest months between 1836 and 1960. It can be seen that the soggiest regions of the nation are consistently Scotland, Wales and northwestern England. Shown in the subsequent figure is the monthly rainfall pattern from 1850 to 1960 recorded by rain gauges located near Seathwaite in Cumbria’s Lake District – one of the wettest spots in the country, with annual rainfall sometimes exceeding 5,000 mm (200 inches). The different colors represent nine different gauges.

By contrast, the driest UK month on record was February 1932 – during a prolonged period of heat waves across the globe. But the new data finds that the driest year on record was actually 1855. And 1844 now boasts the driest spring month of May, during a period of notably dry winters in the 1840s and 1850s.

Gathering the original rain gauge readings transcribed by the volunteers was evidently no simple task. The published paper summarizing the rescue project includes amusing comments found on the Ten Year sheets, such as “No readings as gauge stolen”; “Gauge emptied by child”; and “Gauge hidden by inmates of a mental hospital.”

But the newly expanded dataset does bring recent Met Office statements into question. While precipitation tends to increase as the world warms because of enhanced evap­oration from tropical oceans, which results in more water vapor in the atmosphere, there’s very little evidence that the UK has become any rainier so far.

Next: Science on the Attack: Nuclear Fusion – the Energy Hope of the Future

Can Undersea Volcanoes Cause Global Warming?

It’s well known that active volcanoes on land can cause significant global cooling when they erupt, from shielding of sunlight by sulfate aerosol particles in the eruption plume which linger in the atmosphere. But what is the effect on climate of undersea volcanic eruptions such as the massive submarine blast that blanketed the nearby South Pacific kingdom of Tonga with ash in January?

Submarine volcanoes are relatively unexplored but are thought to number over a million, of which several thousand may be currently active. Many lie along tectonic plate boundaries, where plates are pulling apart or colliding with each other. The Tonga volcano sits above a geological pileup, where the western edge of the Pacific plate dives under the Indian–Australian plate.

The eruption of any volcano releases a huge amount of energy. In the case of a submarine volcano that may be thousands of meters deep, the plume may not even reach the surface and all the energy is absorbed by the ocean. The Tonga eruption was from a shallow depth, so much of the energy was dissipated at the ocean surface – launching a destructive tsunami – and in the atmosphere – generating a plume of ash that reached a record altitude of 55 kilometers (34 miles), a shockwave that traveled around the globe, and nearly 400,000 lightning strikes.

You might think all that energy could contribute to global warming, had the volcano erupted in deeper water that would have converted all the energy to heat. However, the oceans, which cover 71% of the earth’s surface, are vast and can hold 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere. Any change in sea surface temperatures from even multiple underwater volcanic eruptions would be imperceptible.

This can be seen from a simple calculation. According to NASA scientists, the energy released by the undersea Tonga eruption was equivalent to the explosive power of 3.6 to 16 megatonnes (4 to 18 megatons) of TNT. For comparison, the 1980 eruption on land of Mount Saint Helens in Washington state released about 22 megatonnes of TNT equivalent, and the famous 1883 explosion of Indonesia's Krakatoa unleashed 180 megatonnes; the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in Japan in 1945 released roughly 14 kilotonnes of TNT equivalent.

The upper Tonga limit of 16 megatonnes is equal to 7.5 x 10¹⁶ Joules of energy. Assuming the heat capacity of seawater to be 3,900 Joules per kilogram per degree Celsius and the total mass of the oceans to be 1.4 × 10²¹ kilograms, it would take 5.5 × 10²⁴ Joules (5.5 trillion trillion Joules) to warm the entire ocean by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

So if all 16 megatonnes had gone into the ocean, ocean temperatures would have risen by (7.5 x 10¹⁶)/( 5.5 × 10²⁴) or a minuscule 1.4 x 10^-8 (14 billionths) of a degree Celsius. The Krakatoa above-water eruption, on the other hand, decreased global air temperatures by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) for several years and may have cooled the oceans as well.

But there’s another potential source of warming from submarine volcanoes, and that is the CO₂ emitted along with the sulfur dioxide (SO₂) that causes cooling through formation of sulfate aerosols. If the underwater plume reaches the ocean surface, both gases are released into the atmosphere. In the case of Tonga, while the amount of SO₂ emitted was too small to have any cooling effect, the emitted CO₂ could in theory contribute to global warming.

However, the yearly average of CO₂ emissions from all volcanoes, both on land and submarine, is only 1 to 2% of current human emissions that have raised global temperatures by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at most. So any CO₂ warming effect from an underwater eruption is unlikely to be much larger than the above calculation for energy release. Interestingly though, Chinese researchers recently reported that the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ near Tonga after the eruption jumped by 2 parts per million, which is as much as the global concentration normally increases in a whole year from human sources. But this is most probably a temporary local effect that won’t affect the global CO₂ increase expected in 2022.

Despite the inability of undersea eruptions to affect our present climate, it was suggested in a 2015 research paper that CO₂ from submarine volcanoes may have triggered the warming that pulled the earth out of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago.

The basic idea is that lower sea levels during glaciation relieved the hydrostatic pressure on submarine volcanoes that suppressed eruptions during warmer times. This caused them to erupt more. After a lengthy ice age, the buildup of CO₂ from undersea eruptions initiated warming that then began to melt the ice sheets covering volcanoes on land, causing them in turn to belch CO₂ that enhanced the warming, melting more ice in a feedback effect.

Next: New Projections of Sea Level Rise Are Overblown

El Niño and La Niña May Influence the Climate More than Greenhouse Gases

The familiar El Niño and La Niña cycles are known to cause drastic fluctuations in global temperature, along with often catastrophic climatic effects in tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean. What is less well known is that the powerful ocean oscillations have been a feature of our climate for at least 20,000 years – that is, since before the most recent ice age ended.

A 2005 study established a complete record of El Niño events in the southeastern Pacific, by examining marine sediment cores drilled off the coast of Peru. The cores contain an El Niño signature in the form of tiny, fine-grained stone fragments, washed into the sea by multiple Peruvian rivers following floods on the continent caused by heavy El Niño rainfall. As indicated in the adjacent figure, the study site was approximately 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Lima at a depth of 184 meters (604 feet).

Northern Peru sees the heaviest El Niño rainfall, generating floods capable of dispersing large amounts of fine-grained river sediments. Smaller amounts of rainfall in central and southern Peru, which are not caused by El Niño, don’t result in flooding with the same dispersal capability.

The study authors classified the flood event signal as very strong when the concentration of stone fragments, known as lithics, was more than two standard deviations above the centennial mean. The frequency of these very strong events over the last 12,000 years is illustrated in the next figure; the black and gray bars show the frequency as the number of 500- and 1,000-year floods, respectively. Radiocarbon dating of the sediment cores was used to establish the timeline.

It can be seen that the number of very strong Peruvian flood events peaked around 9,500 years ago and again about 2,500 years ago, since when the number has been decreasing. No extreme floods occurred at all from about 5,500 to 7,500 years in the past.

A more detailed record is presented in the following figure, showing the variation over 20,000 years of the sea surface temperature off Peru (top), the lithic concentration (bottom) and a proxy for lithic concentration (middle). Sea surface temperatures were derived from chemical analysis of the marine sediment cores.

As indicated in this figure, the lithic concentration and therefore El Niño strength were high around 2,000 and 10,000 years ago – approximately the same periods when the most devastating floods occurred. The figure also reveals the absence of strong El Niño activity from 5,500 to 7,500 years ago, a dry interval without any major Peruvian floods.

But it’s seen that El Niños were strong in other eras too. During this 20,000-year span, El Niños first became prominent between 17,000 and 16,000 years before now, at the same time that sea surface temperatures jumped several degrees. The initial rise in both El Niños and ocean temperature was followed by roughly centennial fluctuations, alternating between weaker and stronger El Niño activity. After the gap from 7,500 to 5,500 years ago, El Niños surged again, as did sea surface temperatures.

On a finer scale, El Niños during the last two millennia were distinctly stronger than their modern counterparts between 2,000 and 1,300 years ago, then relatively weak during the MWP (Medieval Warm Period) from about 800 (1,300 years ago) to 1300. During the LIA (Little Ice Age) from about 1500 to 1850, El Niños strengthened once more before falling back to their present-day levels.

It may seem counterintuitive that El Niños, which release vast amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere and often raise the global temperature by several tenths of a degree for a year or so, are associated historically with prolonged periods of cooling such as the LIA. But ecologist Jim Steele has explained this phenomenon as arising from the absence of La Niña conditions during an El Niño. La Niña is the cool phase of the so-called ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), El Niño being the warm phase.

In a La Niña event, east to west trade winds cause warm water heated by the sun to pile up in the western tropical Pacific. This removes solar‑heated water from the eastern Pacific, resulting in upwelling of cooler subsurface waters there that replace the surface waters transported to the west and cause a temporary decline in global temperatures. But at the same time, the ocean gains heat at greater depths.

With the absence of this recharging of ocean heat during an El Niño, global cooling sets in for an extended period. Such cooling is usually associated with lower heat output from the sun, characterized by a falloff in the average monthly number of sunspots. Conversely, La Niñas usually accompany periods of higher solar output and result in extended global warming, as occurred during the MWP.

El Niño and La Niña have been major influences on our climate for many millennia and will continue to be. Until they are better understood, we can’t be sure they play less of a role in global warming than greenhouse gases.

Next: Sudden Changes in Ocean Currents Warmed Arctic, Cooled Antarctic in Past

Weather Extremes: Hurricanes and Tornadoes Likely to Diminish in 2021

Despite the brouhaha over the recent record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific northwest and disastrous floods in Europe and China, windy weather extremes – hurricanes and tornadoes – are attracting little media attention because they’re both on track for a relatively quiet season.

Scientists at the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) don’t anticipate that 2021 will see the record-breaking 30 named storms of 2020, even though they think the total may still be above average. However, of last year’s 30 storms, only 13 became actual hurricanes, including 6 major hurricanes. The record annual highs are 15 hurricanes recorded in 2005 and 8 major hurricanes in 1950.

Hurricanes are classified by their sustained wind speeds on the Saffir-Simpson scale, ranging from Category 1, the weakest, to Category 5, the strongest. A major hurricane is defined as one in Category 3, 4 or 5, corresponding to a top wind speed of 178 km per hour (111 mph) or greater. NOAA predicts just 6 to 10 hurricanes this year, with 3 to 5 of those being in the major hurricane categories.

Hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, which has the best quality data available in the world, do show heightened ac­tivity over the last 20 years, particularly in 2005 and 2020. This can be seen in the figure below, depicting the frequency of all Atlantic hurricanes from 1851 to 2020. But researchers have found that the apparent increase in recent times is not related to global warming.

Rather, say the scientists who work at NOAA and several universities, the increase reflects natural variability. Although enhanced evaporation from warming oceans pro­vides more fuel for hurricanes, recent numbers have been artificially boosted by a big improvement in our ability to detect hurricanes, especially since the advent of satellite coverage in the late 1960s. And global warming can’t be the explanation, as the earth was cooling during the previous period of increased activity in the 1950s and 1960s.

Prior to that time, most data on hurricane frequency were based on eyewitness accounts, thus excluding all the hurricanes that never made landfall. What the researchers did was examine the eyewitness records, preserved by NOAA workers, in order to calculate the ratio of Atlantic hurricanes that didn’t come ashore to those that did, both in the modern era and in the past. The observations of non-landfalling hurricanes before the early 1970s came primarily from ships at sea.

Then, using a model for the radius of hurricane or major hurricane winds, the researchers were able to estimate the number of hurricanes or major hurricanes going back to 1860 that were never recorded. Their analysis revealed that the recent hike in the hurricane count is nothing remarkable, being comparable to earlier surges in the early 1880s and late 1940s. In the U.S., the past decade was in fact the second quietest for landfalling hurricanes and landfalling major hurricanes since the 1850s. Hurricane Ida was the first major U.S. landfalling hurricane this year.

Tornadoes, which occur predominantly in the U.S., have been less violent and fewer in number than average so far in 2021. Like hurricanes, tornadoes are categorized according to wind speed, using the Fujita Scale going from EF0 to EF5; EF5 tornadoes attain wind speeds up to 480 km per hour (300 mph).

Up to the end of August, 958 tornadoes had been reported by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in 2021 – of which 740 had been confirmed, according to Wikipedia. These numbers can be compared with the January to August average of 1035 confirmed tornadoes; the yearly average is 1253.

The annual incidence of all tornadoes in the U.S. shows no meaningful trend from 1950 to 2020, a period that included both warming and cooling spells, with net global warming of approximately 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.0 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time. But the number of strong tornadoes (EF3 or greater) has declined dramatically over the last half century, as seen in the next figure illustrating the number observed each year from 1954 to 2017.

Clearly, the trend is downward instead of upward. Indeed, the average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40% less than from 1954 to 1985. In May this year, there wasn’t a single strong tornado for the first time since record-keeping began in 1950. Although there’s debate over whether the current system for rating tornadoes is flawed, 2021 looks like being another quiet year.

Next: What “The Science” Really Says about the Coronavirus Pandemic

Latest UN Climate Report Is More Hype than Science

In its latest climate report, the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) falls prey to the hype usually characteristic of alarmists who ignore the lack of empirical evidence for the climate change narrative of “unequivocal” human-caused global warming.

Past IPCC assessment reports have served as the voice of authority for climate science and, even among those who believe in man-made climate change, as a restraining influence – being hesitant in linking weather extremes to a warmer world, for instance. But all that has changed in its Sixth Assessment Report, which the UN Secretary-General has hysterically described as “code red for humanity.”

Among other claims trumpeted in the report is the statement that “Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heat waves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since [the previous report].” This is simply untrue and actually contrary to the evidence, with the exception of precipitation that tends to increase with global warming because of enhanced evap­oration from tropical oceans, resulting in more water vapor in the atmosphere.

In other blog posts and a recent report, I’ve shown how there’s no scientific evidence that global warm­ing triggers extreme weather, or even that weather extremes are becoming more frequent. Anomalous weather events, such as heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts and tornadoes, show no long-term trend over more than a century of reliable data.

As one example, the figure below shows how the average glob­al area and intensity of drought remained unchanged on aver­age from 1950 to 2019, even though the earth warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.0 degrees Fahrenheit) over that interval. The drought area is the percentage of total global land area, excluding ice sheets and deserts, while the intensity is characterized by the self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index, which measures both dryness and wetness and classifies events as “moderate,” “severe” or “extreme.”

Although the IPCC report claims, with high confidence, that “the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale” are increasing, the scientific evidence doesn’t sup­port such a bold assertion. An accompanying statement that cold extremes have become less frequent and less severe is also blatantly incorrect.

Cold extremes are in fact on the rise, as I’ve discussed in previous blog posts (here and here). The IPCC’s sister UN agency, the WMO (World Meteorological Organi­zation) does at least acknowledge the existence of cold weather extremes, but has no explanation for their origin nor their growing frequency. Cold extremes include prolonged cold spells, unusually heavy snowfalls and longer winter seasons. Why the IPCC should draw the wrong conclusion about them is puzzling.

In discussing the future climate, the IPCC makes use of five scenarios that project differing emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases. The scenarios start in 2015 and range from one that assumes very high emissions, with atmospheric CO₂ doubling from its present level by 2050, to one assuming very low emissions, with CO₂ declining to “net zero” by mid-century.

But, as pointed out by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., the estimates in the IPCC report are dominated by the highest emissions scenario. Pielke finds that this super-high emissions scenario accounts for 41.5% of all scenario mentions in the report, whereas the scenarios judged to be the most likely under current trends account for only a scant 18.4% of all mentions. The hype inherent in the report is obvious by comparing these percentages with the corresponding ones in the Fifth Assessment Report, which were 31.4% and 44.5%, respectively. 

Not widely known is that the supposed linkage between climate change and human emissions of greenhouse gases, as well as the purported connection between global warming and weather extremes, both depend entirely on computer climate models. Only the models link climate change or extreme weather to human activity. The empirical evidence does not – it merely shows that the planet is warming, not what’s causing the warming.

A recent article in the mainstream scientific journal Science surprisingly drew attention to the shortcomings of climate models, weaknesses that have been emphasized for years by climate change skeptics. Apart from falsely linking global warming to CO₂ emissions – because the models don’t include many types of natural variability – the models greatly exaggerate predicted temperatures, and can’t even reproduce the past climate accurately. As leading climate scientist Gavin Schmidt says, “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”

The new IPCC report, with its prognostications of gloom and doom, should have paid more attention to its modelers. In making wrong claims about the present climate, and relying too heavily on high-emissions scenarios for future projections, the IPCC has strayed from the path of science.

Next: Weather Extremes: Hurricanes and Tornadoes Likely to Diminish in 2021

New EPA Climate Change Indicator Is Deceptive

New climate change indicators on the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) website are intended to inform science-based decision-making by presenting climate science transparently. But many of the indicators are misleading or deceptive, being based on incomplete evidence or selective data.

A typical example is the indicator for heat waves. This is illustrated in the left panel of the figure below, depicting the EPA’s representation of heat wave frequency in the U.S. from 1961 to 2019. The figure purports to show a steady increase in the occurrence of heat waves, which supposedly tripled from an average of two per year during the 1960s to six per year during the 2010s.

Unfortunately, the chart on the left is highly deceptive in several ways. First, the data is derived from minimum, not maximum, temperatures averaged across 50 American cities. The corresponding chart for maximum temperatures, shown in the right panel above, paints a rather different picture – one in which the heat wave frequency less than doubled from 2.5 per year in the 1960s to 4.5 per year in the 2010s, and actually declined from the 1980s to the 2000s.

This maximum-temperature graph revealing a much smaller increase in heat waves than the minimum-temperature graph displayed so boldly on the EPA website is dishonestly hidden away in its technical documentation.

A second deception is that the starting date of 1961 for both graphs is conveniently cherry-picked during a 30-year period of global cooling from 1940 to 1970. That in itself exaggerates the warming effect since then. Starting instead in 1980, after the current bout of global warming had begun, it can be seen that the heat wave frequency based on maximum temperatures (right panel) barely increased at all from 1981 to 2019. Similar exaggeration and sleight of hand can be seen in the EPA indicators for heat wave duration, season length and intensity.

A third deception is that the 1961 start date ignores the record U.S. heat of the 1930s, a decade characterized by persistent, searing heat waves across North America, especially in 1934 and 1936. The next figure shows the frequency and magnitude of U.S. heat waves from 1900 to 2018.

The frequency (top panel) is the annual number of calendar days the maximum temperature exceeded the 90th percentile for 1961–1990 for at least six consecutive days. The EPA’s data is calculated for a period of at least four days, while the heat wave index (lower panel) measures the annual magnitude of all heat waves of at least three days in that year combined.

Despite the differences in definition, it’s abundantly clear that heat waves over the last few decades – the ones publicized by the EPA – pale in comparison to those of the 1930s, and even those of other decades such as the 1910s and 1950s. The peak heat wave index in 1936 is a full three times higher than it was in 2012 and up to nine times higher than in many other years.

The heat wave index shown above actually appears on the same EPA website page as the mimimum-temperature chart. But it’s presented as a tiny Figure 3 that is only 20% as large as the much more prominent Figure 1 showing minimum temperatures. As pointed out recently by another writer, a full-size version of the index chart, from 1895 to 2015, was once featured on the website, before the site was updated this year with the new climate change indicators.

The EPA points out that the 1930s heat waves in North America, which were concentrated in the Great Plains states of the U.S. and southern Canada, were exacerbated by Dust Bowl drought that depleted soil moisture and reduced the moderating effects of evaporation. While this is undoubtedly true, it has been suggested by climate scientists that future droughts in a warming world could result in further record-breaking U.S. heat waves. The EPA has no justification for omitting 1930s heat waves from their data record, or for suppressing the heat wave index chart.

Although the Dust Bowl was unique to the U.S. and Canada, there are locations in other parts of North America and in other countries where substantial heat waves occurred before 1961 as well. In the summer of 1930 two record-setting, back-to-back scorchers, each lasting eight days, afflicted Washington, D.C.; while in 1936, the province of Ontario – also well removed from the Great Plains – experienced 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) heat during the longest, deadliest Canadian heat wave on record. In Europe, France was baked during heat waves in both 1930 and 1947, and many eastern European countries suffered prolonged heat waves in 1946.   

What all this means is that the EPA’s heat-wave indicator grossly misrepresents the actual science and defeats its stated goal for the indicators of “informing our understanding of climate change.”

Next: Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: (4) A Minimal Ice-Age Greenhouse Effect

Is Recent Record Cold Just La Niña, or the Onset of Global Cooling?

Little noticed by the mainstream media in their obsession with global warming is an exceptionally chilly 2020-21 winter in the Northern Hemisphere and an unusually early start to the Southern Hemisphere winter. Low temperature and snowfall records are tumbling all over the globe. The harsh cold has already crippled this year’s crops and vines in Europe, while the U.S. state of Texas was ravaged by the subfreezing polar vortex.

Is this the beginning of the predicted grand solar minimum, which was the subject of an earlier post – or simply a manifestation of the naturally occurring La Niña cycle? A grand solar minimum is signified by a steep decline in the maximum number of sunspots during the 11-year solar cycle, a decline that appears to be underway already.

The familiar El Niño and La Niña cycles arise from seesaw changes in surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean and last for periods of a year or more at a time. The persistent but irregular pattern is visible in the graph below, showing satellite measurements of the global temperature since 1979. Warm spikes such as those in 1998, 2010 and 2016 are due to El Niño; cool spikes like those in 2000 and 2008 are due to La Niña. The climatic effects of El Niño and La Niña include catastrophic flooding in the western Americas and flooding or severe drought in Australia; La Niña has also been tied to major landfalling hurricanes in both the U.S. and the western Pacific.

The zero baseline in the figure represents the average temperature in the tropical lower atmosphere or troposphere from 1991 to 2020 (though the satellite record began in 1979). Observations in the troposphere are a more reliable indicator of global warming than surface data, which are distorted by the urban heat island effect on land and by insufficient measurement stations across the oceans.

Right now, in May 2021, it’s clear that we’re experiencing another La Niña, with the mean April temperature having fallen back to the long-term average. This isn’t permanent of course, and the mercury will continue to rise and fall with future El Niño and La Niña fluctuations. But those fluctuations are superimposed on an overall warming trend of 0.14 degrees Celsius (0.25 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade at present – the familiar global warming.

Whether the present frigid and snowy conditions in much of the world are merely a result of La Niña, or the start of a longer cooling trend, we won’t know for several years yet. Climate, after all, is a long-term average of the weather over an extended period of time, up to decades.

Nonetheless, there’s ample evidence that the current cold snap is not about to let up. At the same time as the UK experienced its lowest average minimum temperature for April since 1922, and both Switzerland and Slovenia suffered record low temperatures for the month, bone-chilling cold struck Australia, New Zealand and even normally shivery Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere. The next figure shows how the 2021 sea ice extent (in blue) around Antarctica is above or close to the 30-year average from 1981 to 2010 (in gray).

Snow records have continued to be broken around the world too. Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, registered its all-time high snowfall for April, in record books dating back to 1888; during April, both Finland and Russia reported their heaviest snow in decades; and the UK, Spain and several countries in the Middle East saw rare spring snowfalls from March to May. On the other side of the globe, up to 22 cm (9 inches) of snow fell on southeastern Australia mountain peaks a full two months before the start of the 2021 ski season; and southern Africa was also blanketed in early-season snow.

The figure below shows the  Northern Hemisphere snow mass (excluding mountains) for the current season, based on data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. As can be seen, the snow mass for much of the season has tracked more than one standard deviation above the average for 1982-2012, and in March 2021 exceeded the average by two standard deviations. The mass is measured in billions of tonnes (Gigatonnes, Gt where 1 tonne = 1.102 U.S. tons).

As startling as all this unusual weather is, it should be noted that recent bursts of extreme cold have sometimes been interspersed with brief periods of unseasonal warmth. Such swings between extremes may result from jet stream blocking, a phenomenon that can arise from natural sources such as a downturn in UV from a quieter sun, which can in turn produce changes in upper atmosphere wind patterns.

Next: New EPA Climate Change Indicator Is Deceptive

Little Evidence for Link between Natural Disasters and Global Warming

A new report on extreme weather in 2020 shows how socio-economic studies of natural disasters have been used to buttress the popular but mistaken belief that global warming causes weather extremes. Two international agencies, UNDRR (the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) – in conjunction with CRED (the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) – and IFRC (the International Red Cross), both issued reports in 2020 claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating.

However, as the two reports themselves reveal, such claims are manifestly wrong. This can be seen in the following figure, originally included in the UNDRR-CRED’s report but since withdrawn, showing the annual number of climate-related disasters from 2000 through 2020. The disasters are those in the yellow climatological (droughts, glacial lake outbursts and wildfires), green meteorological (storms, extreme temperatures and fog), and blue hydrological (floods, landslides and wave action) categories.

The UNDRR-CRED report draws a strong link between global warming and extreme weather events, citing a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years.” But, as shown in the figure above, the total number of climate-related disasters in fact exhibits a distinctly declining trend (in red) since 2000, falling by 11% over the last 21 years. This completely contradicts the claims in two different sections of the report that the annual number of disasters since 2000 has either risen significantly from before or been “relatively stable.”

Another blatant inconsistency in the UNDRR-CRED report, an inconsistency that bolsters its false claim of a rising disaster rate, is a comparison between the period from 2000 to 2019 and the preceding 20 years from 1980 to 1999. The report contends that the earlier 20 years saw only 4,212 disasters, compared with 7,348 during the later period.       

However, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., who studies natural disasters, says that the report’s numbers are flawed. As CRED has repeatedly acknowledged, data from 20th-century disasters are unreliable because disasters were reported differently before the Internet existed. Climate writer Paul Homewood has noted a sudden jump in the annual number of disasters listed in CRED’s EM-DAT (Emergency Events Database) after 1998, which the agency itself attributes to increased disaster reporting in the Internet era. So its claim that the number of disasters over 20 years jumped from 4,212 to 7,348 is meaningless.

The IFRC report reaches the same erroneous conclusions as the CRED-UNDRR report – not surprisingly, since they are both based on CRED’s EM-DAT. As seen in the next figure, which is the same as the Red Cross report’s Figure 1.1, climate- and weather-related disasters since 2000 have declined by approximately the same 11% noted above. The report’s misleading assertion that such disasters have risen almost 35% since the 1990s relies on the same failure to account for a major increase in disaster reporting since 1998 due to the arrival of the Internet.

That natural disasters are in fact diminishing over time is reinforced by data on the associated loss of life. The figure below illustrates the annual global number of deaths from natural disasters, including weather extremes, corrected for population increase over time and averaged by decade from 1900 to 2015.

Because the data is compiled from the same EM-DAT database, the annual number of deaths shows an uptick from the 1990s to the 2000s. Yet it’s abundantly clear that disaster-related deaths have been dwindling since the 1920s. However, this is due as much to improvements in planning and engineering to safeguard structures, and to early warning systems that allow evacuation of threatened communities, as it is to diminishing numbers of natural disasters.

Economic loss studies of natural disasters have been quick to blame human-caused climate change for the apparently increasing frequency and intensity of weather-related events. But once the losses are corrected for population gain and the ever-increasing value of property in harm’s way, there’s very little evidence to support any connection between natural disasters and global warming.

According to numerous analyses by Pielke, the frequency and intensity of the phenomena causing financial losses show no detectable trend to date. Climate-related losses themselves are actually declining as a percentage of global gross domestic product. Another research study, based on the NatCatSERVICE database of reinsurance giant Munich Re, has concluded that both human and economic vulnerability to climate-related disasters exhibit a decreasing trend, and that average disaster mortality has dropped by a sizable 6.5 times from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), whose assessment reports serve as the voice of authority for climate science, endorsed these findings in a 2014 report on the impacts of climate change. But most of the political world and the mainstream media cling to the erroneous notion that extreme weather is triggered by global warming and becoming more frequent, despite a lack of scientific evidence for either assertion.

Next: Is Recent Record Cold Just La Niña, or the Onset of Global Cooling?

Natural Sources of Global Warming and Cooling: (1) Solar Variability and La Niña

The role played by the sun in climate change has long been trivialized by advocates of the orthodoxy that links global warming almost entirely to our emissions of greenhouse gases. But recent research suggests that solar fluctuations, while small, may affect climate by driving the multidecadal switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean. Other research finds that our inability to correctly simulate the cooling La Niña cycle is a major reason that computer climate models run hot.     

La Niña is the cool phase of ENSO (the El Niño – Southern Oscillation), a natural cycle that causes temperature fluctuations and other climatic effects in tropical regions of the Pacific. The familiar El Niño and La Niña events, which last for a year or more at a time, recur at irregular intervals from two to seven years. Serious effects of ENSO range from catastrophic flooding in the U.S. and Peru to severe droughts in Australia. 

The sun has several natural cycles, the most well known of which is the 11-year sunspot cycle. During the sunspot cycle the sun’s heat and light output waxes and wanes by about 0.08%. Although this variation in itself is too small to have any appreciable direct effect on the earth’s climate, indirect solar effects can have an impact on the warming and cooling of our planet – indirect effects that are ignored in climate models.

Just such an indirect solar effect may have been discovered in a new study revealing a correlation between the end of sunspot cycles and the switch from El Niño to La Niña states of the tropical Pacific. The research was conducted by a team of scientists from NASA and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The researchers found that the termination of all five solar cycles between 1960 and 2010-11 coincided with a flip from a warmer El Niño to a cooler La Niña. And the end of the most recent solar cycle, which has just occurred, also coincides with the beginning of a new La Niña event. Because the end of the 11-year solar cycle is fuzzy, the research team relied for its “clock” on the sun’s more well-defined magnetic polarity cycle known as a Hale cycle, which is precisely 22 years in length.

The correspondence between the 11-year solar cycle and the onset of La Niña events is illustrated in the figure below, showing the six-month smoothed monthly sunspot number since 1950 in black and the Oceanic El Niño Index in color. The red and blue boxes mark El Niño and La Niña periods, respectively, in the repeating pattern. What stands out is that the end of each sunspot cycle is closely correlated with the switch from El Niño to La Niña. That the correlation is mere coincidence is statistically highly unlikely, say the study authors, although further research is needed to establish the physical connection between the sun and earth responsible for the correlation.

Another study, headed by climate scientists at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, finds that multidecadal La Niña variability is why computer climate models overestimate sea surface temperatures in the Pacific by two to three times. The La Niña cycle results in atmospheric cooling and a distinct pattern of cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, with warmer waters to the north and south.

Many climate models produce ENSO variations, but are unable to predict either the timing of El Niño and La Niña events or temperatures measured by satellite in the tropical lower atmosphere (troposphere). However, the study authors found that approximately 13% of 482 simulations by 55 computer models do show tropospheric warming in the tropics that matches the satellite record. And, unexpectedly, those simulations reproduce all the characteristics of La Niña.

The next figure shows how well one of these particular simulations reproduces a La Niña temperature pattern, in both geographic extent (upper panel) and ocean depth (lower panel). The panels labeled B are the computer simulation and the panels labeled C are the satellite observations. Temperatures are depicted as an average warming (positive) or cooling (negative) rate, in degrees Celsius per decade, over the period from 1979 to 2018. La Niña cooling in the Pacific is clearly visible in both B and C.

The other 87% of the computer simulations overestimate tropical Pacific temperatures, which is why, the authors say, the multimodel mean warming rate is two to three times higher than observed. But their results show that natural climate variability, here in the form of La Niña, is large enough to explain the difference between reality and climate model predictions.

Next: Little Evidence for Link between Natural Disasters and Global Warming

No Evidence That 2020 Hurricane Season Was Record-Breaking

In a world that routinely hypes extreme weather events, it’s no surprise that the mainstream media and alarmist climate scientists have declared this year’s Atlantic hurricane season “unprecedented” and “record-shattering.” But the reality is that the season was merely so-so and no records fell.

While it’s true that the very active 2020 season saw a record-breaking 30 named storms, only 13 of these became hurricanes. That was fewer than the historical high of 15 recorded in 2005 and only one more than the 12 hurricanes recorded in 1969 and 2010, according to NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The figure below shows the frequency of all Atlantic hurricanes from 1851 to 2020.

Of 2020’s 13 hurricanes, only six were major hurricanes, less than the record eight in 1950 and seven in 1961 and 2005, as shown in the next figure. A major hurricane is defined as one in Category 3, 4 or 5 on the so-called Saffir-Simpson scale, corresponding to a top wind speed of 178 km per hour (111 mph) or greater. Although it appears that major Atlantic hurricanes were less frequent before about 1940, the lower numbers reflect the relative lack of observations in early years of the record. Aircraft reconnaissance flights to gather data on hurricanes only began in 1944, while satellite coverage dates only from the 1960s.

Despite the lack of any significant trend in Atlantic hurricanes in a warming world, the frequency of hurricanes globally is actually diminishing as seen in the following figure. The apparent slight increase in major hurricanes since 1981 has been ascribed to improvements in observational capabilities, rather than warming oceans that provide the fuel for hurricanes and typhoons.

As further evidence that recent hurricane activity is nothing unusual, the figure below depicts what is known as the ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) index for the Atlantic basin from 1855 to 2020. The ACE index is an integrated metric combining the number of storms each year, how long they survive and how intense they become. Mathematically, the index is calculated by squaring the maximum sustained wind speed in a named storm every six hours that it remains above tropical storm intensity and summing that up for all storms in the season.

For 2020, the Atlantic basin ACE index was 179.8, which ranks 13th behind 2017, 2005, the peak in 1933 and nine other years. For comparison, this year’s ACE index for the northwestern Pacific, where typhoons are common, was 148.5. The higher value for the Atlantic this year reflects the greater number of named storms.

NOAA attributes the enhanced number of atmospheric whirligigs in the Atlantic in recent years to the warm phase of the naturally occurring AMO (Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation). The AMO, which has a cycle time of approximately 65 years and alternates between warm and cool phases, governs many extremes, such as cyclonic storms in the Atlantic basin and major floods in eastern North America and western Europe. The present warm phase began in 1995, marking the beginning of a period when both named Atlantic storms and hurricanes have become more common on average – as seen in the first two figures above.

Another contribution to storm activity in the Atlantic comes from La Niña cycles in the Pacific. Apart from a cooling effect, La Niñas result in quieter conditions in the eastern Pacific and heightened activity in the Atlantic. The current La Niña started several months ago and is expected to continue into 2021.

Despite NOAA’s recognition of what has caused so many Atlantic storms in 2020, activists continue to claim that climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more destructive and increasing the likelihood of more frequent major hurricanes. Pontificates Michael “hockey stick” Mann: “The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We’re seeing them play out right now in the form of unprecedented wildfires out West and an unprecedented hurricane season back East.”

Clearly, there’s no evidence for such nonsensical, unscientific statements.

Next: New Evidence That the Ancient Climate Was Warmer than Today’s

No Evidence for Dramatic Loss of Great Barrier Reef Corals

A 2020 study of the Great Barrier Reef that set alarm bells ringing in the mainstream media is based on faulty evidence, according to Australian scientist and leading coral reef authority, Professor Peter Ridd. The study claims that between 1995 and 2017 the reef lost half its corals, especially small baby colonies, because of global warming – but Ridd says the claims are false.

The breathtakingly beautiful Great Barrier Reef, labeled by CNN as one of the seven natural wonders of the world, is the planet’s largest living structure. Visible from outer space and 2,300 km (1,400 miles) long, the reef hugs the northeastern coast of Australia. A healthy portion of the reef is shown in the image below.

CREDIT: DAVID CHILD, EVENING STANDARD.

But corals are susceptible to overheating and undergo bleaching when the water gets too hot, losing their vibrant colors. During the prolonged El Niño of 2016-17, higher temperatures caused mass bleaching that damaged portions of the northern and central regions of the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd’s fellow reef scientists contended at the time that as much as 30% to 95% of the reef’s corals died. However, Ridd disagreed, estimating that only 8% of the Great Barrier Reef suffered; much of the southern end of the reef wasn’t affected at all. 

Likewise, Ridd finds no evidence for the 50% loss of corals since 1995 claimed in the recent study. He says the most reliable data on coral extent comes from AIMS (the Australian Institute of Marine Science), who have been measuring over 100 reefs every year since 1986. As the following figure illustrates, AIMS data shows that coral cover fluctuates dramatically with time but there is approximately the same amount of Great Barrier Reef coral today as in 1995. Adds Ridd:

There was a huge reduction in coral cover in 2011 which was caused by two major cyclones that halved coral cover. Cyclones have always been the major cause of temporary coral loss on the Reef.

It can be seen that the coral cover averages only about 20% in the years since 1986, when AIMS measurements began. But a 2019 research paper reported that the first reef expedition back in 1928-29 discovered very similar coverage: on a reef island known as Low Isles, the coral cover ranged from 8% to 42% in different parts of the island. So essentially no coral has disappeared over a period of 90 years that encompasses both warming and cooling periods.

The paper’s authors did find that the coral colonies on Low Isles were 30% smaller in 2019 than in 1928-29, and that coral “richness” had declined. Apart from its faulty conclusion about coral loss, the 2020 study also found smaller colony sizes throughout the reef, even though the relative abundance of large colonies was unchanged.

Nevertheless, the most recent AIMS report records small gains in the cover of hard corals in the central and southern Great Barrier Reef, following another mass bleaching event in late 2019. Hard corals are the primary reef-building corals; soft corals don’t form reefs.

Even more encouraging news for coral reef health comes from a just-reported survey of coral reefs on the opposite side of the country – the Rowley Shoals, a chain of three coral atolls 300 km (190 miles) off the coast of northwest Western Australia. Following an extensive marine heat wave in December 2019, an April 2020 survey found that up to 60% of the Rowley Shoals corals had become a pallid white (left image below). Yet a follow-up survey just six months later revealed that much of the bleached coral had already recovered (right image) and that perhaps only 10% of the reef had been killed.

CREDIT: WESTERN AUSTRALIA DBCA.

Tom Holmes, the marine monitoring coordinator at Western Australia’s DBCA (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions), said "We were expecting to see widespread mortality, and we just didn't see it … which is a really amazing thing." Holmes explained that, while high ocean temperatures cause coral to bleach, what is less well known is that bleached corals don’t die immediately. Bleaching is initially just a sign of stress, but if the stress continues for a long time, it does lead to mortality.

However, Holmes – ever the cautious scientist – feels the reef may have been lucky and dodged a bullet this time. That’s because the marine heat wave that caused the bleaching was short-lived, dissipating at the end of the Australian summer a few months ago and giving the corals a chance to recover.

The resilience of the Rowley Shoals is no surprise to Ridd. Despite having been fired from his position at James Cook University in northern Queensland for his politically incorrect views on the Great Barrier Reef and climate change, Ridd continues to push the case for more accurate measurements and better quality assurance in coral reef science.

Next: No Evidence That 2020 Hurricane Season Was Record-Breaking