Science Matters

Canada Update: Suddenly, Climate Hysteria is Gone

Joe Oliver writes at Financial Post And suddenly, climate change hysteria is gone. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Only 4% of Canadians think climate change is our top problem.
But many of them are hard-core activists ready to block projects.

Over the past several months, public concern about climate change has declined dramatically, replaced by newfound enthusiasm for the development of Canada’s vast oil and gas reserves. The federal government is now under mounting political pressure to expedite the construction of pipelines to tidewater that will bring economic growth, employment, energy security and funding for social programs or tax relief.

What caused the sharp reversal in public opinion?
And will the government actually deliver?

Prime Minister Mark Carney has long championed climate catastrophism and a commitment to net zero, both in his various jobs on the world stage and in his 2021 book, Values. After entering politics, however, he has embraced fossil fuels, and the legacy media have joined him in a head-spinning abandonment of its obsessive focus on global warming’s alleged existential threat to humanity. Whether Carney’s transformation reflects transitory political expediency or is an overdue acknowledgment of economic and scientific reality is now key to Canada’s economic prospects.

Over the past four decades, incessant advocacy from the scientific establishment, media and opinion leaders made first global warming and then climate change the consensus view. Deviation jeopardized reputations and careers, especially for scientists and academics, who risked losing funding or even their jobs. It was no surprise, then, that in 2022, 73 per cent of Canadians believed we were confronting a climate emergency. But now, according to a recent Leger poll, only four per cent say climate change is the number one issue facing Canada.

President Donald Trump’s shocking tariffs and 51st-state talk have diverted Canadians’ attention from climate change. And so have the exorbitant costs of green policies, the growing realization that nothing Canada does can measurably impact global temperatures, and the fact that green policies either weren’t adopted in many countries or have became politically toxic in countries where they were. Despite literally trillions of dollars being spent globally on reducing emissions, hydrocarbons still account for over 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy.

According to McKinsey, achieving net zero globally by 2050 would cost the Western countries a prohibitive $275-550 trillion. That makes it politically untenable.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler recently argued that green policies are largely responsible for European GDP falling from equal to American in 2008 to just two-thirds of it today. Soaring energy prices have led to de-industrialization, compounding the effects of high taxes and social spending, intrusive regulations and a protected workforce. Canada also, and for similar reasons, suffered a lost decade: growth of just half a per cent in real GDP per capita — compared with 20.7 per cent in the U.S.

And maybe the public has finally become skeptical of endless prophecies of impending disasters: “endangered” polar bears almost tripled in the past 50 years; hundreds of Pacific islands have increased in land size; death from extreme weather decreased by 99 per cent in the past 100 years; nine times as many people die from the cold as the heat; and so on. The Little Ice Age ended in the late 19th century with a gradual rise in temperatures — if not, we would still be in an ice age. Yet just 14 months ago, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said we had only two years to save the planet.

Future psychologists, economists and historians will examine the early 21st-century phenomenon of collective climate hysteria, what drove it, what ended it (if it has ended) and what damage it wrought. One thing is all but certain: there will be no admission of guilt for the enormous harm inflicted on Canada and other economies. Although the public has moved on, a hard-core group of climate militants is prepared to exploit every legal and regulatory impediment to resource development in Canada. The federal government will have to use all its legislative and executive authority to push the new energy projects it says it favours through to completion. Only then will Canadians know whether Mark Carney has truly changed his core beliefs.

Tide Running Out on Climatism

Posted on July 24 by Ron Clutz

Gary Abernathy explains how momentum is shifting away from climatists in his Empowering America article The climate change cult is encountering more resistance these days. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The devastating Texas flooding over the July 4 weekend was a natural disaster of immense proportions. The lives lost brought unthinkable heartache for families. Especially difficult to fathom is that so many victims were young children.

Adding to the grief was the irresponsible blame game that almost immediately arose in the wake of the tragedy. Many on the left couldn’t wait to point fingers at Republicans, from President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Of course, the climate cult again demonized fossil fuels, global warming and other predictable villains from the days of yore (or Gore). The group Climate Central could only contain itself until July 8 before rushing out to hold a press briefing to reiterate its dogma that “climate change drives more extreme weather,” and that the Texas storms were “made more likely and powerful in a warmer climate.”

Leftwing climate groups often accuse anyone who disagrees as being a “climate denier.” But few actually deny that the climate indeed changes, often dramatically. The archeological record makes clear that the earth has warmed, cooled, experienced flooding and undergone a number of other climate-related upheavals through the centuries, long before human activity could be faulted. But groups like Climate Central identify the manmade practice of burning fossil fuels as the modern culprit.

Any brave soul who dares to challenge the extent to which carbon emissions and greenhouse gases impact climate change is shouted down by the cult and buried under an avalanche of “scholarly” papers produced by “the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.”

The good news is that the same day that Climate Central was regurgitating its tried-and-true rhetoric, the New York Times reported (in what it likely considered an expose), “The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.”

What seemed frightening to the Times and the indoctrinated left comes as welcome relief for millions of other Americans who believe that the war on affordable and reliable energy sources is based more on politics than science.

The extent to which fewer Americans are being successfully propagandized is made clear by recent polling. On July 11, CNN data analyst Harry Enten told viewers that as early as 1989, 35 percent of Americans were “greatly worried” about climate change, a number that jumped to 46 percent by 2020. But, as Enten admitted with some astonishment, only 40 percent of Americans currently feel “greatly worried” about climate change. The reason for growing public skepticism on climate change is probably because most Americans have wised up to how data can be easily manipulated for political ends.

We know from experience it’s not hard to convince “experts” to sign on to a “consensus” opinion to add gravitas to the cause de jour. Back in 2020, more than 50 former intelligence officials famously signed onto a letter claiming that emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That was not true, and it was later discovered that former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell had drafted the letter to help Joe Biden’s campaign. Everyone else just signed on, their devotion to a particular election outcome apparently outweighing the lack of evidence backing their claim.

Similarly, individual treatises on climate science aren’t authored by hundreds of scientists. Each one is written by, at most, a handful of researchers who then circulate their work and ask others to sign on – giving activists the fodder they need to claim that “the overwhelming majority” of the scientific community is in agreement. In fact, scientific papers being published as authoritative when, in fact, they are not is a growing problem.

“Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud,” according to a 2024 report in The Guardian.

Fortunately, there has always been a segment of the scientific community willing to stand up to the mob and interpret climate data independently. The three scientists hired by the Energy Department and targeted by the Times for expressing skepticism on manmade climate change – physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer – are among the brave.

In decades past, a key tenet of science was to question everything, on the theory that raising doubts and concerns was the best path to the truth. As Dr. Koonin wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future.”

Instead of natural disasters serving as excuses to launch attacks and place blame using the same tired, lockstep rhetoric, here’s hoping for a new age of climate enlightenment, led by scientists, journalists and others with the curiosity – and courage – to question everything.

That’s light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully not an oncoming train.

ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change

Posted on July 23 by Ron Clutz

Activists hoping the opinion from the ICJ’s judges will have far-reaching legal consequences in the fight against climate change Image: Peter Dejong/AP Photo/picture alliance

The media is rampant today with headlines like these:

World Court says countries are legally obligated to curb emissions, protect climate, UN News

World’s top court says major polluters may need to pay reparations for climate harm, CNN

UN’s top court says failing to protect planet from climate change could violate international law, CBC

Top UN court says countries can sue each other over climate change, BBC

Top U.N. Court Says Countries Must Act on Climate Change, New York Times

Etc., Etc., Etc.

I asked perplexity.ai: (bolds in answer supplied by perplexity)

Question: How did the ICJ address scientists disputing IPCC reports like Clintel in its climate advice?

Answer: The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its advisory proceedings on climate change, did not address or give consideration to scientists or groups—such as Clintel—who dispute the findings of the IPCC. Instead, the ICJ relied heavily and explicitly on the IPCC as the authoritative source on climate science throughout the process.

Key points from the available evidence:

The ICJ held a private meeting with IPCC scientists just before hearings began, reflecting the Court’s view of the IPCC as the “scientific pillar” of the climate change regime1.
This meeting was not part of the formal, public hearings and did not include scientists who dissent from the IPCC—states and organizations participating in the advisory proceedings had no opportunity to question or respond to IPCC scientists1.
The process was criticized for lacking transparency and procedural fairness precisely because it favored a single scientific perspective (the IPCC’s), with no indication that alternative scientific viewpoints were admitted or reviewed1.
The UN General Assembly’s request for the advisory opinion itself referenced the “utmost concern [for] the scientific consensus expressed” in the IPCC reports, reinforcing the Court’s mandate to treat the IPCC’s findings as the foundation for its analysis13.
Available commentaries and summaries of the ICJ process do not mention any engagement with scientists or organizations disputing IPCC conclusions, nor do they report that groups like Clintel were referenced or invited as experts13.
While the ICJ has, in rare past cases, consulted technical experts informally, in this climate case it only announced consultation with IPCC figures, reinforcing the exclusion of dissident scientific voices19.

In summary, the ICJ’s approach gave exclusive scientific authority to the IPCC and provided no forum, reference, or weight to scientists disputing its reports, such as those from Clintel13. The Court did not discuss or acknowledge the existence of such scientific disagreement in its process, instead treating the IPCC’s consensus as fact. This approach has been criticized for its lack of transparency and its failure to incorporate procedural safeguards for alternative scientific views19.

Followup Question: Why might the World Court have misunderstood the legal status of the Paris Accord?

Answer: The World Court might have appeared to misunderstand or at least oversimplify the legal status of the Paris Agreement because the Agreement’s nature is complex and somewhat ambiguous under international law, blending legally binding procedural obligations with politically framed, flexible commitments that lack sharp enforcement mechanisms.

Key reasons explaining why the Court could be seen as misunderstanding or glossing over these complexities include:

Legal Flexibility and Lack of Enforcement: The Paris Agreement is a treaty with binding procedural obligations but lacks strong accountability measures, sanctions, or punitive mechanisms for non-compliance1. Articles 13 and 15 establish monitoring and compliance mechanisms that are explicitly “non-intrusive” and “non-punitive,” reflecting the Agreement’s flexible, voluntary essence rather than strict legal constraints on outcome1. Courts may struggle to treat such a hybrid treaty as fully binding in the traditional sense.
Ambiguity over Obligation Types: The Paris Agreement distinguishes between “obligations of conduct” (procedural duties) versus “obligations of result” (achieving emission cuts). It requires parties to submit NDCs and report on implementation but does not legally bind States to achieve specific emission targets or outcomes34. This ambiguity can lead to varying interpretations of the Agreement’s binding force.
Differing State Practices and Interpretations: There remains disagreement among states and experts about whether the Paris Agreement creates firm legal obligations to prevent climate change or is largely aspirational with voluntary commitments6. Some states perceive it as political guidance rather than a hard treaty, influencing how international bodies perceive its weight.
Constraints of International Litigation and Court Jurisdiction: International courts like the ICJ have limited jurisdiction and cannot enforce treaty provisions on states unwilling to submit to their authority1. This constrains how formally the Court can treat the Agreement’s legal status, especially when major emitters are outside its compulsory jurisdiction16. The Court’s advisory role means it clarifies law based on existing commitments but cannot enforce or create new obligations.
Interaction with Customary International Law: Some legal scholarship suggests that customary international law—independent but related to treaty law—may impose broader climate duties on states, which complicates whether the Court grounds its decisions on the Paris Agreement alone or on evolving international legal norms1.

In sum, the World Court may have been perceived as misunderstanding the Paris Agreement’s legal status because the Agreement is simultaneously a legally binding treaty in form with procedural and transparency obligations, yet it remains politically flexible, non-punitive, and ambiguous regarding enforcement or specific outcome obligations. This hybrid nature poses challenges for courts in characterizing it strictly as a binding treaty imposing strong legal duties, thus potentially giving the appearance of oversimplification or misunderstanding in the Court’s advice.

Therefore, the Court’s approach likely reflects the difficulty of interpreting a treaty designed to maximize participation through flexibility rather than strong binding commitments, rather than a simple misunderstanding of the Paris Agreement’s status1 3 46.

My Summary

Despite the courtroom venue and judges participating in rendering an opinion, this was a political, not a legal process. A court of law seeks truth through an adversarial process whereby parties advocate for two or more viewpoints on the matter at hand, including facts and logic of the arguments. Here there was no hearing and weighing of differing evidence and perspectives, just a preconceived partisan political declaration.

Supreme Screw-up: Climate Fallacies Embraced by Canada’s Highest Court

Posted on July 23 by Ron Clutz

Canadian Supreme Court justices rendered an opionion regarding climate change that does not bear up under scrutiny. Former government litigator Jack Wright exposes the errors in his C2C Journal article Supreme Screw-up: How Canada’s Highest Court Got Climate Change Wrong. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Many Canadians think of the Supreme Court as a wise and august body that can be trusted to give the final word on the country’s most important issues. But what happens when most of its justices get it wrong? Former government litigator Jack Wright delves into the court’s landmark ruling upholding the federal carbon tax and uncovers mistakes, shoddy reasoning and unfounded conclusions. In this exclusive legal analysis, Wright finds that the key climate-related contentions at the heart of the court’s decision were made with no evidence presented, no oral arguments and no cross-examination – and are flat wrong. Now being held up as binding judicial precedent by climate activists looking for ever-more restrictive regulations, the decision is proving to be not just flawed but dangerous.

The Supreme Court of Canada sits at the apex of the Canadian judicial ladder. But like any group of humans, the reasoning of its nine justices isn’t always right. What happens if the court’s reasons for decision include some mistakes and some confusing or inconsistent comments? Are all of Canada’s lower courts bound by these “precedents”? The short answer is no: a court’s decision is only precedent-setting for what it actually decided, and not concerning all of the detailed explanations for how the court got there. Still, erroneous reasoning at the top can create major problems as it often triggers unnecessary and harmful litigation that treats errors as binding precedents. That has proved to be the case with the errors in a crucial case that has profound economic, political and social implications affecting all Canadians.

Advocates for ever-increasing climate action have pounced on the decision in the case known as Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2021 as precedent to justify further climate-related litigation, as if the courts or Parliament could stabilize the global climate. Such “lawfare”, as these kinds of tactics have come to be known, continues largely because of the non-binding comments in Greenhouse Gas. But the motivating claim – that these explanatory comments are binding precedents – is wrong.

They also misunderstand the special nature of a reference case.

In Canadian law a reference case is a submission by the federal or a provincial government to the courts asking for an advisory opinion on a major legal issue, usually the constitutionality of particular legislation. The opinion given by the Supreme Court is in the form of a judicial decision; strictly speaking, it is not legally binding, although no government has ever ignored such an opinion.

In Greenhouse Gas, the provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta sought the Supreme Court’s opinion on the constitutionality of the federal carbon tax, with all arguing that it is unconstitutional. In March 2021, a 7-2 majority upheld as constitutional Ottawa’s imposition of “backup” federal carbon pricing in any province which has no equivalent provincial measures. It did so based on the national concern doctrine (under the “peace, order and good government” clause in Canada’s Constitution).

In doing so, the majority unusually delved into the wisdom of climate and energy policy, which requires complicated scientific knowledge and resolving conflicting political priorities. The majority assumed – without any evidence – some crucial scientific facts about the causes and effects of climate change. There was no such evidence because a reference case is initiated at the appellate level and, unlike lower trial courts, appellate courts normally have no fact-finding function.

The majority made two important scientific assumptions. First, it assumed that climate change poses a threat to the survival of humanity. Second, it assumed that Canada’s climate is substantially controlled by Canada’s own emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide (CO₂). Based on these assumptions, it would follow that Canada can avert the harms of climate change to Canadians by reducing Canadian CO₂emissions through a carbon tax.

Suffice it to say that the high court’s two critical premises around which the whole reference case hinged were not proven material facts because there was no evidence before the Court. They were merely the untested assumptions of the seven justices. The first of these key assumptions is highly arguable; the second is outright fallacious. I will address the second of these assumptions first.

The Fantasy of a “Carbon Wall” Around Canada and its Provinces

The majority’s written decision, authored by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, contains a crucial assumption about the physics and chemistry of climate change. . . It held that severely harmful effects of emissions will mostly be caused by – and affect – people situated closest to the geographical origin of the emissions. This is a fallacy which I have termed the “Carbon Wall”.

The Carbon Wall fallacy leads to the error that the federal government can more easily control what the majority termed “grievous” interprovincial impacts caused by CO2 emissions from adjacent provinces. In essence, that government action can “wall off” the effects of greenhouse gas emissions around their area of origin. In fact, there is no CO2 “wall” around any country, nor can one ever be placed around a province by judicial finding or bureaucratic regulation. Unlike local pollutants, CO2 molecules emitted in the United States or China can flow over Canada and all around the planet, and vice-versa. Weather may be largely local, but climate is ultimately global, and so is the movement (and any climate effects) of CO2.

The “Carbon Wall” fallacy: The idea that local CO2 emissions cause local climate change is a common misunderstanding; Canada’s top justices accepted it, envisioning CO2 as akin to traditional pollution that might flow down rivers and cross provincial boundaries, and whose damage can therefore be locally controlled. (Sources of photos: (top) Shutterstock; (bottom) Daveography.ca, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Thus, the majority assumed that climate change consists of CO2, following its emission, having a direct noxious climate impact upon geographically contiguous areas. We are not told, however, what particular form that harm takes, how it is caused or on what evidence it is based. But if Canada’s senior-most justices truly understood the basic mechanics of climate, they would have realized that virtually the entire impact of which they speak must come from outside the country, since Canada generates only 1.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, making each province only a tiny contributor to total global emissions.

Other Fallacious or Unsupported “Carbon Wall” Thinking

The majority also incorrectly suggested (para. 10) that, “The effects of climate change have been and will be particularly severe and devastating in Canada.” There is no evidence to support this assumption. While basic climatology holds that the Earth’s polar regions will warm more than lower latitudes, this is not unique to Canada. And rising levels of CO2 have also generated benefits through increasing agricultural productivity and forest and plant growth.

The good news: The Supreme Court said climate change would be “particularly severe and devastating in Canada”, an assumption for which there is no evidence; rising levels of atmospheric CO2 have actually led to a “greening” of the Earth, increasing agricultural productivity and forest and plant growth. (Source of photos: Pexels)

All that the Supreme Court’s ‘twice as fast’ alarm about Canadian warming shows is that Canadians live on land and not the ocean. The statement, while technically true, communicates nothing of significance. But it is highly misleading.

Canada is not bound in any meaningful way by the Paris Agreement, its contents should not influence decisions by Canadian courts, and the Supreme Court majority in Greenhouse Gas found nothing from the Paris Agreement that would be meaningfully precedential for those seeking to save themselves from ‘climate damage’.

The Assumption of an Existential Threat to Humanity

Climate change, Greenhouse Gas declares emphatically (para. 167), is “an existential challenge…a threat of the highest order to the country, and…[an] undisputed threat to the future of humanity [that] cannot be ignored.” It would seem to follow from this resounding pronouncement that the planet requires rapid decarbonization, with a massive and very costly diversion of resources to do so, and without regard to the cost trade-offs for other important human needs such food, housing and transportation or for such matters as safety and security.

Weighing such competing human needs is a political process, not a judicial judgment. Yet the Supreme Court’s assertions of catastrophe stand alone in mid-judgment, devoid of expert sources, of any investigation of facts, or of any reasoning from facts. This is unfortunate, because the court majority’s seemingly unqualified belief is anything but “undisputed”.

Many experts specifically dispute that humanity’s survival is at stake. Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus, the Yale University economist who is considered the “father” of the carbon tax, does so in his book The Climate Casino (page 134). Nor does the IPCC itself make such a claim.

“For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.” IPCC Report, Working Group 2, 2014

As Greenhouse Gas involved no evidentiary procedures, then what could have been the source of the Supreme Court’s ‘existential threat’ declaration? A search of the court files shows that this was assembled from an affidavit in Canada’s Record by a federal manager, John Moffet, an assistant deputy minister with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Suffice it here to note that Canadian evidentiary rules do not allow for reliance upon a federal government manager’s affidavit for dispositive proof of an existential threat to an entire nation and indeed the whole planet. Moffet was neither disinterested in the dispute nor an expert on any aspect of climate science or any related scientific discipline that would qualify him as an independent expert witness.

The Unfolding Danger in the Supreme Court’s Climate Assumptions

There is no sense in parsing each of the assertions made by the majority in the Background, quite a few of which are highly questionable. But there is no existential threat inference to be drawn even if all are accepted. Climate change may be a serious problem, but it is only one among many other serious and resource-consuming human problems to be weighed and balanced.

If the Supreme Court of Canada chooses to evaluate complex climate policy in future (which the Court really lacks the institutional capacity to do), it should at least make arrangements for a full evidentiary record. For climate change, that would be enormous and would take months of hearings. A Royal Commission would be better placed to handle such a mission.

But judgments like Greenhouse Gas are wholly inadequate. It contains no true factual findings of an existential threat to humanity, or of a Carbon Wall around Canada, or of a possible Carbon Wall controllable by federal regulation around each of our provinces. There is no federal claim to be saving Canadians from interprovincial climate “pollution” and only a diffuse and very insignificant Canadian contribution to overall planetary climate change. Thus, the majority’s assumptions cannot serve as authority for the lower courts to adjudicate the cases that come before them under the guise of saving Canadians from climate change.

We cannot allow single-issue adherents (often wielding generous federal funding)
to repurpose our courts on pretextual bases and achieve goals
that they were denied through the ballot box.

SH and Tropics Lead UAH Cooling June 2025

Posted on July 21 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.

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 ~60 ppm, a 15% 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 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

June 2025 SH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower

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 June 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 behind the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs June 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms, SH Cools.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. Then land air temps, especially NH, dropped in February and recovered in March. Now in June SH land dropped markedly and NH land down slightly, while ocean air temps rose slightly in NH, offset by cooling in SH and Tropics.

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 June 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 June Global ocean air anomaly is little changed despite a slight rise in NH.

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 June 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. In March that drop reversed with both NH and Global land back to January values, holding there in April. In May sharp drops in NH and Tropics land air temps pulled the Global land air temps back down close to February value. In June the Global land air drop was significant, down from 0.67C to 0.55C despite a small rise in the Tropics.

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 -0.03, 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. February went down to 0.5C, then back up to 0.6C in March and April driven by the bounce in NH land air temps, followed by May’s return to 0.5C, and June slightly lower at 0.48C.

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

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

The above chart shows sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) in the North Atlantic 0 to 60N. The index is derived from ERSSTv.5 by subtracting the global anomalies from the North Atlantic anomalies, the differences as shown in the chart. The baseline of 0.0C is the average for the years 1951 to 1980. The mean anomaly since 1980 is in purple at 0.33C, and persisted throughout up to 2018. The orange line is the average anomaly in the the last six years, 2019 to 04/2025 inclusive, at 0.84C. The remarkable spikes in 2023 and 2024 drove that rise to exceed 1.4C, which has been cut in half over the last 10 months. As Dr. Humlum observed, such oceanic changes usually portend air temperature changes later on.

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.

Climate Model Assumptions Contrary to Balloon Data

Posted on July 21 by Ron Clutz

Recently Michael Connolly presented the evidence contradicting assumptions built into GCMs (Global Climate Models). This post consists of the exhibits he used, and additional Connolly comments in italics from a similar talk this month to Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. (Video embedded later in post.)

Michael Connolly:

I’m an engineer and a scientist. As an engineer, I use computer models to design and make things. As a scientist, I look at the data to see if my computer models are correct. So, what we did at the center for environmental research and earth sciences (CERES) is that we looked at the data from 20 million radio balloons.

We then asked, can we look at this data and see how we can use it to check the computer models? And we found there’s two types of balloons. One: the average weather balloon does about a 100 measurements as it goes up to the stratosphere. But the ones which measure ozone do a measurement about once every second. So you have maybe four or 5,000 measurements on each sample. But all of the climate models, and by the way, nobody in the climate model community bothered to check the data to see if their models were correct, which I find very bizarre. But what all of the model community do is they divide the earth into a number of little boxes. So on a horizontal scale the boxes are about 1,000 mi long and on a vertical scale they’re about less than a mile in height.

They then make a number of assumptions about how the air behaves within each of these boxes. So their first assumption is that the air in each box is in a state which we call thermodynamic equilibrium. which I’ll explain in a few minutes. So they assume that on a horizontal scale the air in a box is in equilibrium over a distance of a 1,000 miles. But on a vertical scale only in equilibrium for slightly less than a mile.

And they also assume that the different boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other. Because if it turns out that the boxes are in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other, all of the assumptions of the climate models collapse because Einstein and his co-authors over a 100 years ago showed that if a system was in thermodynamic equilibrium, if you put in a greenhouse gas into that system, it would absorb more energy. But if it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium, it emits more energy. So increasing the level of greenhouse gases will increase the rate of absorption but also increase the rate of emission. So there’s no net change due to the radiation. So if it turns out that the assumption that the the different boxes aren’t in thermodynamic equilibrium is false, then the whole theory of man-made global warming collapses.

So how do we know if something is in thermodynamic equilibrium or not? Well, what you do is you take a system and you do all the measurements of the different parameters involved and if you can describe the system in what’s called an equation of state with using these parameters, then we say the state is in thermodynamic equilibrium. So in other words, obeying an equation of state is one side of the coin of being in thermodynamic equilibrium. They’re both different sides of the same coin.

So for the air, the equation of state is this. It’s called the ideal gas law. And this is the equation that’s used by the climate modelers in treating the different boxes as being in thermodynamic equilibrium. You can see down there it tells you the relationship between the different parameters, but it doesn’t tell you how much energy it would take to change the temperature of a system. For that you need to know the heat capacity of the system. And it doesn’t tell you anything about potential energy. In other words, if I take a cubic meter of air and lift it up and keep it at the same temperature and pressure, it would obey the same equation, but it would have gravitational potential energy because it takes energy to lift it up. That’s not reflected in the equation of state.

As a chemist I thought there was something dead obvious to do. The equation of state can be rewritten in a different form called the molar density form, and this form has been used by chemists for hundreds of years to determine the molecular weight of new gases. So we asked what happens if we describe the atmosphere in terms of molar density form instead of the energy form? We were the first and still the only people to have done this.

When we did that we got a big surprise. We found that if you plot the molar density versus pressure you get these two straight lines. Now this means that the atmosphere in the troposphere, that’s the lower bit, is obeying an equation of state. So that means it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium. And when you get to the tropopause it turns into another straight line. Now this is quite common in studying materials. If you can describe it in terms of one equation of state and then it changes into another equation of state, we call it a change of phase. For example, you can describe water using the gaseous water using the gas laws, but then when it turns into liquid water, you have to use a different equation of state.

Now we studied all the different weather balloons from all around the world and we found that this phenomenon occurred in all of them. The only difference was that in the tropics the change of phase occurred at a higher altitude and in the Arctic and polar regions it occurred at a lower altitude. So, when we were here in Tucson 5 years ago, we made a video for the entire year of all of the radio balloon data for Tucson for 2018. And the reason for this video is that looking at a static graph like that, you don’t see any changes. Now, in the models that they’re using, the different boxes are isolated from each other, if you put energy into one of the boxes, it would kind of stay there. But if they’re in thermodynamic equilibrium, you put energy into one box, then all of the boxes will change because all of the energy will be distributed throughout the system. When you look at the video, the behavior of the boundary layer position moves up and down.

But also the temperature: if it moves to the right, the temperature is increasing. If it moves to the left, the temperature is decreasing. And what you will see once you watch the video, it’s all synchronized. In other words, if a change occurs, if the troposphere is warming up and the temperature is moving to the right, the tropopause moves down, the tropopause moves in the opposite direction. So in other words, when the troposphere heats up, the tropopause cools down. when the troposphere cools down the tropopause heats up and it does so in a synchronized way. So that synchronization shows that it’s thermodynamically connect connected. The idea that all of these boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium is contradicted by this data. [The referenced video starts at 10 minutes into the embedded presentation below.]

So that’s the first assumption. Now looking at the second assumption.
Back in the day, 18th century or something, Hadley was looking to explain the trade winds. So he came up with this idea of what happens: The very hot temperatures landing on the equator heated up the atmosphere. here and this hot air then rose up. Then as it rose up it started to move towards the poles and as it moved towards the poles it cooled down and you got this circular phenomenon. They came up with three different types of circular cells: the Hadley cells; the Ferrel cells and the Polar cells. But all of these this theoretical stuff was based on ground measurements.

And again uh nobody bothered to check whether this is true or not. So I’ll just show how we checked it. But first of all I just want to explain what’s meant by mass flux. So if you take a square meter and you measure the air flowing through it and what weight of air that is the mass flux. So in the weather balloons they give you the speed of the air and they give you the direction in which it’s it’s going. So you can use this to calculate the mass flux. So we said fine. So can we use this to check the idea of the Hadley cells and it turns out that you can. So we did and we published a paper two years ago.

We found first of all if you take a balloon and you launch it up through one of these cells then if Hadley is correct you would expect the hot air was rising here in the tropics and that drags in the air from the colder regions and then it hits the tropopause. Now, when Hadley came up with the idea, nobody knew the tropopause existed, and it’s only 30 years before I was born that it was actually discovered. So, that’s telling something about my age.

Anyway, if you send a balloon up through the atmosphere, you would expect the mass flux flow to flow in that direction down at the lower levels. And then as you go up at some stage it would shift over and start going in the opposite directions. So since that was available that mass flux we could measure from the balloon data we did that and we got a surprise.

There was absolutely no circulation patterns at all. Instead what the atmosphere was doing. So if we point here you can see these ones are the lower ones. So you have the direction the north south direction of the mass flux. These are the ones at the lower half of the troposphere. These are the ones in the opposite half of the troposphere.

For a Hadley cell you would expect these ones to be flowing in the opposite direction to these ones. But instead what we find is they all flow in the same direction. And in a very unusual pattern. What happens is here it’s flowing south then the atmosphere slows down over a couple of days goes back and forth and so on. So instead of this circular pattern what’s happening is the whole atmosphere is moving like a giant pendulum back and forth. So we have the atmosphere going one way, then after a few days it turns around and comes back in the opposite direction. And this is for Iceland but we found the exact same thing occurred for all the different stations.

So in that published paper we we took a station from each of the different five climate types and we found the exact same sort of thing happened. Now people said: okay so maybe it’s going back and forward on a daily basis but over a period of a year it might average out. So we average the data over the five years for each of the stations.

And since we published that paper, we’ve analyzed over 250 of the weather stations in the tropics. And we found for these 82% of them are Hadley. 73 in the northern hemisphere. So the majority are not Hadley cells. And in the southern hemisphere they’re equally balanced. But the problem with even the ones that were Hadley cells is you can see here the mass flux grow flowing in this direction the area under the curve is not the same as the one up above. And if it was a proper Hadley cell, they’d have to be the same. So what we found is for none of them this worked out. So they don’t exist, right?

John Stossel Goes Off on Big Green Racketeers

Posted on July 19 by Ron Clutz

H/T Mark Krebs, who commented: This 5-minute by the great John Stossel packs a punch. Like me, he’s a recovering environmentalist who is still a conservationist but has become sick and tired of the manner in which huge elitist tax-exempt NGOs have used the cause to empower and enrich themselves.

For those who prefer reading, below in italics is the transcript from closed captions with my bolds and added images.

Climate change. We are seeing the impacts more and more each day.
So, what are you doing about it? Our future is on the line.

You can help save the world, say these environmental groups, just donate!The first thing that comes up on their websites is donate. Donate.

Why is it so important to donate to this fundraiser for Greenpeace?
Because it’s too hot, because it’s too cold, because it rains, because it doesn’t.
So, give us money. Money.

Your gift will help NRDC come to the defense of polar bears.
To get more money they lie. They are facing extinction in this century.
They say polar bears are disappearing. They aren’t.

They claim bees are dying off. Greenpeace set itself a challenge to put a stop to the deaths of thousands of bees. But bees are doing fine.

Environmental groups claim nuclear energy is dirty and dangerous, when it’s better than alternatives.

They call climate change an existential threat. It’s a problem, but not existential. These scares drive donations.

Science writer Jon Entine.
They always feel that the only way they can talk about environmental issues is to frame it with hysteria, crisis. But they’re not trying to trick people. They believe it.

Sometimes they believe it. But they also recognize that hysteria generates donations and the oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they’re doing good.

So, you give billions to these groups. Insufficient attention has been made to following the money.

Physicist Mark Mills.
The environmental industrial complex actually has more money in the PR game, in the lobbying game, than the real industry. The media portray the activists as plucky underdogs, the little guy. But they’re not.
Greenpeace pulls in more than $400 million a year and they want more.

Our fundraisers are doing street or door fundraising. They pay young people to accost you.
Even if it’s only two or three people each day, knowing that they’re gonna be giving to Greenpeace for a hell of a long time.

Some of your millions in donations to the World Wildlife Fund help pay for its 250,000 sq foot headquarters with, as they proudly put it, a “stunning eight-story, sky-lit atrium.” They call this, “wise use of donated funds.” Support WWF’s global conservation work. That’s just 40 cents a day.

The Natural Resources Defense Council spends some of your millions on galas with fashion brands and celebrities, who also make ads for them. This is our moment! Give to the Sierra Club and you can attend their lavish ball here.

The so-called environmentalists are now the big guys, rolling in money. It’s bad enough that they lie to us and get paid. Worse is the damage they do. They block progress. They have billions of dollars to not build a thing, but just to oppose building things.

There’s a rich sense of irony there. Irony because while they say they’ll save the bees. Ultimately that donation goes to a lawyer suing someone, preventing you from using gasoline.

Some of your money does go to people cleaning parks or rivers, but groups like the NRDC and Sierra Club spend millions more on lawsuits.

In the past year our legal team has stopped thousands of miles of fossil fuel pipelines and dozens of large power plants.

We have the Sierra Club active in every state, actively suing. A natural gas pipeline that was supposed to span 3 states has been cancelled. Environmentalists sued to stop it.

They sue to stop nuclear power. They even oppose solar projects and wind farms.
It’s that apparatus that’s keeping us from building.

It used to be NIMBY, not in my backyard. Now it’s BANANA.
Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.

And unfortunately, what that means is we don’t get the lifestyle that we want.

If you wanted to build a new house, for example, what kind of permits do you have to get?
Who do you have to talk to? Is the Sierra Club gonna sue you for building the wrong thing?

I’m ashamed that I once fell for their scams. Years ago my TV station ran ads promoting my alarmist environmental reporting. Now I realize that what today’s big environmental groups mostly do is stop progress and make lawyers richer.

We invited the groups to come here and explain to me why I’m wrong. Defend your work.
Not one would agree.

I still want to ask them how they justify making it so hard for people to build anything.
It’s a shame because really when I think about what America could be, what we could be building, we could be so prosperous, so much more prosperous than we are.

June 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms, SH Cools

Posted on July 17 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.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for the current version HadSST4.1.1.0 is here. The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through June 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 last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 12 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 8 months from its 1.3C peak in August, down to 0.8C in March and April. Remarkably, April 2025 SST anomalies in all regions and globally are the coolest since March 2023. May showed little change in the Global anomaly, while in June declines in SH along with the Tropics mostly offset an upward bump in NH.

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 and June despite upward bumps in NH.

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 was holding at 1.4C before declining. 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 is headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, now in May and June aligning with 2010.

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

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.17. The orange line the average 1980-2024, value 0.4, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-2024, value 0.67. 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?

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

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

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

Arctic Ice Melting 4 Days Faster Mid-July 2025

Posted on July 16 by Ron Clutz

After a sub-par March maximum, by end of May 2025 Arctic ice closed the gap with the 19-year average. Then in June the gap reopened and in July the melting pace matched the average, abeit four days in advance of average.

During this period the average year loses ~2.5M km2 of ice extent. MASIE on day 166 was ~300k km2 down, and the gap increased to almost 550k km2 by June 30 (day 181). The deficit to average then reduced to ~350k km2, which persisted over the last 12 days

including yesterday, day 196. The graph shows MASIE 2025 matching the average on day 192, four days in advance.

The regional distribution of ice extents is shown in the table below. (Bering and Okhotsk seas are excluded since both are now virtually open water.)

Region	2025196	Day 196	2025-Ave.	2020196	2025-2020
(0) Northern_Hemisphere	8007061	8358377	-351316	7556873	450188
(1) Beaufort_Sea	1022304	866531	155773	931056	91248
(2) Chukchi_Sea	718615	643869	74745	612932	105683
(3) East_Siberian_Sea	976061	921340	54721	659117	316945
(4) Laptev_Sea	645741	559270	86471	174286	471454
(5) Kara_Sea	153545	360645	-207100	159679	-6134
(6) Barents_Sea	14342	56080	-41738	39446	-25105
(7) Greenland_Sea	387402	402761	-15359	400498	-13096
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence	268783	311662	-42878	232167	36616
(9) Canadian_Archipelago	630633	711293	-80660	733866	-103233
(10) Hudson_Bay	155460	349275	-193815	520027	-364567
(11) Central_Arctic	3032353	3171652	-139299	3093040.21	-60687

The table shows the two largest deficits, the Atlantic Kara basin combined with Hudson Bay, exceed the total difference from average. In addition are lower ice extents in Central Arctic and Canadian Archipelago, offset by surpluses in Beaufort Sea and other Eurasian shelf basins. Note that Hudson Bay with 350k km2 average ice extent yesterday will have less than 100k in three weeks.

Why is this important? All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post NH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower May 2025.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also. See Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_level

The Big Beautiful Win for Rational Climate Policies

Posted on July 11 by Ron Clutz

With Congress passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into US law, let’s consider the policy implications going forward. Also note the irony of the previous Biden administration BBBA (Build Back Better Act) which failed:

Speaker Mike Johnson listed 25 Trump Executive Orders now codified into law by Congress (highlighted are those most related to climate policies):

Securing our Borders
Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border
Protecting the American People Against Invasion
Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders
Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats
Implementing the President’s DOGE Cost Efficiency Initiative
Protecting America’s Bank Account Against Fraud, Waste and Abuse
Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy
Stopping Waste, Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos
Iron Dome for America
Unleashing American Drone Dominance
Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance
Unleashing American Energy
Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry
Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential
Declaring a National Energy Emergency
Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production
Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production
Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States
Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation
Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States and Communities
Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education
Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission
Further Amendment to Duties Addressing the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China as Applied to Low-Value Imports
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Global Tax Deal
Enforcing the Hyde Amendment
Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday — Garden of Heroes
Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful

I used perplexity.ai to answer two questions about what impact to expect from this Development. Text in italics with my bolds, two edits and added images.

Several Trump Executive Orders since January 2025
have directly targeted climate change policies
at both the federal and state levels.

Rescinding Biden-Era Climate Orders: Trump issued an executive order revoking all previous administration executive orders related to climate change, the clean energy transition, and climate finance. This included: the cancellation of national and sectoral climate targets, such as net zero by 2050, 100% electric vehicle sales by 2035, and the revocation of the National Climate Task Force and the State Department’s Climate Change Support Office.

Declaring a National Energy Emergency: An executive order declared a national emergency on energy, prioritizing fossil fuel development, including in previously protected areas like Alaska. It directed agencies to expedite energy permitting and infrastructure, and to use emergency authorities to facilitate new energy projects, especially for oil, gas, coal, and critical minerals.

Disbanding the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases Group: The “Unleashing American Energy” executive order disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, excluding its work from government policy and directing agencies to consider eliminating the social cost of carbon from regulatory decisions.

Blocking State Climate Change Policies: In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order instructing the U.S. Attorney General to identify and take action against state and local laws that address climate change, ESG initiatives, environmental justice, and carbon emissions. The order specifically targeted state policies that mandate clean energy, impose carbon fees, or hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate impacts.

Promoting Coal and Grid Reliability: Additional executive orders promoted coal mining and coal-based power, particularly for AI data centers, and emphasized strengthening the reliability and security of the electric grid. These actions are expected to increase emissions from the power sector.

Rolling Back Wind Energy Initiatives: Trump withdrew the Outer Continental Shelf from wind energy leasing, paused project approvals, and directed a review of federal wind leasing and permitting practices.

Halting Federal Climate Funding: The administration paused disbursements of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that support climate initiatives, including electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

Challenging State Authority: The executive orders aim to preempt or invalidate state-level climate actions, especially those seen as burdensome to domestic energy production. States like California, New York, and Vermont, with aggressive climate policies, are specifically mentioned as targets of these federal actions.

These orders collectively represent a broad effort to reverse federal and state climate change policies, prioritize fossil fuel development, and roll back regulations and incentives for clean energy and emissions reduction.

With Trump’s executive orders on climate and energy
now codified as law by Congress,
the following effects are taking place.

Federal Climate Programs Rolled Back: The new laws have solidified the rollback of key federal climate and clean energy initiatives, including the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate provisions, elimination of the Justice40 commitment, and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Federal agencies are now required by law to halt or redirect funding away from climate-focused programs and environmental justice initiatives.

Permitting and Environmental Review ~~Weakened~~ Reformed: The codified laws have overhauled the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process, prioritizing rapid permitting for energy (especially fossil fuel) projects and rescinding previous NEPA regulations. This accelerates approvals for oil, gas, and infrastructure projects, often at the expense of environmental review and ~~public~~ input from decarbonizing activists.

Electric Vehicle and Clean Energy Incentives Cut: The laws have ended or severely restricted federal incentives for electric vehicles (EVs), including tax credits and mandates. California’s authority to set stricter emissions standards has been revoked, and other states cannot enforce more aggressive climate policies than federal standards.

Wind and Solar Tax Credits Limited: Although a last-minute legislative compromise allowed renewable projects a one-year window to claim tax credits, Trump’s executive order—now backed by law—directs the Treasury to sharply restrict eligibility. Only projects with substantial physical progress will qualify, making it harder for wind and solar developers to access these credits and reducing the financial viability of new clean energy projects.

Social Cost of Carbon Eliminated: The laws have abolished the use of the “social cost of greenhouse gases” in federal decision-making. Agencies are directed to ignore or eliminate this metric from permitting and regulatory processes, undermining the rationale for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Endangerment Finding Under Review: The EPA is required to review the 2009 Endangerment Finding (the scientific and legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act). If overturned or weakened, this could eliminate the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and industry.

Preemption of State Climate Laws: The Attorney General is now legally empowered to challenge and potentially invalidate state and local climate change laws that are viewed as restricting domestic energy production or conflicting with federal policy. This targets states like California and New York, threatening their ability to set independent climate standards.

International Climate Commitments Withdrawn: The United States has formally withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and ceased all international climate finance, isolating the U.S. from global climate efforts and reducing international pressure for domestic climate action.

These changes, now enshrined in law, represent a comprehensive reversal of previous federal and state climate change policies, prioritizing fossil fuel development and deregulation while sharply curtailing support for clean energy and emissions reduction.

The legal codification makes these policy shifts more durable
and harder for future administrations to quickly reverse.

	Finland Regrets Its… on More Political Ignorance on En…
	Finland Regrets Its… on Salla Finland Should Host 2032…
	Finland Regrets Its… on Finland’s Self-imposed C…
	Finland Regrets Its… on Finland Regrets Its Green…
	UAH Stays Cool Janua… on December 2025 All Ocean SSTs C…

Science Matters

Reading between the lines, and underneath the hype.

Canada Update: Suddenly, Climate Hysteria is Gone

See Also

Tide Running Out on Climatism

ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change

My Summary

Supreme Screw-up: Climate Fallacies Embraced by Canada’s Highest Court

The Fantasy of a “Carbon Wall” Around Canada and its Provinces

The Assumption of an Existential Threat to Humanity

The Unfolding Danger in the Supreme Court’s Climate Assumptions

SH and Tropics Lead UAH Cooling June 2025

June 2025 SH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

Climate Model Assumptions Contrary to Balloon Data

John Stossel Goes Off on Big Green Racketeers

See Also:

June 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms, SH Cools

Contemporary AMO Observations

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

Arctic Ice Melting 4 Days Faster Mid-July 2025

The Big Beautiful Win for Rational Climate Policies

Several Trump Executive Orders since January 2025
have directly targeted climate change policies
at both the federal and state levels.

With Trump’s executive orders on climate and energy
now codified as law by Congress,
the following effects are taking place.

See Also

My Summary

The Fantasy of a “Carbon Wall” Around Canada and its Provinces

The Assumption of an Existential Threat to Humanity

The Unfolding Danger in the Supreme Court’s Climate Assumptions

June 2025 SH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

See Also:

Contemporary AMO Observations

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

Several Trump Executive Orders since January 2025 have directly targeted climate change policies at both the federal and state levels.

With Trump’s executive orders on climate and energy now codified as law by Congress, the following effects are taking place.

Several Trump Executive Orders since January 2025
have directly targeted climate change policies
at both the federal and state levels.

With Trump’s executive orders on climate and energy
now codified as law by Congress,
the following effects are taking place.