Climate Impacts

Canada Climate Policy Built on Corrupt Data

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tom Harris and Todd Royal explain why “official” temperature history from Canada government is distorted to invent warming where very little has actually ocurred.  Their article: Is Canada basing its climate policies on ‘decision-based evidence-making?’ Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Politicians want us to believe that they base their decisions on solid, verifiable evidence. “Evidence-based decision-making,” they call it. But what if the decision is made first and then the data is selected, or left uncorrected, in order to support the now politically correct decision? That would then be “decision-based evidence-making.” In other words, a complete corruption of honest decision-making.

It seems that Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is doing exactly that with the country’s temperature data in order to support the government’s mantra that Canada is “warming twice as fast as the global average.” For, if the one-degree anomalous spike in Canada’s “mean temperature” in 1998 is removed from the data, as even ECCC researchers themselves advocated previously should be done to preserve data integrity in cases like this, then Canada is not warming at all and much of the $200 billion spent on the climate file by the federal Liberal government since 2015 is a complete waste.

In 2021, Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist with a PhD in Physics, specializing in complexity science, then an employee of the Bank of Canada, alerted ECCC to this one-degree jump in temperature data across much of Canada, and asked for an explanation. The below graphs of mean, maximum and minimum temperatures constructed with data from three Canadian cities—Moncton (on which Hickey illustrates the step change with red lines), Ottawa and Montreal—are samples of those created by Hickey using ECCC data downloaded on November 11, 2025, data that is the same as that he sent to ECCC researchers as an attachment to his email of June 24, 2021.


Ignoring their previous position about the need to remove such sudden discontinuities from the data, ECCC staff had little to say and left the anomaly in the record, asserting that it was “probably” a real sudden change in temperature.

Making matters worse, another Bank of Canada employee, economist Julien McDonald-Guimond, had already alerted ECCC by email on December 7, 2020, that he had found more than 10,000 instances of days for which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature. Again, ECCC staff had no reasonable justification.

With the Canadian government no longer his employer, so Hickey is now free to tell us all what has been going on behind the scenes. This Hickey did on December 23, 2025, when he published the blockbuster report “Artificial stepwise increases in homogenized surface air temperature data invalidate published climate warming claims for Canada.”

Dr. Hickey shows that, if you apply ECCC’s trend analysis method to their data, you find an increase of 1.74° C (which is statistically significant) from 1948 to 2018. And then, he tells us, if you correct for the one-degree step increase in 1998, you find only a 0.29°C rise. That small change “is indistinguishable from zero,” explains Hickey. “There is no evidence of warming.”

Figure 7: Map showing Sr calculated using Tmean, for the break year 1998 with two five-year windows (1993-1997 and 1998-2002) for the 302 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of Sr. Circle colour indicates Sr ranges as follows: blue: Sr < 0; black: 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1; red: Sr > 1. Moncton, NB (Sr = 2.74) is indicated with a green circle, for reference.

In Figure 7, AHCCD stations with Sr < 0 are coloured blue, while black indicates 0 ≤ Sr ≤ 1, and red indicates Sr > 1. The AHCCD records with the largest stepwise increases at 1998 are located in Eastern and Central Canada (including the stations listed in Table A), and there are many records with discernible steps at 1998 in the Prairies (provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) and the north of the country. British Columbia remains the main outlier, with most ofits AHCCD stations having no discernible steps at 1998.

Figure 8: Map of trend in Tmean over the period 1998-2018, for the 3rd generation AHCCD stations with sufficient data, calculated using linear least-squares fitting. Circle radius is proportional to the absolute value of the trend. Blue circles correspond to negative trends (trend < 0) and red circles to positive trends (trend > 0).

In Figure 8, the trend for a particular Tmean record is equal to the slope (°C/year) from a linear least-squares fit to its data for 1998-2018, times 21 years. An AHCCD station was considered to have sufficient data if its record had at least 350 days of non-missing daily data per year for every year from 1998 2018. Approximately two thirds of the AHCCD records with sufficient data have negative trends for 1998-2018 using linear least-squares fitting.

Summation

This report demonstrates Environment Canada’s dismissive response to being alerted to a large, apparently non-climatic artifact in its flagship temperature time-series product, an artifact which could, on its own, be responsible for essentially all of the calculated warming for many Canadian locations over the past six or seven decades. 

The said apparent artifact, referred to as the “1998 step-increase feature” in this report, is a stepwise increase of approximately 1°C in magnitude occurring at 1998 in the annual mean time-series of daily maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for many stations across Canada in Environment Canada’s Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD).

Canada’s Climate Wake up Call

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vijay Jayaraj writes at American Thinker Canada wakes up to climate reality Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Canadian fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served
only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on
controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. 

A recent memorandum of understanding between Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith represents the inevitable reassertion of economic necessity over the fantasy of “decarbonization” that has gripped Ottawa for the past decade.

Allowing for the construction of a pipeline to transport Albertan oil to a Pacific export terminal, the agreement prompted the resignation of one liberal member of parliament and celebration from the province’s leader. “This is a great day for Alberta,” declared Smith.

Alberta is a major vessel in Canada’s economic bloodstream. The province’s energy sector generates $88 billion in annual gross domestic product (GDP), which is 25% of the Alberta’s total economic output. This revenue flows east to the national capital to fund federal transfers that support public finances of other provinces, some of which oppose the oil production that provides them cash.

Global Warming survey of Canadians, twisted and ignored by Trudeau Liberals.

Atlantic Canada, parts of Quebec, and even Ontario benefit from royalties and tax revenues generated by hydrocarbons extracted thousands of miles away. So-called moral objections to oil sands development are often voiced by inhabitants of Halifax or Montreal, but rarely heard is a willingness to forgo the western revenue that keeps hospitals open and public payrolls funded.

So, it was financial reality that drove Carney to upend expectations established by countless government documents, climate pledges, and regulatory frameworks the previous government put in place to “save the planet” by discouraging the use of fossil fuels. 

Canada’s climate industrial complex had predicted that pipelines would become stranded assets and that Alberta would fade into irrelevance as net zero became federal policy. However, the deal signed by Carney moves in the opposite direction, making provisions for new infrastructure and signaling that even Canada’s most climate-obsessed federal leadership cannot govern without fossil fuels.

In technical terms, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions has been suspended. The Clean Electricity Regulation — a proposed constraint on Alberta’s ability to generate affordable power — has been loosened. Timelines for reducing methane emissions have been extended beyond 2030. Yes, there are caveats that appear to impose a soft form of anti-carbon sentiment, but the overall picture has changed. 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded institution, has consistently parroted environmental advocates who treat fossil fuels as abominations rather than economic necessities. This messaging has convinced many Canadians that their government is committing a terrible sin by producing energy the world demands. Lost on them is the fact that Canadian oil and natural gas are produced under far more stringent standards than exist in the Middle East, Russia, or other regions.

Energy abundance underpins prosperity. Nations that constrain their energy supply impoverish themselves. Nations that produce reliable, affordable energy benefit their populations and the broader world. Canada should produce the energy for itself and export the surplus to global markets.

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Beyond energy economics, there is another dimension to Canada’s economic future that the legacy climate orthodoxy dismisses: agriculture. Canada’s warming climate has extended growing seasons across the prairies and opened new agricultural possibilities. 

According to official data, “total wheat production rose 11.2% year over year to a record 40 million (metric tons) in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2013.” Canola production rose 13%, surpassing a record set in 2017. Barley and oat production rose 19% and 17%, respectively.

In all, the output for all principal field crops increased by 4% year-over-year. For the next crop year (2025-2026), total production is projected to reach near record levels, up 3% year-over-year and 8% above the previous five-year average.

Historical analysis demonstrates that climate conditions across Canadian agricultural regions have shifted toward longer growing seasons, with more frost-free days and expanded viable crop zones.

Critics will claim that allowing a new pipeline is a betrayal of future generations. But what truly endangers posterity? A fraction of a degree of warming that extends growing seasons? Or a future of energy scarcity, deindustrialization, and economic stagnation?

Fearmongering about a “climate emergency” served only to empower a bureaucratic class intent on controlling consumption and taxing lifestyles. It did nothing to change atmospheric physics or the needs of people who rely on affordable energy to survive.

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December 2025 All Ocean SSTs Cool to Mean

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

  • The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
  • SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
  • A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. I’ve grown weary of waiting each month for HadSST4 updates, so the July and August reports were based on data from OISST2.1.  This dataset uses the same in situ sources as HadSST along with satellite indicators. Now however, the US government is shut down and updates to climate datasets are likely to be delayed.  Reminds of what hospitals do when their budgets are slashed: They close the Maternity Ward to get public attention.

This December report is based again on HadSST 4, but with a twist. The data is slightly different in the new version, 4.2.0.0 replacing 4.1.1.0. Product page is here.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST 4.2 starting in 2015 through December 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024 and cooling in 2025.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes.  That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.  A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.

Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C in 2023, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak.  Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. During 2 years of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by Tropics cooling from its 1.3°C peak 2024/01, down to 0.6C in September this year. Note the smaller peak in NH in July 2025 now declining along with SH and the Global anomaly cooler as well. In December the Global anomaly exactly matched the mean for this period, with all regions converging on that value, led by a 6 month drop in NH.  Essentially, all the warming since 2015 is now gone.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.  Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years.  Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on.  Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds.  As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century  It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world.   We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example.  So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well.  One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations.  Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015.  This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since.  The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies.  Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8,  a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12.  Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears.  The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off.  But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average.  In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16.  NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.)  Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021.  In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.

Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year.  Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping.  After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, continuing February through April 2025, with little change in May,June and July despite upward bumps in NH. Now temps in all regions have cooled led by NH from August through December 2025.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH.  The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before.  After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future.  So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data.  It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic.  “ERSST5 AMO  follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.”  So the values represent SST anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed.  As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin.  Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak reached 1.4C before declining to 0.9 last month.  An annual chart below is informative:

 

Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years.  2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September.  1998 and 2007 were mildly warm.  2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average.  2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an  extraordinary peak in July.  August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.

Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April.  Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June.  In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began.  Note 2025 started much lower than the previous year and headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, then since April through September aligning with 2010. In October there was an unusual upward spike, now reversed down to match September 2025.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.

The rose line is the average anomaly 1982-1996 inclusive, value 0.18.  The orange line the average 1982-2025, value 0.41 also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2015-2025, value 0.74. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

Curiosity:  Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher  than expected 1-2 years in the future.  As livescience put it:  Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be?  Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century.  SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.”  The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect.  The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

uss-pearl-harbor-deploys-global-drifter-buoys-in-pacific-ocean

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

UAH Cooling Everywhere December 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots.  It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition.  Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.

As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling  completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022  At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2, and now dropping steadily back toward normal values.

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~65 ppm, an 18% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event.  The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4.  This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C.  Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C.  Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping well below its peak.

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

image-8

See Also Worst Threat: Greenhouse Gas or Quiet Sun?

December 2025 UAH Temps: Cooling Everywhere Led by SH banner-blog

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea.  While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in.  The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995.  Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.

UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for December 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data.  Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead the update from HadSST4 or OISST2.1.  I posted recently on SSTs October 2025 Ocean SST Cools to Mean These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.

Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere.  September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. 2025 has shown a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February.  Now in November and December SH land temps have spiked while ocean temps showed litle change.  As a result of larger ocean surface, Global temps remained cool.

Note:  UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021.   v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4.  For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for December 2025.  The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI).  The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.

In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.

After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024.  The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply to a low of 0.27C in January.  In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March and April. In May drops in NH and Tropics pulled the air temps over oceans down despite an uptick in SH. At 0.43C, ocean air temps were similar to May 2020, albeit with higher SH anomalies. Now in November/December all regions are cooler, led by a sharp drop in SH bringing the Global ocean anomaly down to 0.02C. 1/4 of what it was in April 2024.

Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly.  The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground.  UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps.  The graph updated for December is below.

Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land.  The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in  August 2024, with a large drop in between.  In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C. Some ups and downs followed with returns close to February values in August.  A remarkable spike in October was completely reversed in November/December, along with NH dropping sharply bringing the Global Land anomaly down to 0.52C, half of its peak value of 1.17C 09/2024.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

 The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present.  The average monthly anomaly is -0.02 for this period of more than four decades.  The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20.   An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022.  March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed

With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C.  The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C.  October went down to 0.7C,  November and December dropped to 0.6C.In August Global Land and Ocean went down to 0.39C, then rose slightly to 0.53 in October.

The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps.  Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak.  Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force.  TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995.  Of course, the future has not yet been written.

Arctic Ice Recovering 2025 Yearend

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The Arctic ice extents are now fully reported for 2025, ending the year below average despite a higher rate of growth through December.

Note MASIE 2025 started 1M km2 (or 1 Wadham) below the 19 year average, but cut the deficit to 428k km2, or a gap of 3%. SII v.4 tracked lower than MASIE during December, drawing closer the last week. The chart below shows the distribution of ice extent across the Arctic regions at yearend 2025.

Region 2025365 Day 365 Average 2025-Ave. 2024365 2025-2024
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 12611676 13039302 -427626 12435177 176499
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1071070 1070458 612 1071001 69
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 966006 964771 1235 965989 17
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1087133 4 1087137 0
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 897841 4 897845 0
 (5) Kara_Sea 867623 887208 -19585 876527 -8904
 (6) Barents_Sea 254882 423978 -169096 345715 -90832
 (7) Greenland_Sea 668550 595658 72891 574537 94013
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 768306 982649 -214343 982716 -214409
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854931 853618 1313 854878 53
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1256284 1215695 40589 922416 333868
 (11) Central_Arctic 3174354 3206560 -32206 3207164.49 -32811
 (12) Bering_Sea 350519 403002 -52483 325489.93 25029
 (13) Baltic_Sea 14031 31873 -17843 15271.77 -1241
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 366812 393742 -26929 302941 63871

The major deficits are in Barents Sea and Baffin Bay (Atlantic basins), along with smaller losses in Bering and Okhotsk (Pacific basins).

Background from Previous Post Updated to Year-End 2025

Some years ago reading a thread on global warming at WUWT, I was struck by one person’s comment: “I’m an actuary with limited knowledge of climate metrics, but it seems to me if you want to understand temperature changes, you should analyze the changes, not the temperatures.” That rang bells for me, and I applied that insight in a series of Temperature Trend Analysis studies of surface station temperature records. Those posts are available under this heading. Climate Compilation Part I Temperatures

This post seeks to understand Arctic Sea Ice fluctuations using a similar approach: Focusing on the rates of extent changes rather than the usual study of the ice extents themselves. Fortunately, Sea Ice Index (SII) from NOAA provides a suitable dataset for this project. As many know, SII relies on satellite passive microwave sensors to produce charts of Arctic Ice extents with complete coverages going back to 1989.  Version 3 was more closely aligned than Version 4 with MASIE, the modern form of Naval ice charting in support of Arctic navigation. The SII User Guide is here.

There are statistical analyses available, and the one of interest (table below) is called Sea Ice Index Rates of Change (here). As indicated by the title, this spreadsheet consists not of monthly extents, but changes of extents from the previous month. Specifically, a monthly value is calculated by subtracting the average of the last five days of the previous month from this month’s average of final five days. So the value presents the amount of ice gained or lost during the present month.

These monthly rates of change have been compiled into a baseline for the period 1980 to 2010, which shows the fluctuations of Arctic ice extents over the course of a calendar year. Below is a graph of those averages of monthly changes up to and including this year. Those familiar with Arctic Ice studies will not be surprised at the sine wave form. December end is a relatively neutral point in the cycle, midway between the September Minimum and March Maximum.

The graph makes evident the six spring/summer months of melting and the six autumn/winter months of freezing.  Note that June-August produce the bulk of losses, while October-December show the bulk of gains. Also the peak and valley months of March and September show very little change in extent from beginning to end.

The table of monthly data reveals the variability of ice extents over the last 4 decades, with gains in blue cells and losses in red cells.

The values in January show changes from the end of the previous December, and by summing twelve consecutive months we can calculate an annual rate of change for the years 1980 to 2025.

As many know, there has been a decline of Arctic ice extent over these 40 years, averaging 70k km2 per year. But year over year, the changes shift constantly between gains and losses, ranging up to +/- 500k km2, (2024 being exceptional). Since 1989 the average yearend gain/loss is nearly zero, -0.049k km2 to be exact.

Moreover, it seems random as to which months are determinative for a given year. For example, much ado was printed about 2023 losing more ice than usual June through September. But then the final 3 months of 2023 more than made up for those summer losses, resulting in a sizeable gain for the year.

As it happens in this dataset, October has the highest rate of adding ice. The table below shows the variety of monthly rates in the record as anomalies from the 1980-2010 baseline. In this exhibit a red cell is a negative anomaly (less than baseline for that month) and blue is positive (higher than baseline).

Note that the  +/ –  rate anomalies are distributed all across the grid, sequences of different months in different years, with gains and losses offsetting one another.  As noted earlier,  in 2023 the outlier negative months were June through September where unusual amounts of ice were lost.  Then unusally strong gains in October to December resulted in a large annual gain, compared to the baseline. The bottom line presents the average anomalies for each month over the period 1979-2025.  Note the rates of gains and losses mostly offset, and the average of all months in the bottom right cell is virtually zero.

A final observation: The graph below shows the Yearend Arctic Ice Extents for the last 35 years.

Year-end Arctic ice extents (last 5 days of December) show three distinct regimes: 1989-1998, 1998-2010, 2010-2025. The average year-end extent 1989-2010 is 13.4M km2. In the last decade, 2011 was 13.0M km2, and six years later, 2017 was 12.3M km2. 2021 rose back to 13.0  2024 slipped back to 12.2M, and 2025 is back up to 12.4M. So for all the the fluctuations, the net is virually zero, or a loss of one tenth of a Wadham (0.1M) from 2010. Talk of an Arctic ice death spiral is fanciful.

These data show a noisy, highly variable natural phenomenon. Clearly, unpredictable factors are in play, principally water structure and circulation, atmospheric circulation regimes, and also incursions and storms. And in the longer view, today’s extents are not unusual.

 

 

 

 

Two Hot Spots Slow Arctic Ice Recovery November 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Figure 12. (a) Predicted 10 mb geopotential heights (dam; contours) and temperature anomalies (°C; shading) across the Northern Hemisphere averaged for 25 Nov to 29 Nov 2025. (b) Same as (a) except forecasted averaged from 05 Dec to 09 Dec 2025. The forecasts are from the 00Z 24 November 2025 GFS model ensemble.

The polar vortex is pronounced this year, resulting in warmer temperature over the Arctic ocean, and slowing the normal sea ice recovery.  Dr. Judah Cohen at AER Arctic Oscillation blog provides information like the chart above.

After a pattern of solidly growing sea ice extent in October, a slowdown occurred in November, coincidental with the warm spots shown above.  The graph below shows 2025 compared to the 19 year average (2006 to 2024 inclusive), to SII (Sea Ice Index) and some notable years.

According to MASIE. the average November adds ~2.5M km2 of sea ice extent, which is matched also by 2007.  2024 started below average, but gained steadily to close the gap.  2025 started at the same level, but the refreezing slowed down, ending November in deficit by 1.1M km2.  SII shows even lower ice extents (the last two days not yet reported.)

The table below shows the distribution of ice in the Arctic Ocean basins, suggesting two places where ice recovery is lagging.

Region 2025334 Day 334 Ave. 2025-Ave. 2007334 2025-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 9784037 10880420 -1096383 11009948 -1225911
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1071070 1069623 1447 1058872 12198
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 879082 791207 87875 687829 191253
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1083943 3194 1082015 5122
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 897824 21 897613 232
 (5) Kara_Sea 565299 792107 -226808 826319 -261020
 (6) Barents_Sea 28050 242740 -214690 216525 -188474
 (7) Greenland_Sea 550413 539687 10726 618844 -68431
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 412284 664437 -252153 708497 -296212
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854931 853431 1500 850249 4682
 (10) Hudson_Bay 188797 543322 -354525 751382 -562585
 (11) Central_Arctic 3037637 3193296 -155659 3183072.72 -145436
 (12) Bering_Sea 145331 138776 6555 72644.62 72687
 (13) Baltic_Sea 4226 4452 -225 0 4226
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 58288 61277 -2989 53052 5236

Overall ice extent was 1.1M km2 below average or 10%.  About half the deficit comes from the European Atlantic basins, Kara and Barents seas.  The other half is mostly from N. America’s Hudson and Baffin bays. Ice in these regions operate on the LIFO principle, last in and first out.

At this point in the year, Arctic ice has grown back to 65% of last March maximum with 2.5 months to catch up.   AER  suggests that things may shift again in December:

Figure 9. Forecasted surface temperature anomalies (°C; shading) from 05 Dec to 09 Dec 2025. The forecasts are from the 00Z 24 Nov 2025 GFS ensemble.

Figure 10. Forecasted snowfall (mm/day; shading) from 05 Dec to 09 Dec 2025. The forecasts are from the 00Z 24 Nov 2025 GFS ensemble.

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring ice and snow extents.

 

 

Be Grateful for the Warming We Have

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A reminder that we are presently in the icy end of the Holocene epoch comes in a CBC story Canada’s High Arctic was once a lush forest where unexpected animals roamed.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Camels and beavers that evolved in ancient forests in the Far North
were perfectly adapted for our world today

Modern camels descend from giant High Arctic camels that lived in Canada’s North before the Ice Age. (Global Mechanic/Courtesy of Handful of Films)

By Niobe Thompson, director of Frozen in Time

When you think of the Canadian High Arctic today, visions of frozen tundra, icefields and polar bears probably come to mind. But rewind the clock a little over two million years to before the last ice age, and that Northern tundra was a lush and vibrant forest paradise. It was also home to some surprising animal life, including one large mammal we now associate with scorching deserts: camels.

In Frozen in Time, a documentary from The Nature of Things, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski describes how a head injury in 2011 changed the way she had to live. It also gave her time to think about many fossils she and her team at the Canadian Museum of Nature have uncovered of the animals that once roamed the Far North.

A remarkable discovery

The Pliocene Epoch, spanning from 2.5 to 5 million years ago, was the warm period before the last ice age began. The Pliocene was the last time Earth’s atmosphere contained the same concentration of carbon dioxide that we see today: over 400 parts per million.

At the time, temperatures in the High Arctic were also about 22 C higher than today, Rybczynski says in the documentary — a climate much like we see in modern boreal forest in Canada. As a result, the Arctic was covered in birch, larch, pine and even cedar trees, blanketing the landscape all the way to the northern shores of Ellesmere Island and Greenland.

These dense forests were home to many of the animals we now associate with the Pliocene, such as mammoths and mastodons, but also those found in modern boreal habitats: beavers, bears, geese, horses and caribou.

From 2006 to 2009, a research team led by the Canadian Museum of Nature discovered 30 camel fragments on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut. Scientists dated the remains to 3.5 million years, the mid-Pliocene Epoch, a global warm phase when the region was cloaked in boreal forest. Collagen fingerprinting, a cutting-edge science pioneered at the University of Manchester in England, confirmed that the bones belonged to a camelid.

And in 2013, a team of scientists led by Rybczynski announced a remarkable discovery. At the site of an ancient Pliocene river on Ellesmere Island called Fyles Leaf Beds, they uncovered fragments of a leg bone belonging to a 3.5-million-year-old camel. The find made headlines around the world and suggested that modern camels descended from a High Arctic ancestor.

Evolved in the Arctic, perfect for the desert

High Arctic camels were giant versions of modern camels, and they evolved in a forest world unlike any we know today. Because they lived close to the North Pole, the sun would disappear for nearly half the year, before shining down for nearly 24 hours a day during the polar summer.

Many of the features of the camel that help them survive in deserts today may have originated as adaptations to this punishing environment, Rybczynski says in Frozen in Time.

Their hump — a specialized fat deposit — would have helped them through long, cold winters. Camels have excellent night vision, handy when it is dark for almost half the year. And their wide feet that work so well in sand today would have been perfect in snow 3.5 million years ago.

The desert camel, the habits of beavers, bear hibernation, fall colours — all features of the natural world today that may have evolved in the weird Arctic forest world that came to an end with the encroaching glaciers of the last ice age.

“For me, it’s hard to stop imagining all those natural features of our environment, all passed down from a hotter past when forests could grow in the Arctic,” Rybczynski says in the documentary.

“In so many ways, the lost forests of the High Arctic were kind of like a Garden of Eden — the cradle of our boreal forest ecosystem today.”

See Also

No Right to Stable Climate in Our Holocene Epoch

 

Alimonte Strikes Down Climate Alarms (Again)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gianluca Alimonti, MS Physics, professor and senior researcher, University of Milan

Chris Morrison reports at Daily Sceptic Retracted by Nature, Traduced by Michael Mann – Gianluca Alimonti is Back and He’s Taking No Prisoners.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I’m calling it the ‘Revenge of Alimonti’. In 2023 a group of activists including ‘hockey stick’ inventor Michael Mann, Attribution Queen Frederike Otto and Marlowe Hood and Graham Readfearn from AFP and the Guardian respectively managed to get a paper led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti retracted by Nature because it had spoken the obvious truth that there was little scientific evidence that extreme weather events were getting worse.

It was the high point of ‘settled’ science, a time when it was acceptable
to trash the cherished free speech principles of the scientific process.

But as the Net Zero fantasy starts to collapse and most of the shonky science backing it is facing increasing ridicule, Alimonti 2 is back, bigger and better. In his latest paper on the non-existent climate ‘crisis’, he shows there has been no statistically worsening trends of climate impacts. Indeed there have been many improvements in humans adapting to whatever nature has thrown at them

The publication of the paper is well timed. It should be pinned on the wall of every climate reporting room in mainstream media, starting with the hopelessly biased BBC. Perhaps not the Guardian though, sadly a lost cause beyond redemption. In considerable but easily understood detail, the paper debunks many of the extreme weather claims that remain the mainstay of grossly misleading climate science reporting.

The new Alimonti blockbuster shows it is not difficult to find all the relevant climate data, while the education needed to understand it relies mainly on an ability to read words and comprehend numbers. This climate paper is not breaking new barriers of scientific understanding, rather it is a work of investigation and compilation from freely available sources, many of them to be found in the published output of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most extreme weather events are not getting worse, with or without human involvement, whatever alarmists from the climate comedy turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale to the BBC say. Inconveniently, the IPCC says more or less the same thing.

There is of course no climate ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’, or at least not one that is evident from current scientific observations. Compared to recent historical experience, the current climate is relatively benign. Slightly warmer, more carbon dioxide leading to higher biomass and no increase in most types of bad weather. The fear of some sort of ‘crisis’, usually prophesised for an ulterior purpose, is ubiquitous in human history. Hysteria rises and falls dramatically, sometimes over long sustained periods, and in the case of climate this is displayed by an interesting graph compiled by Alimonti.

Google searches for climate ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ reveal two recent hysteria peaks, namely at the time of the Al Gore agitprop film An Inconvenient Truth featuring the infamous Michael Mann temperature hockey stick, and the Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion-led lunacy at the turn of the current decade.

Professor Alimonti proposes a data-focused toolkit to cut through the hype around a ‘climate crisis’. Instead of the alarmism, it is suggested that clear trackable metrics such as economic damages and health effects are tied to the key climate trends and events. Analysing these metrics shows no strong worsening trends. Any adaption plans for a changing climate should be based on real evidence, not one-size-fits-all panic.

The Article is Quantifying the climate crisis: a data-driven framework using response indicators for evidence-based adaptation policies.  Synopsis below from excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Defining the Concept of ‘Climate Crisis’ Through Measurable Indicators

The paper proposes an analytical approach to the concept of climate crisis through a set of objective, measurable Response Indicators (RINDs), such as environmental anomalies, socio-economic and health impacts, driven by Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) defined in IPCC AR6. By shifting the focus from subjective interpretations to a quantifiable metrics, this approach provides a critical framework for assessing the situation in an analytical manner. Policymakers can use these indicators to design targeted interventions that address specific environmental changes, ensuring that actions are data-driven and aligned with scientific evidence. This definition avoids alarmism while promoting practical, evidence-based solutions.

Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs)

Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) are physical climate system conditions (e.g. means, events, extremes) that affect an element of society or ecosystems and are thus a priority for climate information provision. Depending on system tolerance, CIDs and their changes can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral or a mixture of each across interacting system elements, regions and society sectors. Each sector is affected by multiple CIDs and each CID affects multiple sectors. A CID can be measured by indices to represent related tolerance thresholds. (IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 1770)

The latest IPCC AR6 process led to the development of 7 CID types (heat and cold, wet and dry, wind, snow and ice, coastal, open ocean, and other) and 33 distinct CID categories (CID, Citation2022): they are summarised in Table 12.12 (IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 1856) which also presents CID emergence in different time periods based on multiple methods as provided by recent literature.

Table 12.1 | Overview of the main climatic impact-driver (CID) types and related CID categories with a short description and their link to other chapters where the underlying climatic phenomenon and its associated essential climate variables are assessed and described. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-12/#12.2

As shown in Table 12.12, most of the CIDs do not exhibit significant changes before the end of the XXI century even in the most pessimistic RCP8.5 scenario. It is important to note that the RCP8.5 scenario does not represent a typical ‘business-as-usual’ projection but serves instead as a high-end, high-risk scenario while the RCP4.5 scenario is approximately in line with the upper end of aggregate NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) emissions levels (Hausfather & Peters, Citation2020; IPCC-AR6-WG1, Citation2021, p. 250; IPCC-AR6-WG3, Citation2022, p. 317) as also confirmed by a recent JRC report (Keramidas et al., Citation2025): our analysis will thus focus on the observation of CIDs time series and not on future scenarios.

Examples of CIDs

Floods

Hurricanes

Response indicators (RINDs)

The number of natural disasters caused by weather-related events (e.g. hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, wet mass movements, storms) can be used as a preliminary climate response indicator.

The number of recorded Meteo-Hydro-Climate disaster events and related deaths since 2000 is shown in figure 6 and no clear trend is found by the MK trend analysis, as reported in Table 1.

Natural Disaster Deaths

Diseases and Injuries

Disasters from Temperatures, Droughts, Wildfires

Discussion

An analytical approach to the ‘climate crisis’ concept based on CIDs and RINDs has been proposed enhancing the IPCC CID-based framework (CID, Citation2022). This approach is still provisional and reliant on some statistical scientific indicators. The initiative aims to move beyond the qualitative use of the term ‘climate crisis’ by establishing a broad, shared, and quantitative methodology. The final goal is to provide a robust, data-driven assessment through updated time series and standardised statistical analysis, supported by interdisciplinary collaboration.

To this end, we emphasise the importance of:

  • – periodic (at least annual) series updates by operational organisations such as FAO, WHO or other international entities that collect and manage time series useful for this purpose;

  • – an alarm criterion based on predefined statistical methodologies (e.g. exceeding specific thresholds, significant trend variations, etc.);

  • – multiscale analysis (global, national, regional). All systems on our planet – from the climate system to ecological and socio-economic systems – can be effectively approached from the global scale down to the microscale. While our work has been developed at a global scale with some exceptions, the analysis can be extended to smaller scales (United Nations Statistics Division, Citation2024).

We must emphasise that impact indicator time series often bear
the signature of adaptation, and that other human factors
tend to outweigh climate factors.

For instance, the influence of climate on conflicts is considered minor compared to dominant conflict drivers (IPCC-AR6-WG2, Citation2022, p. 2428; Mach, Citation2019). Similarly, the human footprint on vector-borne diseases may be more significant than climate change, as evidenced in the twentieth century by the decline in malaria endemicity and mortality despite rising global temperatures (Carballar-Lejarazú et al., Citation2023; Climate Adapt, Citation2022; Rossati et al., Citation2016). The reduction in deaths caused by extreme weather events can partly be attributed to improvements in civil protection systems. These examples demonstrate that adaptation often proves more effective than mitigation.

Another example of anthropogenic influence unrelated to climate concerns wildfires: many studies report increases in burned areas linked to a warming climate over recent decades across much of North America. However, the rate of burning sites in the USA in recent decades has been much lower than historical rates across most of the continent, a disparity attributed to aggressive fire suppression and disruption of traditional burning practices (Parks et al., Citation2025). Furthermore, global deforestation trends fit within complex land use patterns where climate plays a secondary role; more specifically, remote sensing data reveal an increase in forest areas at mid-to-high latitudes in the northern hemisphere, while deforestation driven by the expansion of intensive agriculture is observed in subtropical regions (FAO, Citation2022; Pendrill et al., Citation2022; Song et al., Citation2021; Winkler et al., Citation2021).

Most of the time series in Table 1 do not show signs of deterioration. This is important to highlight, as it suggests we still have sufficient time to develop effective and sustainable adaptation policies aimed at enhancing the resilience of socio-economic and environmental systems. For example, in the case of droughts, the use of dry farming techniques, which optimise the exploitation of water resources during periods of scarcity, and the creation of water reservoirs, which can also contribute to renewable energy production and flood mitigation and prevention, can be envisaged. Regarding forest fires, key adaptation measures include the rational management of forest litter, the establishment of firebreaks to prevent the spread of fire, and the maintenance of adequate firefighting services.

Since the observed emergence of most of the CIDs presented in IPCC Table 12.12, and confirmed by the analysed updated time series, as well as most of the RINDs in Table 1 do not exhibit worsening trends, our overall view is that the ‘climate crisis’, as portrayed by many media sources today, is not evident yet.

Nevertheless, it remains extremely important to improve
and standardise monitoring activities and to develop
adaptation strategies based on high-quality data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glaciermania Strikes Again–2025 International Year of Glaciers

Posted on by Ron Clutz

UN is sounding alarms about glaciers, and media is amplifying as usual.

Climate emergency: 2025 declared international year of glaciers, UN News

Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, AP

Glaciers Are Melting Twice as Fast as Predicted and We’re Not Ready,  Science News Today

1st glacier declared dead from climate change seen in before and after images, Live Science

Nearly 40% of the world’s glaciers are already doomed, CNN

Nearly Half of Earth’s Glaciers Are Already Doomed, Even Without Future Warming, SciTechDaily

World’s Melting Glaciers Threaten Food and Water Supply for 2 Billion People, Carbon Brief

Glaciers on the Brink: UN Calls for Bold Action, Climate Fact Checks

This short video puts this alarm into perspective. Additional detail is provided by Dr. John Happs in his article Glaciers And Ice Sheets: Here Today And Here Tomorrow.  Dr. Happs comments on many glaciers around the world, this post has only some excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

How often do the climate alarmists tell us that few glaciers still exist because of (imaginary) global warming and those that remain are rapidly melting away? Not surprisingly, the alarmists, particularly those from the media and vested interest groups, always point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer model projections, referring to one in particular–the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP8.5.)

Even the political/ideological IPCC has sensibly branded RCP8.5 as “Highly Unlikely”

So, what are the glacier numbers?

  1. There are more than 200,000 alpine/valley (land-based) glaciers and many others stemming from the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
  1. Glaciers have advanced, retreated and halted many times over the last 400,000 years being influenced not only by temperature but also by other factors, such as wind, precipitation, altitude, latitude, aspect, topography and slope angle.

Global temperature is often promoted, usually by naïve climate alarmists, as the only important input into glacier formation, growth and retreat yet, in very dry parts of Antarctica, where low temperatures are seemingly ideal for glacier growth, the small amount of net annual precipitation results in glaciers growing very slowly, or even diminishing in size.

Glaciers can also be influenced by sublimation or the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase. Glaciers can experience this process resulting in the “evaporation” of ice, exacerbated by wind action. Sublimation can be seen in the way that ice cubes left in the freezer will shrink over time.

More than 18,000 glaciers have been identified across 50 World Heritage sites but this represents less than 10% of the Earth’s glaciated area. The media, climate activists and vested interest groups like to argue that all glaciers are receding because global temperature is increasing. Not surprisingly, many glaciers have been retreating since we emerged from the Little Ice Age (1250-1850), a time when many farms and houses across Scandinavia were destroyed by advancing glaciers between the 14th and 19th centuries.

We might expect that glaciers and ice sheets would recede after the Little Ice Age yet we know that glaciers in many parts of the world are advancing, with glaciers growing in the Alps, North America, Patagonia, Antarctica, Alaska, the Himalayas, China, Iceland, Greenland, New Zealand, Norway, Antarctica and Greenland.

Where glaciers reach the sea, the media, and some tour guides, like to promote the dramatic calving-glacier image as pointing to (imaginary) global warming but fail to point out (perhaps they don’t know) that a calving glacier is the sign of an advancing inland glacier and certainly not one that is about to disappear.

In his silly, but influential, 2005 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore said:

“Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Mount Kilimanjaro is still covered in snow.  See False Alarm over the Retreat of the Himalayan Glaciers

“The speed and consequences of Himalayan glacial retreat have been grossly exaggerated by the media and environmental activists.”

A significant proportion of Himalayan glaciers are advancing. In fact, 58% of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range, a chain of snowy peaks along the border of India, Pakistan and China, were stable or advancing with annual snowfall increasing. A study of Himalayan glaciers, published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported that cooler summers are failing to melt winter snows, which are themselves becoming more frequent, resulting in advancing glaciers. Source: Live Science

GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS IN ANTARCTICA

The Antarctic ice sheet is the world’s largest mass of ice covering around 14 million sq. km.

Ice sheets can be described as glaciers that cover very large areas and the most obvious examples are found in Greenland and Antarctica where around two-thirds of the Earth’s fresh water is stored.

Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is rapidly melting misrepresent the science of a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years. The ice sheet holds over 26 million gigatonnes of water (a gigatonne is a billion metric tons). If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 60 metres. Such a change is many millennia in the future, if it happens at all, although climate alarmists will always claim that such a response is just around the corner because of (imaginary) global warming.

Modest ice loss is normal in Antarctica.  Each year in summer, more than 2,000 gigatonnes of ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall additions keep the ice mass in equilibrium.

Summary

So it is a familiar story. A complex naturally fluctuating situation, in this case glaciers, is abused by activists to claim support for their agenda. I have a lot of respect for glaciologists; it is a deep, complex subject, and the field work is incredibly challenging. And since “glacial” describes any process where any movement is imperceptible, I can understand their excitement over something happening all of a sudden.

But I do not applaud those pandering to the global warming/climate change crowd. They seem not to realize they debase their own field of study by making exaggerated claims and by “jumping the shark.”
Meanwhile real scientists are doing the heavy lifting and showing restraint and wisdom about the limitations of their knowledge.

Resources:

Redressing Antarctic Glacier Porn

Greenland Ice Varies, Don’t Panic 2023 Update

Climatists’ Childish Reading of Polar Ice

Figure 1. A comparison of presentations of satellite data capturing Greenland’s ice mass loss. The image on the right shows changes in Greenland’s ice mass relative to Greenland’s total ice mass. Sources: The data plotted in these graphs are from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise, a joint exercise by NASA and the European Space Agency.4 Graphs originally by Willis Eschenbach. Adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.

 

 

 

UAH Ocean Stays Cool, SH Land Warms, October 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots.  It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition.  Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.

As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling  completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022  At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2, and now dropping steadily back toward normal values.

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~65 ppm, an 18% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event.  The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4.  This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C.  Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C.  Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping well below its peak.

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

image-8

See Also Worst Threat: Greenhouse Gas or Quiet Sun?

October 2025 UAH Temps: Cool Ocean, Warm Land  banner-blog

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea.  While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in.  The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995.  Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.

UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for October 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data.  Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead the update from HadSST4 or OISST2.1.  I posted recently on SSTs September 2025 Ocean SST Cooling These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.

Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere.  September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. 2025 has shown a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February.  Now in September and October SH land temps have spiked while ocean temps showed litle change.  As a result of larger ocean surface, Global temps remained cool.

Note:  UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021.   v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4.  For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for October 2025.  The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI).  The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.

In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.

After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024.  The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply to a low of 0.27C in January.  In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March and April. In May drops in NH and Tropics pulled the air temps over oceans down despite an uptick in SH. At 0.43C, ocean air temps were similar to May 2020, albeit with higher SH anomalies. Now in September/October Global ocean temps are little changed with Tropics dropping again along with NH declining slightly..

Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly.  The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground.  UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps.  The graph updated for October is below.

Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land.  The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in  August 2024, with a large drop in between.  In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C. Some ups and downs followed with returns close to February values in August.  Now in October we see a remarkable spike in SH land temps, supported by NH and Tropics in September.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present.  The average monthly anomaly is -0.0, 2for this period of more than four decades.  The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20.   An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022.  March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed

With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C.  The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C.  October went down to 0.7C,  November and December dropped to 0.6C.In August Global Land and Ocean went down to 0.39C, then rose slightly to 0.53 in October.

The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps.  Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak.  Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force.  TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995.  Of course, the future has not yet been written.