No Evidence That Weather Extremes Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (3) Floods

You’d think that floods would proliferate in a warming world, since precipitation increases due to enhanced evapo­ration from tropical oceans. Yet there is no evidence that flooding is becoming more prevalent.

A 2017 study found that, despite average rainfall getting heavier as the planet warms, excessive precipitation is not the only cause of flooding. What is less obvious is that alterations to the catchment area – such as land-use changes, deforestation and the building of dams – also play a major role. This had even been recognized by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its Sixth Assessment Report, which stated that:

In addition to precipitation, flooding also depends on basin and river characteristics such as permeability, antecedent soil moisture, and antecedent flow levels for river flooding, so projections of extreme precipitation and flooding are not always closely linked.

Even so, the 2017 study concluded that the biggest influence on flood trends is none of these factors, but rather the size of the catchment area. While smaller catchments do show a trend in flood risk that’s increasing over time, larger catchments exhibit a decreasing trend.

Globally, larger catchments dominate, so the trend in flood risk is actually decreasing rather than increasing in most parts of the world. This is illustrated in the figure below, the data coming from 1,907 different locations over the 40 years from 1966 to 2005.

Another 2017 study, this time restricted to North America and Europe, found “no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time” in the occurrence of major floods from 1930 to 2010. Like the first study described above, this research included both small and large catchment areas. But the only catchments studied were those with minimal alterations, so as to focus on any trends driven by climate change.

The next figure shows the likelihood of a 100-year flood occurring in North America or Europe in any given year, during two slightly different periods toward the end of the 20th century. Blue dots represent observed values, lines a logistic regression fit to the data. A 100-year flood is a massive flood that occurs on average only once a century and has a 1 in 100 or 1% chance of occurring or being exceeded in any given year – although the actual interval between 100-year floods is often less than 100 years.

You can see that for both periods studied, the probability of a 100-year flood in North America or Europe hovers around the 1% (0.01) level or below, implying that 100-year floods were no more or less likely to occur during those intervals than at any time. The straight lines drawn through the data points show no significant trend. Similar results were obtained for 50-year floods.

Although the study authors concluded that major floods in the Northern Hemisphere between 1931 and 2010 weren’t caused by global warming and were no more likely than expected from chance alone, they did find that floods were influenced by the climate. The strongest influence is the naturally occurring Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, an ocean cycle that causes heavier than normal rainfall in Europe and lighter rainfall in North America during its positive phase – leading to an increase in major European floods and a decrease in North American ones.

Floods in the modern era are no more common nor deadly or disruptive than any of the thousands of floods in the past. The figure below shows flood levels of Germany’s Danube River recorded in the town of Passau over more than 500 years. As the caption states, the highest flood level over this period was back in 1501, and only two of the nine severe floods occurred during the last 70 years.

Germany in fact has been battered by devastating floods many times during the last few centuries, including a 1717 Christmas Eve flood that killed 13,700 people. More recently, the Ahr valley in Germany, which was struck in July 2021, experienced major floods in the same locations on 12 June 1910, when at least 52 people were killed.

These numbers pale in comparison with the number of fatalities caused by historical floods in Asia, notably in China, India, Pakistan and Japan. The death toll from past flooding in these countries has often been in the millions, either by drowning or from subsequent famine or disease.

In the more developed world, the illusion that major floods are becoming more frequent is due in part to the growing population and the appeal of living near water. This has led to people building their dream homes in harm’s way, on river or coastal floodplains, where rainfall-swollen rivers or storm surges result in intermittent flooding and subsequent devasta­tion. It is changing human wants rather than climate change that are responsible for disastrous floods.

Next: Measles Surging Worldwide, Thanks to Vaccine Hesitancy

No Evidence That Weather Extremes Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (2) Droughts

Droughts have been a continuing feature of the earth’s climate for millennia. Both short-term and long-term trends show no signs of any increase in frequency or intensity.

In fact, recent droughts have slightly declined on a global scale, as warmer oceans release more moisture into the atmosphere. This is illustrated in the figure below, in which drought conditions from 1982 to 2012 are denoted by D0 (abnormally dry); D1 (moderate); D2 (severe); D3 (extreme); and D4 (exceptional).

The next figure depicts observational data showing the percentage of the contiguous U.S. in drought from 1895 up until 2015. There’s clearly no trend over this period, apart from pronounced drought during the record heat waves of the 1930s.

A 2007 U.S. study was able to reconstruct the drought pattern in western North America over the last 1,200 years, using tree rings as a proxy. The width and color of the rings consti­tute a record of past climate, including droughts. The reconstruc­tion, illustrated in the following figure, reveals that several unprecedently long and severe “megadroughts” have occurred in North America since the year 800, droughts that the study authors re­mark have never been experienced in the modern era.

Comparison of the previous figure with the yearly data in this figure (indicated in gray; the thick black line is a 60-year mean), shows that the long-term pattern of overall drought in North America is featureless, despite global warming during both the Mediaeval Warm Period and today. A similar conclusion was reached by a 2021 study that compared 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.

That some histori­cal droughts were even longer and more severe than those of today can be seen in another tree-ring reconstruction, of drought in California where I live. The next figure shows the pattern of dry and wet periods in my drought-prone state over the past 1,200 years. Although the third-driest period in the 1100s and the fifth driest period in the 1200s both occurred during the Mediaeval Warm Period, the driest (1500s) and fourth driest (800s) periods of drought occurred during rela­tively cool epochs.

Just like North America, Europe has also experienced mega­droughts over the past millennium, although in different peri­ods. The figure below illustrates a 2021 European reconstruction, again from tree ring proxies, of the drought pattern in central Europe from 1000 to 2012, with observational data from 1901 to 2018 ­superimposed. 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.

The authors of the study point out that droughts from 1400 to 1480 and from 1770 to 1840 were much longer and more severe than those of the 21st century. Their conclusions are reinforced by the results of another recent study, which failed to find any statistically significant trend in meteorological droughts in western Europe during the last 170 years. A meteorological drought describes one arising from a precipitation deficit alone.

What stands out in all these studies is the lack of any long-term trend in drought worldwide over at least a millennium. There is no evidence of the warming that began in the late 19th century, after the Little Ice Age ended, having played any role so far.

Indeed, ice cores from Antarctica demonstrate that much more dust – a sign of a dry climate – was deposited during the ice ages than during warmer interglacial periods. Even the UNDRR (UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction), in its Special Report on Drought 2021 which drew a link between drought and global warming, acknowledged that one of the main sources of episodic droughts globally is the natural El Niño Southern Oscillation.

There are regional variations, however. A 2021 research pa­per found that, from 1901 to 2017, the risk of meteorological droughts increased in the southwestern and southeastern U.S., while it decreased in northern states. Indeed, the UNDRR report found that such regional differences in drought are not restricted to the U.S. but occur worldwide.

Although generally caused by a severe fall-off in precipitation, droughts can be aggravated by other factors such as elevated temperatures, soil erosion and overuse of available groundwater. The consequences of drought, which can be catastrophic for human and animal life, include crop failure, starvation and mass migration. A major exodus of early humans out of Af­rica about 135,000 years ago is thought to have been driven by drought.

Next: No Evidence That Weather Extremes Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (3) Floods

No Evidence That Weather Extremes Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (1) Heat Waves

Climate reporting of the last few years has routinely promoted the mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening be­cause of climate change.

But the perception that weather extremes are increasing in frequency and intensity is false. The perception actually results from modern technology – the Internet and smart phones – which has revolutionized communication and made us much more aware of extreme weather than we were 50 or 100 years ago.

To demonstrate how extreme weather has not changed or even declined over time, this and subsequent posts will present observational evidence showing long-term trends over the past century or so for heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires.

We’ll start with heat waves. It’s commonly argued that heat waves today are hotter than ever before. That is possible, but only because global warming has raised the baseline temperature by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times – so we would expect heat waves to be that much hotter too.

Even so, there’s no evidence that current heat waves are hotter on average than they were in the past. The figure below shows the frequency and magnitude of heat ­waves in the U.S. from 1901 to 2018. The frequency (top panel) is defined as the annual number of calendar days the average U.S. maximum temperature exceeded the 90th percentile for 1961–1990 during at least six consecutive days, in a window centered on that calendar day; it repre­sents the average duration of all heatwaves of six days or longer in that year.

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 average annual heat wave or warm spell duration (top panel) is seen to have dropped from 11 days during the 1930s to about 6.5 days during the 2000s. The peak heat wave index (bottom panel) in 1936 was a full three times higher than in 2012 and up to nine times higher than in many other years.

In addition, the aver­age maximum temperature during any particular U.S. heat wave has declined slightly from 38 degrees Celsius (101 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 1930s to 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1980s. This can be seen indirectly in the next figure, which plots the average number of days per weather station with maximum temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) for the conterminous U.S. (bars) and regions (lines, 11-year averages).

With the exception of the Pacific southwest (dashed blue line) and the Four Corners states (Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, dashed black line), all other regions exhibit a declining trend. The absence of any trend in the U.S. as a whole is clearly evident. 

As I’ve documented in a GWPF report, the hottest years of the 1930s in the U.S. were 1934 and 1936. In the summer of 1934, Fort Smith, Arkansas recorded an unbelievable 53 consecutive days with maximum temperatures of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher. Topeka, Kansas, had 47 days, Oklahoma City had 45 days and Columbia, Missouri had 34 days when the mercury reached or passed that level. Approximately 800 deaths were attributed to the widespread heat wave, at a time when the U.S. population was about 60% smaller than today.

In comparison, the U.S. heat wave during July 2023, which was falsely trumpeted by the main­stream media as the hottest month in history, did not outmatch the scorching heat of 1934. El Paso, Texas did experience 44 consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), somewhat shorter than Fort Smith’s 53 days in 1934 just mentioned. And Phoenix, Arizona saw the maximum there exceed 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) – a comparable baseline for a city with a hotter climate than El Paso – but only for 31 days in a row.

Heat waves lasting a week or longer in the 1930s were not confined to North America; the Southern Hemisphere baked too. Adelaide on Australia’s south coast experienced a heat wave at least 11 days long in 1930, and Perth on the west coast saw a 10-day hot spell in 1933. Not to be outdone, 1935 saw heat waves elsewhere in the world, including India, France and Italy.

That today’s heat waves are nothing extraordinary is apparent from the following table, which depicts all-time record high tem­peratures for the seven continents. Three records date from the 1930s or before, while only Europe and Asia have set new records in the 21st century.

The record high temperatures during the deadly recent heat wave in Europe, which ranged up to 41.7 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit), are still lower than the continent’s all-time record in the table, set on the Italian island of Sicily five years ago. And the recent European heat wave’s duration pales in comparison with the U.S. heat waves described above.

Next: No Evidence That Weather Extremes Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (2) Droughts

The Pseudoscience behind Extreme Weather Attribution

As I wrote in a previous post, newly popular extreme event attribution studies are deeply flawed, with fundamental logical and meth­odological errors. Here I examine these failings in more detail.

To begin with, attribution studies rely on computer climate models, the weaknesses of which I’ve described multiple times in these pages (see for example here and here). The models have a dismal track record in predicting the future, or indeed of hindcasting the past. Not only do the majority of models overestimate the warming rate, but they also wrongly predict a hot spot in the upper atmosphere that isn’t there and are unable to accurately reproduce sea surface temperatures and sea-level rise.

Most importantly for attribution studies, the models are poor at hindcasting. That matters because the models are used to compare the present climate with anthropogenic CO₂ emissions to a preindustrial climate without extra CO₂.

In particular, climate models underestimate the warming during the global warming spell from 1910 to 1940, seen in the figure below. If the same deficiency applies to hindcasted temperatures before that period, including those in 1850 which is the baseline preindustrial year for attribution studies, then such studies will underestimate the magnitude of any counterfactual, comparison warming (and probably any other weather characteristic) in preindustrial times.

Another weakness of attribution method­ology is that, in the absence of CO₂, we simply do not know what the “natural” climate would have been. Although we have reliable historic mete­orological data for a few countries such as the UK and the U.S., we do not for most of the other countries on the planet. And historical data for variables such as cloud cover and wind speeds is lacking worldwide.

A further deficiency in event attribution studies is lack of attention to the uncertainty involved in temperature or other measurements, as I mentioned in the earlier post. An example of this is a Grantham Institute attribution study claiming that 2024’s Hurricane Helene that struck the U.S. was 100%, or 2 times, more likely than would have occurred in a preindustrial climate. Helene was a large Category 4 (top wind speed 250 km per hour or 156 mph) hurricane when it made landfall and caused significant damage across Florida and the southeastern U.S.

The next figure shows the path of Hurricane Helene, together with the maximum speed locations of historically observed and simulated hurricanes that followed paths within a 2° radius of Helene landfall. It also includes the attribution study’s estimates of landfall maximum wind speed as a function of “return period”; the return period is the expected interval between successive hurricanes at the same location, which is the inverse of hurricane frequency.

However, the methodology of the Hurricane Helene study is fundamentally flawed. Beyond the general limita­tions of attribution studies, hurricane behavior in particular is poorly reproduced by climate models. This contrasts with heatwaves, for which models are relatively skillful. Furthermore, very few North Atlantic hurricanes have made landfall in the same region of Florida, limiting the amount of observational data available.

The study’s solution to this problem was to include data from hurricanes that passed nearby but never actually made landfall in the same region – historic “near misses,” which are depicted in the top panel of the figure. Such practice is highly questionable at best, deceptive at worst. The blatant dishonesty is exemplified in the bottom panel, where it can be seen that the uncertainty (colored bands) associated with the partly simulated 2024 Helene curve (orange line) embraces the preindustrial curve (blue line); in other words, Helene may have been no more likely than normal.

The lack of attention to uncertainty is evident in the same data. For example, the uncertainty range (blue band) for the preindus­trial curve includes the observational data (black line) for all North Atlantic hurricanes since 1900 – suggesting that there has been nothing very different about Florida landfalling hurricanes, including Helene, over the whole period of observation.

After accounting for this uncertainty, therefore, the Helene study’s conclusions that the return period decreased from 130 years in the preindustrial era to 52 years, and the wind speed increased by 6.1 meters per second or 11%, are meaningless.

That there was indeed nothing exceptional about Hurricane Helene is reinforced by the plot of all Florida landfalling hurricanes since 1850, presented below. Neither hurricanes overall nor major hurricanes, of which Helene was the latest, exhibit any long-term trend. Taken as a whole, the conclusions of this Hurricane Helene attribution study are faulty.

Extreme event attribution studies, as currently conducted, fail to reinforce the mistaken belief that weather extremes are rising due to global warming – as I will demonstrate in subsequent posts.

Next: No Evidence That Weather Extremes Are Becoming More Frequent or Intense: (1) Heat Waves

The Evidence Shows We Are Nowhere Near a Climate Tipping Point, As Alarmists Claim

A recent paper raises the specter of the earth’s climate being on a “hothouse trajectory” – a pathway in which self-reinforcing feedbacks push the climate system past a point of no return, an irreversible disaster beyond which the planet would become unbearably hot. But a careful look at the evidence reveals this claim to be absurd, with no sign that we are currently anywhere close to such a tipping point.

This is not a new form of alarmism. In fact, the paper’s lead author published another paper over six years ago titled “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” perhaps the beginning of the recent obsession with the erroneous notion of a climate crisis caused by global warming. And a new NGO (non-governmental organization), Global Tipping Points, has in 2023 and 2025 produced fearmongering reports on tipping points.

That we are approaching a tipping point, insists the new paper, is evident from an imagined surge in extreme weather that the paper claims is becoming “more frequent, intense, and costly.” However, the observational evidence shows that most forms of extreme weather are becoming neither more frequent nor more intense, as I’ve demonstrated numerous times in these pages (see Category “Weather extremes”). The increasing costs of natural disasters are simply a result of population gain and the ever-escalating value of property in harm’s way.

The NGO’s 2025 report features the following summary of supposed global-warming-enhanced tipping points faced by our earth. The vertical bars represent the range of anticipated temperature increases that would trigger various tipping points. The report’s purported nearness of tipping points is reflected in the lower limits of all the bars being in the current level of warming band.

Nevertheless, it’s not difficult to show that none of these tipping points – nor several others cited in the report – are imminent. I’ll discuss just three here: coral reefs, ice sheets, and the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation).

According to the figure above, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs has already begun, with an estimated tipping point of 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. This shortsighted claim, probably based on temporary losses in global coral cover during the recent period of elevated sea surface temperatures, is irrational.

Australian physicist and leading coral reef authority, Professor Peter Ridd has explained in a 2023 report that most corals that bleach due to higher temperatures do not die, but are capable of rapid recovery in a decade or less. This is exemplified by studies of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which has the most reliable long-term record of large-area coral cover. Despite four supposedly catastrophic bleaching events in the six years prior to 2022, the reef’s coral cover reached a record high in 2024, as depicted in the image on the left below.

The image on the right shows the estimated global average cover of hard coral (solid line) and its associated uncertainty (shaded areas) since the late 1970s. Note that data before the late 1990s is of little value, says Ridd, because of small sample sizes; but the data since then reveals little overall variation – certainly nothing suggestive of a tipping point, either already passed or impending.

As for likely collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, there’s no evidence that such a catastrophic event is just around the corner either. As I discussed in a 2025 post, the Antarctic ice sheet overall is growing, and no longer melting, for the first time in decades. This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows changes in Antarctic ice sheet mass from April 2002 to December 2023, measured in billions of tonnes (gigatonnes, Gt where 1 gigatonne = 1.102 U.S. gigatons).

Although the ice sheet does appear to be growing in East Antarctica, the ice loss there in the form of melting glaciers is partly caused by active volcanoes underneath the continent. There’s no evidence that the East Antarctica portion of the ice sheet is anywhere near collapse.

Finally, I also discussed the very unlikely slowing down, let alone collapse, of the AMOC in a very recent blog post. All claims of impending doom rely on computer climate models, which have a generally poor history of making predictions. Although some models do indeed support the existence of a weakened AMOC, such cherry picking is highly unscientific and many of the ignored models in fact simulate a strengthened AMOC.

The next figure, from the new paper, graphs the mean global temperature over past millennia, with future projections based on so-called SSPs (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) that range from low- to high-emission scenarios. As climate writer Roger Pielke Jr. has emphasized on many occasions (see here, for example), high-emission scenarios such as SSP5-8.5 are implausibly extreme. More realistic scenarios such as SSP1-2.6 or even SSP2-4.5 will produce only modest warming in the near future, with no likelihood of triggering tipping points.

Next: Uncertainty in Ocean Heat Content May Be Grossly Underestimated

Abuse of Science: Extreme Event Attribution Studies

As its header suggests, this blog’s purpose is to combat today’s abuse and rejection of true science – the hallmarks of which are empirical evidence and logic. These two pillars are being outrageously abused in climate science by the ever-increasing use of extreme event attribution studies, which attempt to describe the extent to which specific extreme weather events are influ­enced by anthropogenic climate change.

Both the mainstream media and government reports have latched on to event attribution to fan the flames of climate alarmism and the associated narrative that we are in a climate crisis. But such studies are deeply flawed, with errors in both science and inter­pretation, having been created for legal and political rather than scientific reasons.

One of the fundamental failings of attribution studies is the logical fallacy of “begging the question.” To estimate the effect of a particular extreme event, the studies need to replicate the climate without the impact of global warming.

But this ignores the role of natural variability, which is neglected in climate models used in attribution studies on the assumption that only anthropogenic CO₂ – with no contribution from natural sources – accounts for all current warming. If natural sources play no role in warming today, then their contribution to a preindustrial climate is unknown.

Other scientific shortcomings are a lack of appropriate peer review, faulty statistics and the ignoring of important evidence. Defective methodological practices include the improper use of temperature datasets, a lack of sufficient attention to uncertainties in the data, and the neglect of historical records.

In a new GWPF report, I’ve discussed several recent attribution studies in detail. One example is a heatwave concentrated in the U.S. southwest, Mexico and Central America in May and June 2024, which generated alarmist media headlines proclaiming the event “35 times more likely” than before. The media reports were fed by an attribution study conducted by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, London.

Apart from the general limitations of attribution studies, the absurdity of such a claim can be seen in the conclusions drawn from the temperature datasets employed. The figure below shows the May to June maximum of 5-day maximum daytime temperatures in the study region from 1950 to 2024, for all three datasets; the dashed lines are 10-year moving averages.

To begin with, the study’s estimate of the region’s 2024 heatwave being 35 times more likely than in the preindustrial past is an average estimate for all three temperature datasets. But its estimate for only the ERA5 data (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 5th generation reanalysis product), which includes observations going back to 1950 rather than only 1979 in the other two datasets, is a much lower 13 times more likely.

Another reason this attribution study is in error is that it does not emphasize the uncertainty involved. It can be seen from the figure that when uncertainties in the temperature measurements are taken into account, a heatwave possibly com­parable to 2024 occurred in the early 1990s; the temperature uncertainty is indicated by the height of the boxes for each data point.

A second example is a devastating flash flood that swept through holiday camps and homes in central Texas on July 4, 2025. An attribution study conducted by ClimaMeter, a French counterpart of the UK’s Grantham Institute, concluded that “Natural variability alone cannot explain the changes in precipitation associated with this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

ClimaMeter attributed the catastrophic flooding to two factors: a purported temperature increase of up to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the flood-affected area, from the period of 1950–86 in the past to the more recent period of 1987–2023; and present-day rainfall up to 2 mm (0.08 inches) per day, or up to 7% wetter than in the past, in parts of central Texas.

But these assertions don’t stand up to scrutiny. First, the reference period of 1950–86 includes 25 of approximately 35 years of global cooling from 1940 to 1975, so that the estimated temperature increase for central Texas between 1950 and 1986 is most likely inflated.

Second, heavier rainfall does not necessarily lead to an increase in extreme flooding probability, which depends on other factors such as rainfall duration, landscape and the type of river basin. In fact, disastrous floods in Texas’ Flash Flood Alley are nothing new and have caused devastation for more than a century, as shown in the following table.

As my report discusses, extreme event attribution was developed because of the inability of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to achieve high or even medium confidence in the detection and attribution of most types of extreme weather events. This has been politi­cally problematic for climate activists, who have therefore pushed for rapid extreme event attribution in order to pursue climate litigation against fossil fuel companies.

The origins of this climate lawfare date back to a 2012 meeting of U.S. environmental advocates, climate scientists and others, which attempted to mimic strategies from the 1960s campaign against smoking tobacco.

More details of several studies and of the history can be found in the report itself.

Next: The Evidence Shows We Are Nowhere Near a Climate Tipping Point, As Alarmists Claim

No U.S. Landfalling Hurricanes in 2025 Refutes Alarmist Rhetoric on Weather Extremes

It’s like a football game where one team didn’t show up.

Or champagne without the fizz.

Or Christmas without the tree.

That was the U.S. 2025 hurricane season, in which not a single Atlantic hurricane made landfall in the U.S. And this despite the steady drumbeat of articles in the mainstream media and pronouncements by climate alarmists, proclaiming that weather extremes such as hurricanes are on the rise.

The 2025 no-show is illustrated in the figure immediately below; the second figure shows the much more active 2024 season.  

The closest to landfall of the 2025 hurricanes were tropical storms Barry (2) and Chantal (3), neither of which actually qualifies as a fully fledged hurricane. Tropical storms have sustained wind speeds up to 117 km per hour (73 mph), while the weakest Category 1 hurricanes have top wind speeds from 119 to 153 km per hour (74 to 95 mph).

Although the last time no hurricanes made landfall in the continental U.S. was in 2015, the preceding 15 years from 2000 to 2014 saw the same phenomenon no less than 6 times. Before that, the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s each saw just 2 landfalling hurricanes. Clearly there is no pattern or connection to climate change, as the globe was cooling in the 1960s and early 1970s, but has warmed since then.

The total number of all North Atlantic hurricanes or major hurricanes in 2025 and 2024 was 9 and 16, respectively. The lower number in 2025 is reflected in what is known as the Accumulated Cy­clone Energy (ACE) index for the North Atlantic Basin. The ACE index is an integrated metric combining the number of storms each year, how long they survive and how intense they be­come.

The next figure shows the ACE North Atlantic index since 1851. The highest index in the record was 259 in 1933. The 2025 no-landfall season had an ACE index of 133 (measured to December 4), which is just slightly higher than the long-term average; the index for 2024 was 162.

A comprehensive report on 2024 hurricanes by UK climate writer Paul Homewood, discussing long-term trends in North Atlantic hurricanes, found at that time no evidence for any increase in hurricane frequency, intensity or both associated with global warming. Homewood’s compilation of frequency data for North Atlantic hurricanes and major hurricanes from 1851 to 2024 is presented in the figure below.

While it may appear from the figure that hurricanes have indeed become more common since the 19th century, Homewood points out that the apparent increase “has been due to changes in observation practices over the years, rather than an actual increase” – as concluded in a 2021 study by a team of hurricane experts.  Prior to the satellite era, which dates only from the 1960s, many storms were not spotted at all.

Back then, most data on hurricane frequency in the U.S. was based on eyewitness accounts, thus excluding most hurricanes that never made landfall – as well as many landfalling ones in sparsely populated areas. And even the recording of non-landfall­ing hurricanes relied on observations made by ships at sea, which almost certainly resulted in an undercount. So it is hardly surprising that the public falsely sees today’s more complete coverage enabled by satellite technology as an uptick in hurricane occurrence.

The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primar­ily a consequence of modern technology – the Internet and smart phones – which have revo­lutionized communication and made us much more aware of such disasters than we were 50 or 100 years ago. Before 21st-century electron­ics arrived, many hurricanes and other weather extremes went unre­corded. The misperception has only been amplified by the mainstream media, eager to promote the latest climate scare.

Another aspect of hurricane measurement is maximum wind speeds. There is growing evidence, says Homewood, that wind speeds of the most powerful current hurricanes may be overestimated compared to those in the pre-satellite era, because of changing methods of measurement.

In the past, hurricane wind speeds were estimated from the central pressure of the system, which could be more readily measured. But more recently, wind speeds have been calculated from satellite and aircraft data. This has created an anomaly, because estimates of wind speeds for hurricanes now tend to be higher than past ones with similar central pressure. What this means is that wind speeds before the advent of satellite technology were underestimated in comparison with hurricanes today.

As with frequency, the data clearly reveals no evidence that hurricanes are becoming more intense, or that extremely intense ones are becoming more common, as global warming continues.

Past Global Warming More Rapid than Today’s: The Younger Dryas

Skeptics of the climate change narrative often point to periods of warming in the distant past when global temperatures were far above today’s, but CO₂ levels were lower, as ruling out human emissions of CO₂ as the cause of modern global warming. But this assertion is rejected by advocates of the CO₂ narrative, who argue that current warming is happening far more rapidly than in any past episodes.

However, there are numerous examples of rapid climate change in the historical record, some as recently as the last ice age. One of the best documented is a period of climate upheaval known as the Younger Dryas, which occurred approximately 12,900 to 11,700 years ago and temporarily reversed the earth’s recovery from frigid glacial conditions.

The effect on temperature and ice accumulation in Greenland is illustrated in the figure below, but a similar phenomenon took place all over the Northern Hemisphere. The Younger Dryas is named after a wildflower, Dryas Octopetala, that thrives in very cold European climates.

As the earth slowly warmed from the ice age, the temperature (red line) suddenly took a steep upward turn – to almost present-day levels – around 15,000 years ago. This event is known as the Oldest Dryas and is clearly visible on the left of the figure. This was soon followed by the Younger Dryas, when the temperature plunged back to near-glacial conditions and which must have been devastating for early humans.

But then the Younger Dryas ended abruptly, with temperatures soaring upward again to where they would have been had the Dryas events not happened. By many accounts (see, for example, here and here), the mean annual global temperature rose by as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) in only 10 years.

That’s an increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in just one year – far in excess of modern global warming, in which the same 1-degree Celsius increase has taken more than 50 years.

However, the Younger Dryas is not an isolated instance of abrupt climate change in our planet’s past. As I discussed in a 2024 blog post, temperatures in Greenland rose suddenly and fell again at least 25 times during the last ice age, which spanned the period from about 115,000 to 10,000 years ago. Corresponding temperature swings occurred in Antarctica too, although they were less pronounced than those in Greenland.

The striking but fleeting bursts of heat are known as Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O) events, named after palaeoclimatologists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger who examined ice cores obtained by deep drilling the Greenland ice sheet. They found a series of rapid climate fluctuations, when the earth warmed to near-interglacial conditions over just a few decades, and then gradually cooled back down to frigid ice-age temperatures.

The phenomenon can be seen in the next figure, depicting ice-core data from both Greenland and Antarctica; two sets of measurements, recorded at different locations, are shown for each. The isotopic ratios of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O, or δ¹⁸O, and ²H to ¹H, or δ²H, in the cores are used as proxies for the past surface temperature in Greenland and Antarctica, respectively. The Younger Dryas is merely the last of 25 or 26 D–O events over the past 120,000 years, albeit an extra strong one.

Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the Younger Dryas. The leading hypothesis postulates that enormous amounts of freshwater were discharged into the North Atlantic Ocean about 12,900 years ago, in the form of rapidly melting icebergs disgorged from the massive Laurentide ice sheet which covered most of Canada and the northern U.S.

This vast influx of freshwater would have disrupted the deep-ocean thermohaline circulation (shown in the figure below) by lowering ocean salinity, which in turn suppressed deepwater formation and weakened the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). Eventually, as the meltwater flux abated, the AMOC would have strengthened again, enabling the climate to recover.

A problem with this hypothesis is the timing: a second meltwater pulse, while slightly smaller than the first one 1,200 years earlier, occurred at the end of the Younger Dryas. Yet the second pulse didn't result in a similar weakening of the AMOC.

An alternative explanation is the impact hypothesis. This involves the impact of a large extraterrestrial object that burst in the atmosphere, creating fragments which struck various areas around the world 12,900 years ago. The fragments are thought to have sparked widespread wildfires and even caused a number of extinctions.

Proponents of the hypothesis point to geological layers known as “black mats,” as well as the formation of nanodiamonds, as evidence of past fiery events. But others dismiss such claims, saying that it’s equally likely that volcanic eruptions were the cause.

Next: Climate Alarmism and Net Zero Strategy on the Wane

Math Teacher, Sole Climate Scientist Unlock Mystery of Recent Global Warming Spike

For the last two years it’s baffled climate scientists, who have been besides themselves trying to explain the apparent totally unexpected spike in recent global warming. Typical headlines in the media have included (see here, here, here and here):

What’s Causing the Recent Spike in Global Temperatures?

Charting the Exceptional, Unexpected Heat of 2023 and 2024

2023, 2024 climate change records defy scientific explanation

Scientists Stumped By 2024’s Heat Spike  

At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, DC on December 10 last year, very few hands were raised when NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt asked how many attendees agreed that we understand why 2023 and 2024 were so hot. Asked a slightly different question, a majority of the audience concurred that an adequate explanation didn’t yet exist. Schmidt himself has used the phrase “uncharted territory” to describe the spike.

The spike can be viewed graphically in several ways. One way is by examining NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) satellite temperature data compiled by PhD meteorologist Roy Spencer and Alabama state climatologist John Christy:

The 2023-24 spike on the far right represents an extra strong El Niño, comparable to the one observed in 1997-98. The graph shows that the event raised the globally averaged temperature of the lower troposphere to a record 0.94 degrees Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 mean.

Another, perhaps more dramatic, way of viewing the spike is by plotting monthly temperatures for all years since 1880, compared to the preindustrial average, as depicted in the next figure. The warming surge during 2023 and 2024, which began with elevated global sea surface temperatures before the El Niño kicked in, stands out clearly.

But an Australian high school math (maths to Aussies) teacher who often comments on my blog can’t understand why everyone is so perplexed, saying that a very simple explanation exists – namely that the temperature spike was merely the result of an exceptionally strong El Niño superimposed on a steadily rising background due to global warming. The same effect will occur for any form of periodic variability.

The teacher, who goes by the screen name Braintic, points out that the phenomenon can be visualized mathematically by comparing the graph of the periodic function y = sin x with that of the function y = x + sin x, as shown in the figure below. Here x represents an assumed linear increase in global temperature with time, which may or may not be due to greenhouse gas emissions, and sin x represents periodic natural variability.

As Braintic emphasizes, the graph of y = x + sin x is a series of step increases superimposed on a rising trend. Exactly the same behavior can be seen in the first, satellite figure above.

In fact, such a staircase effect for global temperatures has actually been commented on before, by eminent New Zealand climate scientist Kevin Trenberth who made the following statement in an article published in July 2023, when the present spike was barely underway:

The combination of decadal variability and the warming trend from rising greenhouse gas emissions makes the temperature record look more like a rising staircase, rather than a steady climb.

Apparently, Trenberth’s prophetic comment – illustrated in the figure below – has gone unnoticed by his climate science colleagues, who have continued to make a mountain out of the proverbial molehill about the recent temperature surge. Trenberth remarks that the resulting temperature steps usually occur at the end of an El Niño event.

The staircase effect has been noticed by other scientists too, although none as perceptive as Braintic or Trenberth. In a 2024 blog post, I discussed a provocative hypothesis that links an upsurge in underwater seismic activity to recent warming.

The hypothesis was proposed by retired professor Arthur Viterito, whose starting point was the distinct step increases observed in satellite measurements of global warming, displayed in the first figure above. Viterito links these apparent jumps to geothermal heat emitted by volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the middle of the world’s ocean basins. However, the explanation put forward here seems much more plausible.

Another revealing observation made by Braintic is that the magnitudes of the 1997-98 and 2023-24 El Niños are virtually the same, also contrary to the prevailing wisdom among climate scientists.

The Spencer-Christy satellite data shows that, for the 1997-98 El Niño, the background temperature anomaly (departure from the 1991-2020 mean) was -0.20 degrees Celsius averaged over the previous 10 years, and +0.35 degrees Celsius during the peak year of 1998. That’s a jump of 0.55 degrees Celsius.

For the 2023-24 El Niño, the background temperature anomaly was +0.23 degrees Celsius averaged over the previous 10 years, and +0.77 degrees Celsius during the peak year of 2024. That’s an almost identical jump of 0.54 degrees Celsius.

So two down-to-earth types from down under have solved a puzzle that has mystified hundreds in the climate science community!

Next: AI Tries Its Hand at Climate Science

No Convincing Evidence That Extreme Wildfires Are Increasing

According to a new research study by scientists at the University of Tasmania, the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe more than doubled between 2003 and 2023, despite a decline in the total worldwide area burned annually. The study authors link this trend to climate change.

Such a claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, however. First, the authors seem unaware of the usual definition of climate change, which is a long-term shift in weather patterns over a period of at least 30 years. Their finding of a 21-year trend in extreme wildfires is certainly valid, but the study interval is too short to draw any conclusions about climate.

Paradoxically, the researchers mention an earlier 2017 study of theirs, stating that the 12-year period of that study of extreme wildfires was indeed too short to identify any temporal climate trend. Why they think 21 years is any better is puzzling!

Second, the study makes no attempt to compare wildfire frequency and magnitude over the last 21 years with those from decades ago, when there were arguably as many hot-burning fires as now. Such a comparison would allow the claim of more frequent extreme wildfires today to be properly evaluated.

Although today’s satellite observations of wildfire intensity far outnumber the observations made before the satellite era, there’s still plenty of old data that could be analyzed. Satellites measure what is called the FRP (fire radiative power), which is the total fire radiative energy less the energy dissipated through convection and conduction. The older FI (fire intensity) also measures the energy released by a fire, and is the rate of energy released per unit time per unit length of fire front; FRP, usually measured in MW (megawatts), is obviously related to FI.

The study authors define extreme wildfires as those with daily FRPs exceeding the 99.99th percentile. Satellite FRP data for all fires in the study period was collected in pixels 1 km on a side, each retained pixel containing just one wildfire “hotspot” after duplicate hotspots were excluded.

The total raw dataset included 88.4 million hotspot observations, and this number was reduced to 30.7 million “events” by summing individual pixels in cells approximately 22 x 22 km on a side. Of this 30.7 million, just 2,913 events satisfied the extreme wildfire 99.99th percentile requirement. The average of the study’s summed FRP values for the top 20 events was in the range of 50,000-150,000 MW, corresponding to individual FRPs of about 100-300 MW in a 1 x 1 km pixel.   

A glance at the massive datatset shows individual FRP values ranging from the single digits to several hundred MW. If the 20 hottest wildfires during 2003-23 had FRPs above 100 MW, most of the other 2,893 fires above the 99.99th percentile would have had lower FRPs, in the tens and teens.

While intensity data for historical wildfires is sparse, there are occasionally numbers mentioned in the literature. One example can be found in a 2021 paper that reviews past large-area high-intensity wildfires that have occurred in arid Australian grasslands. The paper’s authors state that:

Contemporary fire cycles in these grasslands (spinifex) are characterized by periodic wildfires that are large in scale, high in intensity (e.g., up to c. 14,000 kW) … and driven by fuel accumulations that occur following exceptionally high rainfall years.

An FRP of 14,000 kW, or 14 MW, is comparable to that of many of the 2,893 FRPs for modern extreme wildfires (excluding the top 20) in the Tasmanian study. The figure below shows the potential fire intensity of bushfires across Australia, the various colors indicating the FI range. As you can see, the most intense bushfires occur in the southeast and southwest of the country; FI values in those regions can exceed 100 MW per meter, which correspond to FRPs of about 30 MW.

And, although it doesn’t cite FI numbers, a 1976 paper on Australian bushfires from 1945 to 1975 makes the statement that:

The fire control authorities recognise that no fire suppression system has been developed in the world which can halt the forward spread of a high-intensity fire burning in continuous heavy fuels under the influence of extreme fire weather.

High- and extremely high-intensity wildfires in Australia at least are nothing new, and the same is no doubt true for other countries included in the Tasmanian study. The study authors remark correctly that higher temperatures due to global warming and the associated drying out of vegetation and forests both increase wildfire intensity. But there have been equally hot and dry periods in the past, such as the 1930s, when larger areas burned.

So there’s nothing remarkable about the present study. Even though it’s difficult to find good wildfire data in the pre-satellite era, the study authors could easily extend their work back to the onset of satellite measurements in the 1970s.

Next: The Scientific Reality of the Quest for Net Zero

Unexpected Sea Level Fluctuations Due to Gravity, New Evidence Shows

Although the average global sea level is rising as the world warms, the rate of rise is far from uniform across the planet and, in some places, is negative – that is, the sea level is falling. Recent research has revealed the role that localized gravity plays in this surprising phenomenon.   

The researchers used gravity-sensing satellites to track how changes in water retention on land can cause unexpected fluctuations in sea levels. While 75% of the extra water in the world’s oceans comes from melting ice sheets and mountain glaciers, they say, the other 25% is due to variations in water storage in ice-free land regions. These include changes in dam water levels, water used in agriculture, and extraction of groundwater which either evaporates or flows into the sea via rivers.

Water is heavy but, the researchers point out, moves easily. Thus local changes in sea level aren't just due to melting ice sheets or glaciers, but also reflect changes in the mass of water on nearby land. For example, the land gets heavier during large floods, which boosts its gravity and causes a temporary rise in local sea level. The opposite occurs during droughts or groundwater extraction, when the land becomes lighter, gravity falls and the local sea level drops.

A similar exchange of water explains why the sea level around Antarctica falls as the massive Antarctic ice sheet melts. The total mass of ice in the sheet is a whopping 24 million gigatonnes (26 million gigatons), enough to exert a significant gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean, making the sea level higher than it would be with no ice sheet. But as the ice sheet melts, this gravitational pull weakens and so the local sea level falls.

At the same time, however, distant sea levels rise in compensation. They also rise continuously over the long term because of the thermal expansion of seawater as it warms; added meltwater from both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets; and land subsidence caused by groundwater extraction, resulting from rapid urbanization and population growth. In an earlier post, I discussed how sea levels are affected by land subsidence.

The research also reveals how the pumping of groundwater in ice-free places, such as Mumbai in India and Taipei in Taiwan, can almost mask the sea level rise expected from distant ice sheet melting. Conversely, at Charleston on the U.S. Atlantic coast, where groundwater extraction is minimal, sea level rise appears to be accelerated.

All these and other factors contribute to substantial regional variation in sea levels across the globe. This is depicted in the following figure which shows the average rate of sea level rise, measured by satellite, between 1993 and 2014.

Clearly visible is the falling sea level in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, as well as elevated rates of rise in the western Pacific and the east coast of North America. Note, however, that the figure is only for the period between 1993 and 2014. Over longer time scales, the global average rate of rise fluctuates considerably, most likely due to the gravitational effects of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Yet another gravitational influence on sea levels is La Niña, the cool phase of the ENSO (El Niño – Southern Oscillation) ocean cycle. The arrival of La Niña often brings torrential rain and catastrophic flooding to the Pacific northwest of the U.S., northern South America and eastern Australia. As mentioned before, the flooding temporarily enhances the gravitational pull of the land. This raises local sea levels, resulting in a lowering of more distant sea levels – the opposite of the effects from the melting Antarctic ice sheet or from groundwater extraction.

The influence of La Niña is illustrated in the figure below, showing the rate of sea level rise during the two most recent strong La Niñas, in 2010-12 and 2020-23. (Note that the colors in the sea level trend are reversed compared to the previous figure.) A significant local increase in sea level can be seen around both northern South America and eastern Australia, while the global level fell, especially in the 2010-12 La Niña event. Consecutive La Niñas in those years dumped so much rain on land that the average sea level worldwide fell about 5 mm (0.2 inches).

The current rate of sea level rise is estimated at 3.4 mm per year. Of this, the researchers calculate that over-extraction of groundwater alone contributes approximately 1 mm per year – meaning that the true rate of rise, predominantly from ice sheet melting and thermal expansion, is about 2.4 mm per year. Strong La Niñas lower this rate even more temporarily.

But paradoxically, as discussed above, groundwater extraction is causing local sea levels to fall. It’s local sea levels that matter to coastal communities and their engineers and planners.

Next: No Convincing Evidence That Extreme Wildfires Are Increasing

Was the Permian Extinction Caused by Global Warming or CO2 Starvation?

Of all the mass extinctions in the earth’s distant past, by far the greatest and most drastic was the Permian Extinction, which occurred during the Permian between 300 and 250 million years ago. Also known as the Great Dying, the Permian Extinction killed off an estimated 57% of all biological families including rainforest flora, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species that existed before the Permian’s last million years. What was the cause of this devastation?

The answer to that question is controversial among paleontologists. For many years, it has been thought the extinction was a result of ancient global warming. During Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, the global average temperature has fluctuated wildly, from “hothouse” temperatures as much as 14 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) above today’s level of about 14.8 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit), to “icehouse” temperatures 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) below.

Hottest of all was a sudden temperature spike from icehouse conditions at the onset of the Permian to extreme hothouse temperatures at its end, as can be seen in the figure below. The figure is a 2021 estimate of ancient temperatures derived from oxygen isotopic measurements combined with lithologic climate indicators, such as coals, sedimentary rocks, minerals and glacial deposits. The barely visible time scale is in millions of years before the present.

The geological event responsible for this enormous surge in temperature is a massive volcanic eruption known as the Siberian Traps. The eruption lasted at least 1 million years and resulted in the outpouring of voluminous quantities of basaltic lava from rifts in West Siberia; the lava buried over 50% of Siberia in a blanket up to 6.5 km (4 miles) deep.

Volcanic CO₂ released by the eruptions was supplemented by CO₂ produced during combustion of thick, buried coal deposits that lay along the subterranean path of the erupting lava. This stupendous outburst boosted the atmospheric CO₂ level from a very low 200 ppm (parts per million) to more than 2,000 ppm, as shown in the next figure.

The conventional wisdom in the past has been that this geologically sudden, gigantic increase in the CO₂ level sent the global thermometer soaring – a conclusion sensationalized by mainstream media such as the New York Times. However, that argument ignores the saturation effect for atmospheric CO₂, which limits CO₂-induced warming to that produced by the first few hundred ppm of the greenhouse gas.

While the composition of the atmosphere 250 million years ago may have been different from today’s, the saturation effect would still have occurred. There’s no question, nevertheless, that end-Permian temperatures were as high as we think, whatever the cause. That’s because the temperatures are based on the highly reliable method of measuring oxygen ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O isotopic ratios in ancient microfossils.

Such hothouse conditions would have undoubtedly caused the extinction of various species; the severity of the extinction event is revealed by subsequent gaps in the fossil record. Organic carbon accumulated in the deep ocean, depleting oxygen and thus wiping out many marine species such as phytoplankton, brachiopods and reef-building corals. On land, vertebrates such as amphibians and early reptiles, as well as diverse tropical and temperate rainforest flora, disappeared.

All from extreme global warming? Not so fast, says ecologist Jim Steele.

Steele attributes the Permian extinction not to an excess of CO₂ at the end of this geological period, but rather to a lack of it during the preceding Carboniferous and the early Permian, as can be seen in the figure above. He explains that all life is dependent on a supply of CO₂, and that when its concentration drops below 150 ppm, photosynthesis ceases, and plants and living creatures die.

Steele argues that because of CO₂ starvation over this interval, many species had either already become extinct, or were on the verge of extinction, long before the planet heated up so abruptly.

In comparison to other periods, the Permian saw the appearance of very few new species, as illustrated in the following figure. For example, far more new species evolved (and became extinct) during the earlier Ordovician, when CO₂ levels were much, much higher but an icehouse climate prevailed.

When CO₂ concentrations reached their lowest levels ever in the early Permian, phytoplankton fossils were extremely rare – some 40 million years or so before the later hothouse spike, which is when the conventional narrative claims the species became extinct. And Steele says that 35-47% of marine invertebrate genera went extinct, as well as almost 80% of land vertebrates, from 7 to 17 million years before the mass extinction at the end of the Permian.

Furthermore, Steele adds, the formation of the supercontinent Pangaea (shown to the left), which occurred during the Carboniferous, had a negative effect on biodiversity. Pangea removed unique niches from its converging island-like microcontinents, again long before the end-Permian.

Next: Unexpected Sea Level Fluctuations Due to Gravity, New Evidence Shows

El Niño and La Niña May Have Their Origins on the Sea Floor

One of the least understood aspects of our climate is the ENSO (El Niño – Southern Oscillation) ocean cycle, whose familiar El Niño (warm) and La Niña (cool) events cause drastic fluctuations in global temperature, along with often catastrophic weather in tropical regions of the Pacific and delayed effects elsewhere. A recent research paper attributes the phenomenon to tectonic and seismic activity under the oceans.

Principal author Valentina Zharkova, formerly at the UK’s Northumbria University, is a prolific researcher into natural sources of global warming, such as the sun’s internal magnetic field and the effect of solar activity on the earth’s ozone layer. Most of her studies involve sophisticated mathematical analysis and her latest paper is no exception.

Zharkova and her coauthor Irina Vasilieva make use of a technique known as wavelet analysis, combined with correlation analysis, to identify key time periods in the ONI (Oceanic Niño Index). The index, which measures the strength of El Niño and La Niña events, is the 3-monthly average difference from the long-term average sea surface temperature in the ENSO region of the tropical Pacific. Shown in the figure below are values of the index from 1950 to 2016.

Wavelet analysis supplies information both on which frequencies are present in a time series signal, and on when those frequencies occur, unlike a Fourier transform which decomposes a signal only into its frequency components.

Using the wavelet approach, Zharkova and Vasilieva have identified two separate ENSO cycles: one with a shorter period of 4-5 years, and a longer one with a period of 12 years. This is illustrated in the next figure which shows the ONI at top left; the wavelet spectrum of the index at bottom left, with the wavelet “power” indicated by the colored bar at top right; and the global wavelet spectrum at bottom right. 

The authors link the 4- to 5-year ENSO cycle to the motion of tectonic plates, a connection that has been made by other researchers. The 12-year ENSO cycle identified by their wavelet analysis they attribute to underwater volcanic activity; it does not correspond to any solar cycle or other known natural source of warming.

The following figure depicts an index (in red, right-hand scale), calculated by the authors, that measures the total annual volcanic strength and duration of all submarine volcanic eruptions from 1950 to 2023, superimposed on the ONI (in black) over the same period. A weak correlation can be seen between the ENSO ONI and undersea volcanic activity, the correlation being strongest at 12-year intervals.

Zharkova and Vasilieva estimate the 12-year ENSO correlation coefficient at 25%, a connection they label as “rather significant.” As I discussed in a recent post, retired physical geographer Arthur Viterito has proposed that submarine volcanic activity is the principal driver of global warming, via a strengthening of the thermohaline circulation that redistributes seawater and heat around the globe.

Zharkova and Vasilieva, however, link the volcanic eruptions causing the 12-year boost in the ENSO index to tidal gravitational forces on the earth from the giant planet Jupiter and from the sun. Jupiter of course orbits the sun and spins on an axis, just like Earth. But the sun is not motionless either: it too rotates on an axis and, because it’s tugged by the gravitational pull of the Jupiter and Saturn giants, orbits in a small but complex spiral around the center of the solar system.

Jupiter was selected by the researchers because its orbital period is 12 years - the same as the longer ENSO cycle identified by their wavelet analysis.

That Jupiter’s gravitational pull on Earth influences volcanic activity is clear from the next figure, in which the frequency of all terrestrial volcanic eruptions (underwater and surface) is plotted against the distance of Earth from Jupiter; the distance is measured in AU (astronomical units), where 1 AU is the average earth-sun distance. The thick blue line is for all eruptions, while the thick yellow line shows the eruption frequency in just the ENSO region.

What stands out is the increased volcanic frequency when Jupiter is at one of two different distances from Earth: 4.5 AU and 6 AU. The distance of 4.5 AU is Jupiter’s closest approach to Earth, while 6 AU is Jupiter’s distance when the sun is closest to Earth and located between Earth and Jupiter. The correlation coefficient between the 12-year ENSO cycle and the Earth-Jupiter distance is 12%.  

For the gravitational pull of the sun, Zharkova and Vasilieva find there is a 15% correlation between the 12-year ENSO cycle and the Earth-sun distance in January, when Earth’s southern hemisphere (where ENSO occurs) is closest to the sun. Although these solar system correlations are weak, Zharkova and Vasilieva say they are high considering the vast distances involved.

Next: Shrinking Cloud Cover: Cause or Effect of Global Warming?

The Deceptive Catastrophizing of Weather Extremes: (2) Economics and Politics

In my previous post, I reviewed the science described in environmentalist Ted Nordhaus’ four-part essay, “Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?”, and how science is being misused to falsely link weather extremes to climate change. Nordhaus also describes how the perception of a looming climate catastrophe, exemplified by extreme weather events, is being fanned by misconceptions about the economic costs of natural disasters and by environmental politics – both the subject of this second post.

Between 1990 and 2017, the global cost of weather-related disasters increased by 74%, according to an analysis by Roger Pielke, Jr., a former professor at the University of Colorado. Economic loss studies of natural disasters have been quick to blame human-caused climate change for this increase.

But Nordhaus makes the point that, if the cost of natural disasters is increasing due to global warming, then you would expect the cost of weather-related disasters to be rising faster than that of disasters not related to weather. Yet the opposite is true. States Nordhaus: “The cost of disasters unrelated [my italics] to weather increased 182% between 1990 and 2017, more than twice as fast as for weather-related disasters.” This is evident in the figure below, which shows both costs from 1990 to 2018.

Nordhaus goes on to declare:

In truth, it is economic growth, not climate change, that is driving the boom in economic damage from both weather-related and non-weather-related natural disasters.

Once the losses are corrected for population gain and the ever-escalating value of property in harm’s way, there is very little evidence to support any connection between natural dis­asters and global warming. Nordhaus explains that accelerating urbanization since 1950 has led to an enormous shift of the global population, economic activity, and wealth into river and coastal floodplains.

On the influence of environmental politics in connecting weather extremes to global warming, Nordhaus has this to say:

… the perception among many audiences that these events centrally implicate anthropogenic warming has been driven by ... a sustained campaign by environmental advocates to move the proximity of climate catastrophe in the public imagination from the uncertain future into the present.

The campaign had its origins in a 2012 meeting of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists and others in La Jolla, California, convened by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The specific purpose of the gathering was “to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.”

This was clearly an attempt to mimic the 1960s campaign against smoking tobacco because of its link to lung cancer. However, the correlation between smoking and lung cancer is extraordinarily high, leaving no doubt about causation. The same cannot be said for any connection between extreme weather events and climate change.

Nevertheless, it was at the La Jolla meeting that the idea of reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change, as I discussed in my previous post, was born. Nordhaus discerns that a subsequent flurry of attribution reports, together with a fortuitous restructuring of the media at the same time:

… have given journalists license to ignore the enormous body of research and evidence on the long-term drivers of natural disasters and the impact that climate change has had on them.

It was but a short journey from there for the media to promote the notion, favored by “much of the environmental cognoscenti” as Nordhaus puts it, that “a climate catastrophe is now unfolding, and that it is demonstrable in every extreme weather event.”

The media have undergone a painful transformation in the last few decades, with the proliferation of cable news networks followed by the arrival of the Internet. The much broader marketplace has resulted in media outlets tailoring their content to the political values and ideological preferences of their audiences. This means, says Nordhaus, that sensationalism such as catastrophic climate news – especially news linking extreme weather to anthropogenic warming – plays a much larger role than before.

As I discussed in a 2023 post, the ever increasing hype in nearly all mainstream media coverage of weather extremes is a direct result of advocacy by well-heeled benefactors like the Rockefeller, Walton and Ford foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, has begun funding the hiring of climate reporters to “fight the climate crisis.”

A new coalition, founded in 2019, of more than 500 media outlets is dedicated to producing “more informed and urgent climate stories.” The CCN (Covering Climate Now) coalition includes three of the world’s largest news agencies — Reuters, Bloomberg and Agence France Presse – and claims to reach an audience of two billion.

Concludes Nordhaus:

[These new dynamics] are self-reinforcing and have led to the widespread perception among elite audiences that the climate is spinning out of control. New digital technology bombards us with spectacular footage of extreme weather events. … Catastrophist climate coverage generates clicks from elite audiences.

Next: El Niño and La Niña May Have Their Origins on the Sea Floor

The Deceptive Catastrophizing of Weather Extremes: (1) The Science

In these pages, I’ve written extensively about the lack of scientific evidence for any increase in extreme weather due to global warming. But I’ve said relatively little about the media’s exploitation of the mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening be­cause of climate change.

A recent four-part essay addresses the latter issue, under the title “Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?”  The essay was penned by Ted Nordhaus, well-known environmentalist and director of the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California, which he co-founded with Michael Shellenberger in 2007. Its authorship was a surprise to me, since the Breakthrough Institute generally supports the narrative of largely human-caused warming.

Nonetheless, Nordhaus’s thoughtful essay takes a mostly skeptical – and realistic – view of hype about weather extremes, stating that:

We know that anthropogenic warming can increase rainfall and storm surges from a hurricane, or make a heat wave hotter. But there is little evidence that warming could create a major storm, flood, drought, or heat wave where otherwise none would have occurred, …

Nordhaus goes on to make the insightful statement that “The main effect that climate change has on extreme weather and natural disasters … is at the margins.” By this, he means that a heat wave in which daily high temperatures for, say, a week reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) or above in the absence of climate change would instead stay above perhaps 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) with our present level of global warming.

His assertion is illustrated in the following, rather congested figure from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s Sixth Assessment Report. The purple curve shows the average annual hottest daily maximum temperature on land, while the green and black curves indicate the land and global average annual mean temperature, respectively; temperatures are measured relative to their 1850–1900 means.

However, while global warming is making heat waves marginally hotter, Nordhaus says there is no evidence that extreme weather events are on the rise, as so frequently trumpeted by the mainstream media. Although climate change will make some weather events such as heavy rainfall more intense than they otherwise would be, the global area burned by wildfires has actually decreased and there has been no detectable global trend in river floods, nor meteorological drought, nor hurricanes.

Adds Nordhaus:

The main source of climate variability in the past, present, and future, in all places and with regard to virtually all climatic phenomena, is still overwhelmingly non-human: all the random oscillations in climatic extremes that occur in a highly complex climate system across all those highly diverse geographies and topographies.

The misconception that weather extremes are increasing when they are not has been amplified by attribution studies, which use a new statistical method and climate models to assign specific extremes to either natural variabil­ity or human causes. Such studies involve highly questionable methodology that has several shortcomings.

Even so, the media and some climate scientists have taken scientifically unjustifiable liberties with attribution analysis in order to link extreme events to climate change – such as attempting to quantify how much more likely global warming made the occurrence of a heat wave that resulted in high temperatures above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of five days in a specific location.

But, explains Nordhaus, that is not what an attribution study actually estimates. Rather, “it quantifies changes in the likelihood of the heat wave reaching the precise level of extremity that occurred.” In the hypothetical case above, the heat wave would have happened anyway in the absence of climate change, but it would have resulted in high temperatures above 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) over five days instead of above 38 degrees.

The attribution method estimates the probability of a heat wave or other extreme event occurring that is incrementally hotter or more severe than the one that would have occurred without climate change, not the probability of the heat wave or other event occurring at all.

Nonetheless, as we’ll see in the next post, the company WWA (World Weather Attribution), founded by German climatologist Friederike Otto, has utilized this new technology to rapidly produce science that does connect weather extremes to climate change – with the explicit goal of shaping news coverage. Coverage of climate-related disasters now routinely features WWA analysis, which is often employed to suggest that climate change is the cause of such events.

Next: The Deceptive Catastrophizing of Weather Extremes: (2) Economics and Politics

Extreme Weather in the Distant Past Was Just as Frequent and Intense as Today’s

In a recent series of blog posts, I showed how actual scientific data and reports in newspaper archives over the past century demonstrate clearly that the frequency and severity of extreme weather events have not increased during the last 100 years. But there’s also plenty of evidence of weather extremes comparable to today’s dating back centuries and even millennia.

The evidence consists largely of reconstructions based on proxies such as tree rings, sediment cores and leaf fossils, although some evidence is anecdotal. Reconstruction of historical hurricane patterns, for example, confirms what I noted in an earlier post, that past hurricanes were even more frequent and stronger than those today.

The figure below shows a proxy measurement for hurricane strength of landfalling tropical cyclones – the name for hurricanes down under – that struck the Chillagoe limestone region in northeastern Queensland, Australia between 1228 and 2003. The proxy was the ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O isotopic levels in carbonate cave stalagmites, a ratio which is highly depleted in tropical cyclone rain.

What is plotted here is the ¹⁸O/¹⁶O depletion curve, in parts per thousand (‰); the thick horizontal line at -2.50 ‰ denotes Category 3 or above events, which have a top wind speed of 178 km per hour (111 mph) or greater. It’s clear that far more (seven) major tropical cyclones impacted the Chillagoe region in the period from 1600 to 1800 than in any period since, at least until 2003. Indeed, the strongest cyclone in the whole record occurred during the 1600 to 1800 period, and only one major cyclone was recorded from 1800 to 2003.

Another reconstruction of past data is that of unprecedently long and devastating “megadroughts,” which have occurred in western North America and in Europe for thousands of years. The next figure depicts a reconstruction from tree ring proxies of the drought pattern in central Europe from 1000 to 2012, with observational data from 1901 to 2018 superimposed. Dryness is denoted by negative values, wetness by positive values.

The authors of the reconstruction point out that the droughts from 1400 to 1480 and from 1770 to 1840 were much longer and more severe than those of the 21st century. A reconstruction of megadroughts in California back to 800 was featured in a previous post.

An ancient example of a megadrought is the 7-year drought in Egypt approximately 4,700 years ago that resulted in widespread famine, known as Famine Stela. The water level in the Nile River dropped so low that the river failed to flood adjacent farmlands as it normally does each year, resulting in drastically reduced crop yields. The event is recorded in a hieroglyphic inscription on a granite block located on an island in the Nile.

At the other end of the wetness scale, a Christmas Eve flood in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany in 1717 drowned over 13,000 people – many more than died in the much hyped Pakistan floods of 2022.

Although most tornadoes occur in the U.S., they have been documented in the UK and other countries for centuries. In 1577, North Yorkshire in England experienced a tornado of intensity T6 on the TORRO scale, which corresponds approximately to EF4 on the Fujita scale, with wind speeds of 259-299 km per hour (161-186 mph). The tornado destroyed cottages, trees, barns, hayricks and most of a church. EF4 tornadoes are relatively rare in the U.S.: of 1,000 recorded tornadoes from 1950 to 1953, just 46 were EF4.

Violent thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes have also been reported throughout history. An associated hailstorm which struck the Dutch town of Dordrecht in 1552 was so violent that residents “thought the Day of Judgement was coming” when hailstones weighing up to a few pounds fell on the town. A medieval depiction of the event is shown in the following figure.

Such historical storms make a mockery of the 2023 claim by a climate reporter that “Recent violent storms in Italy appear to be unprecedented for intensity, geographical extensions and damages to the community.” The thunderstorms in question produced hailstones the size of tennis balls, merely comparable to those that fell on Dordrecht centuries earlier. And the storms hardly compare with a hailstorm in India in 1888, which actually killed 246 people.

Next: Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: (10) Global Warming Comes from Water Vapor, Not CO2

Antarctica Sending Mixed Climate Messages

Antarctica, the earth’s coldest and least-populated continent, is an enigma when it comes to global warming.

While the huge Antarctic ice sheet is known to be shedding ice around its edges, it may be growing in East Antarctica. Antarctic sea ice, after expanding slightly for at least 37 years, took a tumble in 2017 and reached a record low in 2023. And recent Antarctic temperatures have swung from record highs to record lows. No one is sure what’s going on.

The influence of global warming on Antarctica’s temperatures is uncertain. A 2021 study concluded that both East Antarctica and West Antarctica have cooled since the beginning of the satellite era in 1979, at rates of 0.70 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade and 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, respectively. But over the same period, the Antarctic Peninsula (on the left in the adjacent figure) has warmed at a rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius (0.32 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade.

During the southern summer, two locations in East Antarctica recorded record low temperatures early this year. At the Concordia weather station, located at the 4 o’clock position from the South Pole, the mercury dropped to -51.2 degrees Celsius (-60.2 degrees Fahrenheit) on January 31, 2023. This marked the lowest January temperature recorded anywhere in Antarctica since the first meteorological observations there in 1956.

Two days earlier on January 29, 2023, the nearby Vostok station, about 400 km (250) miles closer to the South Pole, registered a low temperature of -48.7 degrees Celsius (-55.7 degrees Fahrenheit), that location’s lowest January temperature since 1957. Vostok has the distinction of reporting the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and also the world record low, of -89.2 degrees Celsius (-128.6 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 21, 1984.

Barely a year before, however, East Antarctica had experienced a heat wave, when the temperature soared to -10.1 degrees Celsius (13.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Concordia station on March 18, 2022. This balmy reading was the highest recorded hourly temperature at that weather station since its establishment in 1996, and 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit) above the previous March record high there. Remarkably, the temperature remained above the previous March record for three consecutive days, including nighttime.

Antarctic sea ice largely disappears during the southern summer and reaches its maximum extent in September, at the end of winter. The two figures below illustrate the winter maximum extent in 2023 (left) and the monthly variation of Antarctic sea ice extent this year from its March minimum to the September maximum (right).

The black curve on the right depicts the median extent from 1981 to 2010, while the dashed red and blue curves represent 2022 and 2023, respectively. It's clear that Antarctic sea ice in 2023 has lagged the median and even 2022 by a wide margin throughout the year. The decline in summer sea ice extent has now persisted for six years, as seen in the following figure which shows the average monthly extent since satellite measurements began, as an anomaly from the median value.

The overall trend from 1979 to 2023 is an insignificant 0.1% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 median. Yet a prolonged  increase above the median occurred from 2008 to 2017, followed by the six-year decline since then. The current downward trend has sparked much debate and several possible reasons have been put forward, not all of which are linked to global warming. One analysis attributes the big losses of sea ice in 2017 and 2023 to extra strong El Niños.

Melting of the Antarctic ice sheet is currently causing sea levels to rise by 0.4 mm (16 thousandths of an inch) per year, contributing about 10% of the global total. But the ice loss is not uniform across the continent, as seen in the next figure showing changes in Antarctic ice sheet mass since 2002.

In the image on the right, light blue shades indicate ice gain while orange and red shades indicate ice loss. White denotes areas where there has been very little or no change in ice mass since 2002; gray areas are floating ice shelves whose mass change is not measured by this satellite method.

You can see that East Antarctica has experienced modest amounts of ice gain, which is due to warming-enhanced snowfall. Nevertheless, this gain has been offset by significant loss of ice in West Antarctica over the same period, largely from melting of glaciers – which is partly caused by active volcanoes underneath the continent. While the ice sheet mass declined at a fairly constant rate of 133 gigatonnes (147 gigatons) per year from 2002 to 2020, it appears that the total mass may have reached a minimum and is now on the rise again.

Despite the hullabaloo about its melting ice sheet and shrinking sea ice, what happens next in Antarctica continues to be a scientific mystery.

Next: Two Statistical Studies Attempt to Cast Doubt on the CO2 Narrative

No Evidence That Today’s El Niños Are Any Stronger than in the Past

The current exceptionally strong El Niño has revived discussion of a question which comes up whenever the phenomenon recurs every two to seven years: are stronger El Niños caused by global warming? While recent El Niño events suggest that in fact they are, a look at the historical record shows that even stronger El Niños occurred in the distant past.

El Niño is the warm phase of ENSO (the El Niño – Southern Oscillation), a natural ocean cycle that causes drastic temperature fluctuations and other climatic effects in tropical regions of the Pacific. Its effect on atmospheric temperatures is illustrated in the figure below. Warm spikes such as those in 1997-98, 2009-10, 2014-16 and 2023 are due to El Niño; cool spikes like those in 1999-2001 and 2008-09 are due to the cooler La Niña phase.

A slightly different temperature record, of selected sea surface temperatures in the El Niño region of the Pacific, averaged yearly from 1901 to 2017, is shown in the next figure from a 2019 study.

Here the baseline is the mean sea surface temperature over the 1901-2017 interval, and the black dashed line at 0.6 degrees Celsius is defined by the study authors as the threshhold for an El Niño event. The different colors represent various regional types of El Niño; the gray bars mark warm years in which no El Niño developed.

This year’s gigantic spike in the tropospheric temperature to 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) – a level that set alarm bells ringing – is clearly the strongest El Niño by far in the satellite record. Comparison of the above two figures shows that it is also the strongest since 1901. So it does indeed appear that El Niños are becoming stronger as the globe warms, especially since 1960.

Nevertheless, such a conclusion is ill-considered as there is evidence from an earlier study that strong El Niños have been plentiful in the earth’s past.

As I described in a previous post, a team of German paleontologists established a complete record of El Niño events going back 20,000 years, 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 in the country caused by heavy El Niño rainfall.

The research team classified the flood 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.

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 (center). Sea surface temperatures were derived from chemical analysis of the marine sediment cores.

You can see that 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 as reflected in the previous figure.

If you examine the lithic plots carefully, you can also see that the many strong El Niños approximately 2,000 and 10,000 years ago were several times stronger (note the logarithmic concentration scale) than current El Niños on the far left of the figure. Those two periods were warmer than today as well, being the Roman Warm Period and the Holocene Thermal Maximum, respectively.

So there is nothing remarkable about recent strong El Niños.

Despite this, the climate science community is still uncertain about the global warming question. The 2019 study described above found that since the 1970s, formation of El Niños has shifted from the eastern to the western Pacific, where ocean temperatures are higher. From this observation, the study authors concluded that future El Niños may intensify. However, they qualified their conclusion by stating that:

… the root causes of the observed background changes in the later part of the 20th century remain elusive … Natural variability may have added significant contributions to the recent warming.

Recently, an international team of 17 scientists has conducted a theoretical study of El Niños since 1901 using 43 climate models, most of which showed the same increase in El Niño strength since 1960 as the actual observations. But again, the researchers were unable to link this increase to global warming, declaring that:

Whether such changes are linked to anthropogenic warming, however, is largely unknown.

The researchers say that resolution of the question requires improved climate models and a better understanding of El Niño itself. Some climate models show El Niño becoming weaker in the future.

Next: Antarctica Sending Mixed Climate Messages

Estimates of Economic Losses from El Niños Are Far-fetched

A recent study makes the provocative claim that some of the most intense past El Niño events cost the global economy from $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the following years. That’s two orders of magnitude higher than previous estimates, but almost certainly wrong.

One reason for the enormous difference is that earlier estimates only examined the immediate economic toll, whereas the new study estimated cumulative losses over the five-year period after a warming El Niño. The study authors say, correctly, that the economic downturn triggered by this naturally occurring climate cycle can last that long.

However, even when this drawn-out effect is taken into account, the new study’s cost estimates are still one order of magnitude greater than other estimates in the scientific literature, such as those of the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., who studies natural disasters. His estimated time series of total weather disaster losses as a proportion of global GDP from 1990 to 2020 is shown in the figure below.

The accounting used in the new study includes the “spatiotemporal heterogeneity of El Niño teleconnections,” teleconnections being links between weather phenomena at widely separated locations. Country-level teleconnections are based on correlations between temperature or rainfall in that country, and indexes commonly used to define El Niño and its cooling counterpart, La Niña. Teleconnections are strongest in the tropics and weaker in midlatitudes.

The researchers’ accounting procedure estimates total losses from the 1997-98 El Niño at a staggering $5.7 trillion by 2003, compared with a previous estimate of only $36 billion in the immediate aftermath of the event. For the earlier 1982-83 El Niño, the study estimates the total costs at $4.1 trillion by 1988. The calculated global distribution of GDP losses following both events is illustrated in the next figure.

To see how implausible these trillion-dollar estimates are, it’s only necessary to refer to Pielke’s graph above, which relies on official data from the insurance industry (including leading reinsurance company Munich Re) and the World Bank. His graph indicates that the peak loss from all 1998 weather disasters was 0.38% of global GDP for that year.

As El Niño was not the only disaster in 1998 – others include floods and hurricanes – this number represents an upper limit for instant El Niño losses. Using a value for global GDP in 1998 of $31,533 billion in current U.S. dollars, 0.38% was a maximum instant loss of $120 billion. Over a subsequent 5-year period, the maximum loss would have been 5 times as much, or $600 billion assuming the same annual loss each year which is undoubtedly an overestimate.

This inflated estimate of $600 billion is still an order of magnitude smaller than the study’s $5.7 trillion by 2003. In reality, the discrepancy is larger yet because the actual 5-year loss was likely much less than $600 billion as just discussed.

Two other observations about Pielke’s graph cast further doubt on the methodology of the researchers’ accounting procedure. First, the strongest El Niños in that 21-year period were those in 1997-98, 2009-10 and 2014-16. The graph does indeed show peaks in 1998-99 and in 2017, one year after a substantial El Niño – but not in 2011 following the 2009-10 event. This alone suggests that financial losses from El Niño are not as large as the researchers think.

Furthermore, there’s a strong peak in 2005, the largest in the 21 years of the graph, which doesn’t correspond to any substantial El Niño. The implication is that losses from other types of weather disaster can dominate losses from El Niño.

It’s important to get an accurate handle on economic losses from El Niño and other weather disasters, in case global warming exacerbates such events in the future – although, as I’ve written extensively, there’s no evidence to date that this is happening yet. Effects of El Niño include catastrophic flooding in the western Americas, flooding or episodic droughts in Australia, and coral bleaching.

The study authors stand by their research, however, estimating that the 2023 El Niño could hold back the global economy by $3 trillion over the next five years, a figure not included in their paper. But others are more skeptical. Climate economist Gary Yohe commented that “the enormous estimates cannot be explained simply by forward-looking accounting.” And Mike McPhaden, a senior scientist at NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) who was not involved in the research, called the study “provocative.”

Next: Targeting Farmers for Livestock Greenhouse Gas Emissions Is Misguided

Has the Mainstream Media Suddenly Become Honest in Climate Reporting?

Not so long ago I excoriated the mainstream media for misleading the public about perfectly normal extreme weather events. So ABC News’ August 14 article headlined “Why climate change can't be blamed for the Maui wildfires” came as a shock, a seeming media epiphany on the lack of connection between extreme weather and climate change.

But my amazement was short-lived. The next day the news network succumbed to a social media pressure campaign by climate activists, who persuaded ABC News to water down their headline by adding the word “entirely” after “blamed.” Back to the false narrative that today’s weather extremes are more common and more intense because of climate change.

Nevertheless, a majority of the scientific community, including many meteorologists and climate scientists, think that climate change was only a minor factor in kindling the deadly, tragic conflagration on Maui.

As ecologist Jim Steele has explained, the primary cause of the Maui disaster was dead grasses – invasive, nonnative species such as Guinea grass that have flourished in former Maui farmland and forest areas since pineapple and sugar cane plantations were abandoned in the 1980s. Following a wet spring this year which caused prolific grass growth, the superabundance of these grasses quickly became highly flammable in the ensuing dry season. The resulting tinderbox merely awaited a spark.

Three paragraphs later, the story quotes UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) climate scientist Daniel Swain as saying:

We should not look to the Maui wildfires as a poster child of the link to climate change.

Swain’s statement was immediately followed by another from Abby Frazier, a climatologist at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, wThat spark came from the failure of Maui’s electrical utility to shut off power in the face of hurricane-force winds. Numerous instances of blazes triggered by live wires falling on dessicated vegetation or by malfunctioning electrical equipment have been reported. Just hours before the city of Lahaina was devastated by the fires, a power line was actually seen shedding sparks and igniting dry grass.

Exactly the same conditions set off the calamitous Camp Fire in California in 2018, which was ignited by a faulty electric transmission line in high winds, and demolished Paradise and several other towns. While the Camp Fire’s fuel included parched trees as well as dry grasses, it was almost as deadly as the 2023 Maui fires, killing 86 people. The utility company PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company) admitted responsibility, and was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2019 because of potential lawsuits.

Despite the editorial softening of ABC News’ headline on the Maui wildfires, however, the article itself still contains a number of statements more honest than most penned by run-of-the-mill climate journalists. Four paragraphs into the story, this very surprising sentence appears:

Not only do “fire hurricanes” not exist, but climate change can't be blamed for the number of people who died in the wildfires.

The term “fire hurricanes” refers to a term used erroneously by Hawaii’s governor when commenting on the fires.  

Three paragraphs later, the story quotes UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) climate scientist Daniel Swain as saying:

We should not look to the Maui wildfires as a poster child of the link to climate change.

Swain’s statement was immediately followed by another from Abby Frazier, a climatologist at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who commented that::

The main factor driving the fires involved the invasive grasses that cover huge parts of Hawaii, which are extremely flammable.

And there was more. All of which is unprecedented, to borrow a favorite word of climate alarmists, in climate reporting of the last few years that has routinely promoted the mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening be­cause of climate change.

Is this the beginning of a new trend, or just an isolated exception?

Time will tell, but there are subtle signs that other mainstream newspapers and TV networks may be cutting back on their usual hysterical hype about extreme weather. One of the reasons could be the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) new Chair’s urging the IPCC to “stick to our fundamental values of following science and trying to avoid any siren voices that take us towards advocacy.” There are already a handful of media that endeavor to be honest and truly fact-based in their climate reporting, including the Washington Examiner and The Australian.

Opposing any move in this direction is a new coalition, founded in 2019, of more than 500 media outlets dedicated to producing “more informed and urgent climate stories.” The CCN (Covering Climate Now) coalition includes three of the world’s largest news agencies — Reuters, Bloomberg and Agence France Presse – and claims to reach an audience of two billion.

In addition to efforts of the CCN, the Rockefeller Foundation has begun funding the hiring of climate reporters to “fight the climate crisis.” Major beneficiaries of this program include the AP (Associated Press) and NPR (National Public Radio).

Leaving no doubts about the advocacy of the CCN agenda, its website mentions the activist term “climate emergency” multiple times and includes a page setting out:

Tips and examples to help journalists make the connection between extreme weather and climate change.

Interestingly enough, ABC News became a CCN member in 2021 – but has apparently had a change of heart since, judging from its Maui article.

Next: The Sun Can Explain 70% or More of Global Warming, Says New Study