Global and domestic political difficulties overshadow the annual
negotiations at this year’s summit, co-hosted by Australia and Turkey
The signal from the organisers of this year’s summit, Australia and Turkey, who are co-hosting because neither country would withdraw its bid to stage the event, which begins next week. Turkey’s climate minister, Murat Kurum:
“We want to create a Cop31 that prioritises action and implementation, where commitments are finally put into practice.” “Cop31 is an implementation Cop and we should focus on that.” Ireland’s climate minister, Darragh O’Brien.
It is true there have been many commitments that have yet to be honoured in full, or even in part. They include the Paris Agreement from Cop21, the creation of the Loss and Damage Fund from Cop27 and agreement to transition away from fossil fuels from Cop28. All were breakthrough achievements but much work is required to realise their goals.
Other recent pledges came without instructions as to how to proceed and have been slow to progress:
♦ to triple renewable capacity by 2030, ♦ double energy efficiency and ♦ scale up climate finance.
There is one new buzz word around this year’s summit, however – electrification. Turkey and Australia want a Cop31 agreement that commits to having 35 per cent of global demand for power, heat and transport supplied by electricity by 2035. The idea behind the “35 by 35” goal is that it will kick-start the transition away from fossil fuels.
“A lot is being made of this electrification target,” “The key thing, though, is that it doesn’t seem to include a commitment to clean energy,” says Diarmuid Torney of Dublin City University.
It certainly doesn’t sound like much of a win if electric cars replace petrol and electric heating replaces coal but the electricity itself is generated by burning gas.
With a so far underwhelming agenda, Cop31 might be considered less of a draw than previous summits but the number of delegates accredited and pavilions booked by countries, alliances and industries is touching a record high. Prof Peter Thorne of the Icarus climate research centre at Maynooth University despairs of this burgeoning sideshow element to the negotiations.
“Cops have become an absolute circus,” he says. “Many will be going to network or for the vibes with no official role and at best talking to 20 mates in some country pavilion.”
“There will be inevitable window dressing applied and positive words, but the fundamental issues will remain,” he says.
“A lack of ambition amongst even the handful of states with the means to progress reductions emissions, a growing adaptation gap even in developed countries, and yawning finance, equity and justice gaps.”
My Comments
Since there is a big push on climate funding, maybe they could get to the bottom of this.
Maybe donors are put off by no one knowing who gets the money and for what it is spent. And while they are investigating, how about understanding Energy Return on Investment (EROI): you know, the notion that an energy project is worth doing if the energy produced is greater than energy spent. “Electrify everything” is only people dreaming of a world free of fossil fuels.
Why a COP Briefing?
Actually, climate hysteria is like a seasonal sickness. Each year a contagion of anxiety and fear is created by disinformation going viral in both legacy and social media in the run up to the annual autumnal COP. Since the climatists are especially desperate with the US outspokenly against the climate movement, we can expect the public will be hugely hosed with alarms over the next few weeks. Before the distress signals go full tilt, individuals need to inoculate themselves against the false claims, in order to build some herd immunity against the nonsense the media will promulgate. This post is offered as a means to that end.
Media Climate Hype is a Cover Up
Back in 2015 in the run up to Paris COP, French mathematicians published a thorough critique of the raison d’etre of the whole crusade. They said:
Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.
Absurd because of no reliable evidence that anything unusual is happening in our climate.
Costly because trillions of dollars are wasted on immature, inefficient technologies that serve only to make cheap, reliable energy expensive and intermittent.
Pointless because we do not control the weather anyway.
The prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation) issued a detailed 195-page White Paper presenting a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of global warming. The synopsis with links to the entire document is at COP Briefing for Realists
Even without attending to their documentation, you can tell they are right because all the media climate hype is concentrated against those three points.
Finding: Nothing unusual is happening with our weather and climate.
Hype: Every metric or weather event is “unprecedented,” or “worse than we thought.”
Finding: Proposed solutions will cost many trillions of dollars for little effect or benefit.
Hype: Zero carbon will lead the world to do the right thing. Anyway, the planet must be saved at any cost.
Finding: Nature operates without caring what humans do or think.
Hype: Any destructive natural event is blamed on humans burning fossil fuels.
How the Media Throws Up Flak to Defend False Suppositions
The Absurd Media: Climate is Dangerous Today, Yesterday It was Ideal.
Billions of dollars have been spent researching any and all negative effects from a warming world: Everything from Acne to Zika virus. A recent Climate Report repeats the usual litany of calamities to be feared and avoided by submitting to IPCC demands. The evidence does not support these claims. An example:
It is scientifically established that human activities produce GHG emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans, resulting in warming of Earth’s surface and the oceans, acidification of the oceans, increased variability of climate, with a higher incidence of extreme weather events, and other changes in the climate.
Moreover, leading experts believe that there is already more than enough excess heat in the climate system to do severe damage and that 2C of warming would have very significant adverse effects, including resulting in multi-meter sea level rise.
Experts have observed an increased incidence of climate-related extreme weather events, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme heat and heavy precipitation events and more severe droughts and associated heatwaves. Experts have also observed an increased incidence of large forest fires; and reduced snowpack affecting water resources in the western U.S. The most recent National Climate Assessment projects these climate impacts will continue to worsen in the future as global temperatures increase.
Alarming Weather and Wildfires
But: Weather is not more extreme.
And Wildfires were worse in the past. But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.
Litany of Changes
Seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade; wildfires are at an all-time high, while Arctic Sea ice is rapidly diminishing.
We are seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.
When it rains really hard, it’s harder than ever.
We’re seeing glaciers melting, sea level rising.
The length and the intensity of heatwaves has gone up dramatically.
Plants and trees are flowering earlier in the year. Birds are moving polewards.
We’re seeing more intense storms.
But: Arctic Ice has not declined since 2007.
But: All of these are within the range of past variability.In fact our climate is remarkably stable, compared to the range of daily temperatures during a year where I live.
And many aspects follow quasi-60 year cycles.
The Impractical Media: Money is No Object in Saving the Planet.
Here it is blithely assumed that the UN can rule the seas to stop rising, heat waves to cease, and Arctic ice to grow (though why we would want that is debatable). All this will be achieved by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and powering civilization with windmills and solar panels. While admitting that our way of life depends on fossil fuels, they ignore the inadequacy of renewable energy sources at their present immaturity.
An Example: The choice between incurring manageable costs now and the incalculable, perhaps even irreparable, burden Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children will face if Defendants fail to rapidly transition to a non-fossil fuel economy is clear. While the full costs of the climate damages that would result from maintaining a fossil fuel-based economy may be incalculable, there is already ample evidence concerning the lower bound of such costs, and with these minimum estimates, it is already clear that the cost of transitioning to a low/no carbon economy are far less than the benefits of such a transition. No rational calculus could come to an alternative conclusion. Defendants must act with all deliberate speed and immediately cease the subsidization of fossil fuels and any new fossil fuel projects, and implement policies to rapidly transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.
But CO2 relation to Temperature is Inconsistent.
But: The planet is greener because of rising CO2.
But: Modern nations (G20) depend on fossil fuels for nearly 90% of their energy.
But: Renewables are not ready for prime time.
People need to know that adding renewables to an electrical grid presents both technical and economic challenges. Experience shows that adding intermittent power more than 10% of the baseload makes precarious the reliability of the supply. South Australia is demonstrating this with a series of blackouts when the grid cannot be balanced. Germany got to a higher % by dumping its excess renewable generation onto neighboring countries until the EU finally woke up and stopped them. Texas got up to 29% by dumping onto neighboring states, and some like Georgia are having problems.
But more dangerous is the way renewables destroy the economics of electrical power. Seasoned energy analyst Gail Tverberg writes:
In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.
The Irrational Media: Whatever Happens in Nature is Our Fault.
An Example:
Other potential examples include agricultural losses. Whether or not insurance reimburses farmers for their crops, there can be food shortages that lead to higher food prices (that will be borne by consumers, that is, Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children). There is a further risk that as our climate and land use pattern changes, disease vectors may also move (e.g., diseases formerly only in tropical climates move northward).36 This could lead to material increases in public health costs
But: Actual climate zones are local and regional in scope, and they show little boundary change.
But: Ice cores show that it was warmer in the past, not due to humans.
The hype is produced by computer programs designed to frighten and distract children and the uninformed. For example, there was mention above of “multi-meter” sea level rise. It is all done with computer models. For example, below is San Francisco. More at USCS Warnings of Coastal Floodings
In addition, there is no mention that GCMs projections are running about twice as hot as observations.
Omitted is the fact GCMs correctly replicate tropospheric temperature observations only when CO2 warming is turned off.
Figure 5. Simplification of IPCC AR5 shown above in Fig. 4. The colored lines represent the range of results for the models and observations. The trends here represent trends at different levels of the tropical atmosphere from the surface up to 50,000 ft. The gray lines are the bounds for the range of observations, the blue for the range of IPCC model results without extra GHGs and the red for IPCC model results with extra GHGs.The key point displayed is the lack of overlap between the GHG model results (red) and the observations (gray). The nonGHG model runs (blue) overlap the observations almost completely.
In the effort to proclaim scientific certainty, neither the media nor IPCC discuss the lack of warming since the 1998 El Nino, despite two additional El Ninos in 2010 and 2016, plus an unexplained spike in 2023-24, now cooling off.
Further they exclude comparisons between fossil fuel consumption and temperature changes. The legal methodology for discerning causation regarding work environments or medicine side effects insists that the correlation be strong and consistent over time, and there be no confounding additional factors. As long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for a set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. Such is the null hypothesis in legal terms: Things happen for many reasons unless you can prove one reason is dominant.
Finally, advocates and IPCC are picking on the wrong molecule. The climate is controlled not by CO2 but by H20. Oceans make climate through the massive movement of energy involved in water’s phase changes from solid to liquid to gas and back again. From those heat transfers come all that we call weather and climate: Clouds, Snow, Rain, Winds, and Storms.
Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ended a very fine recent presentation with this description of the climate system:
I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.
Summary: From this we learn three things:
Climate warms and cools without any help from humans.
Warming is good and cooling is bad.
The hypothetical warming from CO2 would be a good thing.
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, which dropped back toward normal values. Now in September and October 2026 there is again an El Nino peaking, albeit at a lower level.
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 ~66 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.
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
October 2026 UAH Temps: Ocean Warms and Land Cools
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 a low in January 2026. Since then El Nino in the Tropics has risen sharply pulling up all regions despite a drop in July.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for August 2026. 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 I posted recently on August 2026 ENSO Spikes SSTs Warming. 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. 2025 showed a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February. Then in November and December SH land temps spiked while ocean temps showed litle change. In February 2026 NH land temps doubled, from Dec. 0.53C up to 1.14C last month. Despite SH land changing little, and Tropical land cooling, the Global land anomaly jumped up from 0.53 to 0.93C. That reversed in March with both NH land and Global land anomaly back down to 0.63C. That cooling offset SH Ocean warming doubling from 0.19C to 0.38C. In May was a warming spike in Tropics and SH ocean air while NH ocean air was flat. At the same time, Land air temps warmed in Tropics and NH while dropping in SH. The unusual end result for May was Global, Land and Ocean air temp anomalies all showing the same 0.53C. In June and July there were ups and down, and now in August an upward bump in NH and SH, both land and sea.
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 2026. 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.
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. During 2025 there were ups and downs, but in November/December all regions were cooler, led by a sharp drop in SH bringing the Global ocean anomaly down to 0.02C. In 2026, ocean warming was evident, with Tropics and SH pulling up Global ocean air temps despite little rise in NH ocean. Now in June and July that has reversed with SH cooling and pulling down the Global ocean anomaly, even despite tropical warming. In October all regions are up again, near summer of 2024 values, though Tropics rose only slightly and may be peaking.
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. 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.
In 2026 January and February Global land rebounded up to 1.14C, led by a NH warming spike. That NH spike was reversed in March and April back down to 0.43C. In June land temps in SH plunged nearly 0.6C down to 0.2C, pulling Global land anomaly down more than 0.1C. August saw Global land temps peaking, before going lower in September and little changed in October 2026.
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, later months declined steadily dropping. to 0.3C in December. In 2026 the global anomaly was little changed through April, then rose to a new peak of 0.68C in August, little changed 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.
The Guardian: Gulf Stream Could Collapse As Early as 2025, Study Suggests
Coincidental with the runup to Halloween, climate alarmists are again filling the media with warnings about Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC) collapsing and giving rise to an ice age. They blame this on radiative forcing from increasing CO2 levels by humans using hydrocarbon fuels. Some examples that may have caught your attemtion.
Satellites show some of the strongest evidence the AMOC is weakening, New Scientist, 26 October 2026
Key Atlantic currents could collapse this century, but the risk is missing from almost all national climate plans, The Conversation, 28 October 2026
AMOC collapse: The major climate threat missing from almost every country’s adaptation plans, MSN 2 November 2026
‘Too late to act’: Scientists warn critical Atlantic and Antarctic Ocean currents are collapsing, news.com.au 2 November 2026
AMOC: How the changing Atlantic could reshape our world, BBC 1 November 2026
Iceland Is War-Gaming an Ocean Current Collapse, Gizmodo 2 November 2026
Etc., Etc., Etc.
As readers may suspect, much of this bandwagon is triggered by a new paper from the alarmists at Potsdam led by Rahmstorf. And also unsurprisingly, it all depends on projections from climate models rather than observed realities. This post provides a fact check from the real world by means of a peer-reviewed paper at Nature by A.J. Baker et al. (2026) Continued Atlantic overturning circulation even under climate extremes. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
To enlarge, open image in new tab.
Abstract
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), vital for northwards heat transport in the Atlantic Ocean, is projected to weaken owing to global warming, with significant global climate impacts. However, the extent of AMOC weakening is uncertain with wide variation across climate models and some statistical indicators suggesting an imminent collapse. Here we show that the AMOC is resilient to extreme greenhouse gas and North Atlantic freshwater forcings across 34 climate models.
Upwelling in the Southern Ocean, driven by persistent Southern Ocean winds, sustains a weakened AMOC in all cases, preventing its complete collapse. As Southern Ocean upwelling must be balanced by downwelling in the Atlantic or Pacific, the AMOC can only collapse if a compensating Pacific Meridional Overturning Circulation (PMOC) develops. Remarkably, a PMOC does emerge in almost all models, but it is too weak to balance all of the Southern Ocean upwelling, suggesting that an AMOC collapse is unlikely this century.
Our findings reveal AMOC-stabilizing mechanisms with implications for past and future AMOC changes, and hence for ecosystems and ocean biogeochemistry. They suggest that better understanding and estimates of the Southern Ocean and Indo-Pacific circulations are urgently needed to accurately predict future AMOC change.
Discussion
To understand how the AMOC is sustained under extreme climate forcing, and what causes differences in its weakened state across models and forcings, we quantify the AMOC’s upwelling pathways, which return deep North Atlantic waters to the surface either through Southern Ocean (SO) wind-driven upwelling or diffusion in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans. The SO wind-driven upwelling rate depends on the SO westerly wind strength that drives SO upwelling and on the opposing SO mesoscale eddy response, referred to as eddy compensation.
Our approach, which focuses on AMOC upwelling pathways rather than the mean state of the North Atlantic, offers fresh perspectives on the AMOC response. Although the AMOC’s Indo-Pacific upwelling pathway largely controls intermodel variations in AMOC decline in realistic scenarios, the impact of extreme forcing on upwelling pathway changes and thereby potentially AMOC resilience has not been explored. Here we assess how ocean circulation changes remote from the Atlantic affect the AMOC and its upwelling pathways in climate models.
Fig. 1 | Schematic and analysis method for AMOC upwelling pathways. a,b, Meridional overturning streamfunctionin sverdrups (Sv (106 m3 s−1), with 2-Sv contour intervals) from the CMCC-ESM2 pre-industrial control simulation, highlighting the methodology for separating the AMOC’s upwelling pathways.
Streamfunctions are shown for the Atlantic (a) and Indo-Pacific (b) oceans north of 34.5° S (indicated by vertical dashed lines) and globally within the Southern Ocean (SO). The 0-Sv streamline is marked by a solid black line and the vertical green line at 34.5° S in b denotes the net volume transport from the Indo-Pacific to the Southern Ocean over the highlighted depth. The coloured circles highlight the meridional overturning circulation strength at these locations. The term IndoPac_ResidualUp is calculated as a residual by rearranging the equation shown below the panels. c,d, Schematic of the
AMOC’s upwelling pathways in the present day (c) and under scenarios of extreme GHG or North Atlantic freshwater forcing (d). Transport pathways are sketched, with increasing water mass density illustrated by a colour gradient from yellow to dark green.
Our analysis reveals that SO wind-driven upwelling maintains a weakened AMOC under extreme forcing, overcoming the destabilizing effects of a developing Pacific Meridional Overturning Circulation (PMOC), with implications for understanding both past and future risks of AMOC collapse. We define the PMOC as a clockwise overturning cell in the Indo-Pacific Ocean (Methods), characterized by sinking and densification occurring in the subtropical North Pacific or more southerly latitudes, rather than the more commonly referenced northern latitudes.
Future fate of the AMOC
We have shown that SO wind-driven upwelling prevents an AMOC collapse under extreme climate forcing in CMIP6 climate models. The AMOC’s future strength depends not only on the future SO upper cell strength (which depends on its present-day strength and change) but also on the future PMOC strength (if it forms) (Fig. 4c,e; r = 0.90 (r = 0.98) for 4xCO2 (u03_hos), excluding anomalous models shaded in orange and purple). Previous studies have highlighted the role of SO wind-driven upwelling in sustaining an AMOC in simple models, but its importance in comprehensive global climate models under extreme forcing was unexplored. GHG forcing strengthens the SO westerly winds, strengthening the SO upper cell33. Thus, for an AMOC collapse or substantial AMOC weakening to occur, a strong PMOC that upwells in the SO (Fig. 1d) is essential because SO wind-driven upwelling must be balanced by downwelling in either the Atlantic or Indo-Pacific oceans to conserve volume.
An active PMOC associated with a weakened or collapsed AMOC was evident in past climates, including during the Last Glacial Maximum and its termination and the warm Pliocene when atmospheric CO2 levels were similar to present-day levels. Our findings suggest that PMOC formation may have facilitated AMOC collapses in past climates by reducing the SO upwelling of AMOC deep waters. The PMOC transports heat northwards, and affects ocean biogeochemistry and carbon uptake, highlighting the need to assess its impact on future climate in CMIP6 models.
Although SO upwelling sustains the AMOC under the extreme forcings considered here, increased forcings may further weaken the AMOC, but only if the SO upper cell weakens or the PMOC strengthens. AMOC weakeningis therefore resisted through maintenance of the SO winds and freshwater input to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, implying that a large forcing is required for an AMOC collapse. Hence, we argue that changes in the hydrological cycle or changes in freshwater transport into the Indo-Pacific Ocean, in addition to the Atlantic Ocean, may be crucial for AMOC tipping by enabling formation of a strong PMOC. Although the models show a PMOC does not develop or remains generally weak in realistic future scenarios, if they underestimate the possibility of a strong PMOC forming, they may also underestimate the risk of a future AMOC collapse. Therefore, understanding model biases is essential.
The future extent of AMOC decline remains uncertain, despite its critical impact on heat, carbon and nutrient transport, and thus on global climate and ecosystems. We have shown that SO wind-driven upwelling prevents an AMOC collapse in CMIP6 climate models under extreme GHG and North Atlantic freshwater forcings. With predicted stronger SO winds and the present-day Bering Strait open, we conclude that a twenty-first century AMOC collapse (defined here as weakening to below 6 Sv) is unlikely. However, to refine AMOC projections, a greater focus on ocean circulation changes beyond the North Atlantic and their driving mechanisms is essential. Future changes in both the Atlantic and Pacific overturning would impact regional weather, climate, ecosystems and agriculture, so accurate projections of both are required to inform adaptation and resilience to climate change.
This post is the second of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You.I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the second theme.
Overview
The assembled governments of the world meeting in Glasgow for COP26 are fixing to declare war on the backbone of modern economic life and the abundance and relief from human poverty and suffering with which it has gifted the world. We are referring, of course, to its agenda to essentially drive fossil fuels—which currently make up 80% of BTU consumption—from the global energy supply system over the next several decades.
All of this is being done in the name of preventing global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels.
But when it comes to the crucial matter of exactly which pre-industrial baseline level, you can see the skunk sitting on the woodpile a mile away. That’s because, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!
2. During our Holocene epoch, for the past 11.6 thousand years, earth’s climate has changed often with multiple periods, both warmer and and cooler than the present. The modern warming period since 1850 was preceded by the Medieval, the Roman, and the Minoan warming periods–each was cooler than the previous, and all of them warmer than the present. The last 1.5C of warming has been a boon to human agriculture and civilization, and the next 1.5C is likely to also be beneficial.
Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.
Still, the juxtaposition of the temperature record of the last 66 million years and the sawed-off charts of the climate alarmists tells you all you need to know: to wit, they have simply banished all the “inconvenient” science from the narrative.
Global Average Temperature Trend, 1850–2018 per the Global Warming Narrative
Needless to say, there is a reason why they start the graphs in 1850, and it is not just because it was the tail-end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), from which low point the temperature trend might well climb upwards for a time as climatic conditions normalized.
Actually, the intellectual deception is far more egregious. To wit, the Climate Howlers want you to believe the absolutely anti-scientific notion that the global climate was in general equipoiseuntil the coal barons and the John D. Rockefeller’s of the mid-19th century set off a dangerous chain of climate dysfunction as they brought the stored solar energy embedded in coal and petroleum to the surface and released its combustion by-products–especially CO2—into the ambient air.
The Risible Myth Of Climate Equipoise
The global warming narrative is the most risible manifestation yet of this leap into self-righteous disregard for evidence, logic, and plausibility. For when you step back from the shrill, sanctimonious narrative that passes for the global warming catechism, the ridiculousness of its central claim that industrial society is destroying the climatic equipoise of the planet is self-evident.
For crying out loud, there has never been equipoise!
What there’s been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes, including:
plate tectonics that has sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 335 million and 175 million years ago, and the continuous drift of the present-day continents thereafter;
asteroid bombardments;
the 100,000-year cycles of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it’s at maximum elongation);
the 41,000-year cycles of the Earth’s tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake;
the wobble or precession of the earth’s rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000 year cycles;
the recent 150,000 year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles;
the 1500 year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased.
The natural climate change now underway is, therefore, the product of powerful planetary forces that long predated the industrial age and which massively exceed the impact of industrial era emissions. As we indicated in Part 1, that the present conflation of these forces has resulted in a warming cycle is nothing new—warming has happened repeatedly even in modern times. Contrary to the false claims of the Climate Howlers,
Current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too.
Continued planetary equipoise requires no interventions whatsoever by the state to retard the use of prosperity-fostering fossil fuels or to subsidize and accelerate the adoption of high-cost renewable energy.
So the question recurs. What “pre-industrial” temperature baseline can be picked out of all these eras and all these climate change forces that would be anything but an arbitrary political, not science-based, choice?
After all, the science is agnostic. Mother Earth has weathered every kind of climate disequilibrium at both the colder and warmer ends of the spectrum and, crucially, experienced the eventual release of countervailing forces that took both temperature and CO2 levels back in the other direction.
We think the planet’s climatic resilience is especially evident in the fact that, after five major ice ages, warming forces returned with robust energy until they reversed again, thereby proving there is no doomsday loop that leads in linear fashion to inexorable catastrophe as is embedded in the climate models.
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As we noted, during the Holocene Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished because conditions were especially hospitable for agriculture and the generation of economic surpluses. The Nile River, for instance, had an estimated three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region. In fact, 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was far more fertile than today and supported large herds of animals, as evidenced by the Tassili N’Ajjer frescoes of Algeria.
That is to say, warmer and wetter was far better for mankind than prior bouts of cold.
Indeed, prior to the post-1850 warming, there had been five distinct warming periods (red areas) since the last glaciers with temperatures above current levels. Never, of course, does this chart see the light of day in the mainstream climate change narrative.
Also, during this period, the Vikings established settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Long before the industrial era, Greenland was so warm, wet, and fertile that major colonization occurred after AD 980. At its peak, it included upward of 10,000 settlers, extensive farming, numerous Catholic churches, and a parliament that eventually voted for union with Norway.
Nor was the reversal from the hospitable climate of the Viking era settlements in Greenland merely a regional anomaly has some Climate Howlers have claimed. During the Medieval Warm period, great civilizations flourished in many other areas, which then became uninhabitable.
For instance, a great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. Grand settlements like those in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned. Tree-ring analysis has identified a period of no rain between 1276 and 1299 in these areas.
Needless to say, these extreme weather perturbations were not caused by industrial activity because there was none, and they occurred during a period when it was getting colder, not warmer!
From 1550 to AD 1850, global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago. Hence the designation of this period as the Little Ice Age (LIA).
Self-evidently, when the LIA finally ended around 1850, global temperatures were at a modern nadir (no wonder the Climate Howlers start their charts in the middle of the 19th century).
Mann’s Attempt to Erase Pre-Industrial Warming
But the significance of this fact goes well beyond cropping the temperature charts at 1850. Actually, in order to erase the above-described oscillations of the modern climate, climate change advocates have actually gone so far as to literally attempt to airbrush them out of existence.
We are referring to what we call the climate “Piltdown Mann,” named for one Michael Mann, a newly minted Ph.D. (1998) who became the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead investigator and advocate for what famously became the “hockey stick” proof of global warming.
The latter, of course, was the blatant fraud embedded in the image that Al Gore made famous in his propagandistic movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. Suffice to say, the purpose of the hockey stick was to wipe out all the evidence summarized above.
That is, in lieu of the planet’s long-term and recent severe climate oscillations, the IPCC posited an entirely opposite thesis. Namely, for the pre-industrial millennium before 1900, global temperatures were nearly as flat as a board.
The only problem is that Mann’s graph was as phony as the Piltdown Man itself—the latter famously being confected in England in 1912 and conveniently “discovered” by an amateur anthropologist who claimed it was the missing link in human evolution. At length, it was shown that the fossil was a forgery; it consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.
In the case of the graph, Professor Mann and his accomplices at the IPCC doctored the evidence,used misleading data from southwestern US tree rings in lieu of abundant alternative data showing the contrary, and jiggered their computer models to generate pre-specified results.
That is, the models were produced by goal-seeking on the part of Mann and his associates to prove the man-made warming thesis. In essence, this was accomplished by simply pasting modern temperature records showing steady increases on top of a pre-industrial baseline that never happened.
The phony pre-industrial baseline is depicted by the yellow area in the graph for the period 1400–1900. The hockey stick-like eruption of the yellow space after 1900, of course, allegedly depicts the man-made temperature rise since the onset of the hydrocarbon age.
By contrast, the corrected version is in blue. In this version—which comports with the history of climate oscillations cited above—there is no hockey stick because the shaft never happened; it was invented by computer model manipulations, not extracted from the abundant scientific data on which the Mann study was allegedly based.
So the question is answered. The mid-19th century is exactly the wrong baseline from which to measure global temperature change during modern times.
The blue area of the chart, in fact, is the smoking gun that obliterates the whole predicate on which COP26 is being foisted upon the everyday people of the world.
The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.
This post is the first of five to alert readers to a compilation of the scientific case against the claims of IPCC supporters and anti-fossil fuel activists. David Stockman provides the evidence and the arguments against the IPCC policy framework in a series of five essays published at International Man under the title The GreenMageddon and What It Means for You. I will state the five themes he develops in his essays, along with some excerpts and images to illustrate the main points. Here is an overview followed by the first theme.
Overview
With COP26 now underway, it’s not too soon to start clanging the alarm bells—not about climate catastrophe, of course, but about the stupidest act of the assembled nations since Versailles, when the vindictive WWI victors laid the groundwork for the catastrophes of depression, WWII, the Holocaust, Soviet tyranny, the Cold War and Washington’s destructive global hegemony, all of which followed hard upon the next.
Politicians and their allies in the mainstream media, think tanks, lobbies and Big Business (with its cowardly sleep-walking leaders) are fixing to do nothing less than destroy the prosperity of the world and send global life careening into a modern economic Dark Ages.
And worse still, it’s being done in the service of a bogus climate crisis narrative that is thoroughly anti-science and wholly inconsistent with the actual climate and CO2 history of the planet.
1. During the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.
In fact, according to the careful reconstructions of actual earth scientists who have studied ocean sediments, ice cores and the like, there have been only two periods encompassing about 75 million years (13% of that immensely long 600 million year stretch of time) where temperatures and CO2 concentrations were as low as it present. These were the Late Carboniferous/Early Permian time from 315 to 270 million years ago and the Quaternary Period, which hosted modern man 2.6 million years ago. You might say, therefore, that the possibility of a warmer, CO2-richer environment is a case of planetary “been there, done that”.
And it is most certainly not a reason to wantonly dismantle and destroy the intricate, low-cost energy system that is the root source of today’s unprecedented prosperity and human escape from poverty and want.
But that’s hardly the half of it. What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.
As shown by the blue line in the chart below, during most of that period (highlighted in the brown panels), temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.
Global Temperature And Atmospheric CO2 Over Geologic Time
Moreover, the science behind this isn’t a matter of academic armchair speculation for the simple reason that it has been powerfully validated in the commercial marketplace. That is, trillions of dollars have been deployed in the last century in the search for hydrocarbons, based on immensely complicated petroleum engineering research, theory and geologic models. Oil drillers weren’t throwing darts at a wildcatter’s wall but were coincidentally proving these “facts” of climate history are correct, given that they led to the discovery and extraction of several trillions of BOEs (barrels of oil equivalent).
Consequently, it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:
About 70% during the Mesozoic age (brown panels, 252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;
20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);
10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).
Indeed, at the end of the day, petroleum engineering is rooted in climate science because it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.
And a pretty awesome science it is. After all, billions of dollars have been pushed down the wellbores in up to two miles of ocean waters and 40,000 feet below the surface in what amounts to an amazingly calibrated and targeted search for oil-bearing needles in a geologic haystack.
Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply. That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.
Moreover, we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch. This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.
To wit, it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated and ridden with crosscurrents than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.
W. J. Davis (2017)
It is surely one of the great ironies of our times that today’s fanatical crusades against fossil fuels are being carried out with not even a nod to the geologic history that contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteriaand made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.
That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here.
True global warming is not the current and future folly of mankind; it is the historical enabler of present-day economic blessings. Yet, here we are on the eve of COP26, manically focused on reducing emissions to the levels required to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.
If your brain is not addled by the climate change narrative, the very term rings a resoundingly loud bell. That’s because there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene, the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago and from which we have been digging out ever since.
In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either. Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.
Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks. In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears. Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.
Say what? Isn’t that the same +1.6 degrees C above current levels that the COP26 folks are threatening to turn off the lights of prosperity to prevent?
In any event, what did happen was far more beneficent. To wit, the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.
Stated differently, that +1.6 degrees C was reflective of the climate-based catalyzing forces that actually made today’s world possible. From the abundances of the river civilizations, there followed the long march of agriculture and the economic surpluses and abundance that enabled cities, literacy, trade and specialization, advancement of tools and technology and modern industry—the latter being the ultimate human escape from a life based on the back muscles of man and his domesticated animals alone.
As it happens, when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD, St. Jerome admonished the faithful “never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Yet that’s exactly what the assembled nations will be doing at COP26.
The most powerful and enigmatic forces on our weather are the Pacific El Nino and La Nina phenomena which cause floods and droughts on opposite sides of the Pacific. Unfortunately, climate modelers can’t predict them much more than three to five months ahead, which tells us there’s some big driver they are missing. But a new paper from Chinese researchers suggests that a large blob of water in the North Eastern Pacific is responding to something in solar cycles.
This vast slab has the catchy name of The North Pacific eastern subtropical mode water (NPESTMW). It sits about 100m below the surface and grows and shrinks as the solar cycles rise and fall. It appears to be a very important blob. A different paper last year found that changes in the NPESTMW volume led the El Nino events by about 9 months.(Liu, 2025)
Remarkably, they found in the 1991–2022 record, seven of eight
large drops in this water volume were followed by El Niño,
while eight of nine large increases were followed by La Niña.
If they are right, it would confirm what skeptics have been saying for years — that climate modelers need to pay a lot more attention to solar cycles in their big models and that one day we might even learn to predict El Ninos (by crikey) a whole year ahead. Finally, the experts might be able to tell us if next summer really will be a barbecue summer, and the farmers might get a bit more warning on whether to plant seed early or sell off the cattle.
Awkwardly for 4,000 UN climate experts, the more solar factors we add to the climate models, the smaller the role is for CO2. (It’s even more awkward for nations that spent a trillion dollars on climate control before we understood the climate.)
The mechanism
The researchers suggest (see the top image) that it’s the solar UV which probably creates this effect on the oceans from the top down. High energy UV rays hit the oxygen molecules in the stratosphere and split them into ozone. Ozone then absorbs more UV and warms up that part of the atmosphere. This changes the jet streams and winds below. And winds close to the ocean can take energy or heat out of the water as it evaporates, but they also stir it up (or not). Peak solar activity seems to suppress the orderly settling of the NPESTMW blob. Once the blob forms and sinks to 100m to 300m down, surprisingly it is very stable and carries the temperature, salinity and other chemistry for a long time. This is what is called “the ocean memory” in the paper’s title.
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After solar activity peaks, for the next year or two in every cycle, the formation of the NPESTMW block is suppressed. This may be due to cyclonic wind stress anomalies that drive upwelling. However, at the solar minima the winds change creating the opposite downwelling effect and the water flows into the blob.
Complicating everything, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) acts like a gate. During warm phases of the AMO, it amplifies the solar cycle effect on the NE Pacific, which is why after looking at eight decades of data, the effect has been strongest since 1990.
The Sun’s energy output follows an approximately 11-year cycle of stronger and weaker activity. Although this variation is small, it can nonetheless produce detectable effects on Earth’s climate. Here, we show that the solar-cycle consistently modulates the volume of a subsurface water mass in the North Pacific Ocean: the North Pacific Eastern Subtropical Mode Water, which forms at the ocean surface in winter and sinks, transferring heat and carbon to the deep ocean and influencing climate variability on timescales of years to decades. We find that during periods of high solar activity, anomalous cyclonic circulation over the formation region weakens surface winds and reduces ocean heat loss, suppressing winter mixed layer deepening and mode water formation, while the associated upwelling inhibits the sinking of this water mass; the opposite occurs during low solar activity. However, the strength of this solar influence is not constant over time: it is further amplified by a long-term natural climate fluctuation in the Atlantic Ocean, helping explain why the Sun’s imprint on climate has been particularly pronounced since the 1990s. These findings reveal a new mechanism through which the Sun may influence climate predictability via the ocean’s subsurface memory.
Figure 5
Schematic diagram illustrating the pathway from enhanced solar irradiance to reduced NPESTMW formation during solar-active periods. Enhanced solar forcing induces negative SLP anomalies over the North Pacific through “top-down” stratospheric-tropospheric coupling, producing anomalous cyclonic circulation and reduced air-sea heat loss. These atmospheric changes suppress winter mixed layer depth, preventing the water mass from penetrating enough to ventilate the thermocline and form mode water. Additionally, cyclonic wind-induced upwelling anomaly opposes downward subduction (shading schematic), further hindering NPESTMW formation and ventilation. Critically, this solar-driven pathway is strongly modulated by the AMO phase: during positive AMO phases, stronger atmosphere-ocean coupling and enhanced mixed layer sensitivity to atmospheric forcing amplify the solar-NPESTMW relationship, whereas during negative AMO phases, weaker coupling and sensitivity damp this signal, rendering the solar imprint less detectable.
Solar Cycle Progression September 15, 2026
Footnote: Oceans Oviously Drive Global Warming
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.
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 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, then dropping well below its peak.
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. Reports since February are based 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 August 2026. 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, now with a steady mild rising in 2026 pausing in May, resuming in June and rising sharply into July and August.
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 comes a third iteration of the pattern starting in 2023 and continuing through July 2026. Each year presents a summer NH warming spike with the highest in 2023, now approached by 2026. The Tropics have a different rhythm, rising dramatically in 2023, peaking in 2024, then rapidly declining hitting bottom end of 2025. Now in 2026 ENSO is returning with a spike raising temperatures in all regions pulling the Global anomaly upward. The August NH peak matches the 2023 NH peak along with higher values for SH, Tropics and Global anomaly.
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
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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 was 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 starting 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. 2024 and 2025 replicated summer peaks in the previous itertation. Now in 2026 July is nearly as high as 2023.
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 0.8, and now back up to 1.2C August 2026. 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, and since April through September aligning with 2010. In October there was an unusual upward spike, now reversed down to match 2022 and 2016. The orange 2026 line started downward and is visible on top of 2016 purple line, then slightly higher, and now spiking higher in July and August up to 1.2C.
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 0.18. The orange line the average 1980-2026, value 0.42 also for the period 1996-2013. The red line is 2013-2026, value 0.72. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
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
An unusual and unexplained warming spike rose from -0.07C 2023/01 to a peak of 0.94C 2024/04. Temps then steadily declined to a low of 0.35C in 2026/01. Now there is a rise up to 0.68C in 2026/08. Historical records show that around 1875 was the coldest time in the last 10,000 years. That was the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), and since then temperatures have warmed at an average rate of about 0.5C per century. The recovery of the biosphere and ocean warming resulted in rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founder of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute reported on this pattern in 2009.
At times, there are warming spikes, in the 1930s and 40s for example, and the rate of rising CO2 goes up. At other times, such as 1950s and 60s, temperatures cool, and rising CO2 slows down. More recently, in 2023 and 24, we saw temperatures spike up before falling back down in 2025 and now in 2026. [Note: A study of ocean biochemistry processes confirms that since the end of the LIA rising temperatures have been accompanied by rising CO2 at a rate of ~2 ppm per year. [ See: Slam Dunk: Δtemp Drives Δco2, Ocean Biochemistry at Work ]
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.
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, then dropping well below its peak.
Previously I have demonstrated that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels follow changes in Global Mean Temperatures (GMT) as shown by satellite measurements from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). A link to that background post is provided later below.
This post updates the analysis with the most current observations, testing the premise that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The chart at the top shows the two monthly datasets: CO2 levels in blue reported at Mauna Loa, and Global temperature anomalies in purple reported by UAHv6.1, both through August 2026. Would such a sharp increase in temperature be reflected in rising CO2 levels, according to the successful mathematical forecasting model? Would CO2 levels decline as temperatures dropped following the peak?
The answer is yes: that temperature spike resulted
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected. Lower CO2 levels followed the temperature decline, now rising again.
Above are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.
Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies referenced to the 1991-2020 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example August 2026 minus August 2025). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the 2023-24 CO2 upward spike and 2025 drop following the temperature drop. The CO2 differential bottomed 2026/04 and is now rising again.
The table below shows clearly the pattern of observed temperatures declining along with declining rates of rising observed CO2. The CO2 rate peaked at 4.41 ppm, then declined over the next 25 months to 1.48 ppm, nearly the baseline rate since the LIA. There are fluctuations in the CO2 monthly response since the differential is influenced by the previous year as well as current year. By 2026/4, the rate of 1.48 ppm was one-third of the peak rate of 4.41 ppm.
Month
Temperature Anomaly
CO2 Diff. from Previous Year
2024\1
0.79
3.32
2024\2
0.86
4.23
2024\3
0.87
4.41
2024\4
0.94
3.14
2024\5
0.78
2.87
2024\6
0.7
3.25
2024\7
0.74
3.72
2024\8
0.75
3.31
2024\9
0.8
3.53
2024\10
0.73
3.56
2024\11
0.64
3.39
2024\12
0.62
3.54
2025\1
0.46
3.85
2025\2
0.5
2.54
2025\3
0.58
2.77
2025\4
0.61
3.13
2025\5
0.5
3.61
2025\6
0.48
2.70
2025\7
0.36
2.32
2025\8
0.39
2.49
2025\9
0.53
2.34
2025\10
0.53
2.49
2025\11
0.43
2.61
2025\12
0.3
2.09
2026\1
0.35
1.97
2026\2
0.39
2.26
2026\3
0.38
2.01
2026\4
0.39
1.48
2026\5
0.53
1.83
2026\6
0.46
1.83
2026\7
0.48
1.25
2026\8
0.68
1.85
The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:
For each subsequent year, the CO2 level for each month was generated
CO2 this month this year = a + b × Temp this month this year + CO2 this month last year
The values for a and b are constants applied to all monthly temps, and are chosen to scale the forecasted CO2 level for comparison with the observed value. Here is the result of those calculations.
In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9989 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically. For a more detailed look at the recent fluxes, here are the results since 2015, an ENSO neutral year.
For this recent period, the calculated CO2 values match well the annual highs, while some annual generated values of CO2 are slightly higher or lower than observed at other months of the year. Still the correlation for this period is 0.9944.
Key Point
Changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperatures on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia. Since CO2 is the lagging variable, it cannot logically be the cause of temperature, the leading variable. It is folly to imagine that by reducing human emissions of CO2, we can change global temperatures, which are obviously driven by other factors.
From 10.000 Years to 4: One Equation Falsifies the Entire IPCC CO₂ Narrative – by Jonathan Cohler
The video above is a recent presentation by Jonathan Cohler at EIKE ( European Climate and Energy Institute). The english audio is available. He does a complete and evidence-based destruction of IPCC “concensus” Climate Science. For those prefering to read I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions, along with some bolds and key exhibits from the talk.
Just very briefly, I’m Jonathan Cohler. I’m a Harvard-trained physicist, AI researcher, software developer. I serve on the Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors, and I’m a member of the CO2 Coalition. And over the past year, I’ve authored six climate papers, both peer-reviewed and pre-print, with illustrious co-authors including Willie Soon, David Legates, Keston Green, and Ole Humlum.
Collectively, the papers falsify the entire IPCC framework.
I presented some of this at Heartland’s conference in Washington this April, but today at EIKE is the first public presentation of our newest paper on the bomb radiocarbon falsification of the IPCC CO2 attribution, and more. So I’m going to start here by sharing my screen with you so you can see the presentation. So for 38 years, numerous IPCC purported metrics and associated lies have been paraded before the world as settled science.
Today, I’m going to show you that none of them are true, and most aren’t even real. One note on language I use, I use the word lie in its plain sense, a statement that is not true. Intent is not part of the definition. Orwell’s 2 plus 2 equals 5 is a lie regardless of who says it or why. When I call an IPCC claim a lie, I’m stating it’s false.
That said, intent in this case is not in doubt. The IPCC has had 38 years of access to all the data and the resources of every major government on earth. It knows what it has been promulgating, it knows what it has been suppressing, and significant numbers of scientists know as well. I won’t name any individuals, they know who they are, but I will name the institution, the IPCC.
My presentation is based on five papers, my 2025 peer-reviewed paper, building on Essex et al., 2007, and proving again that global mean surface temperature, GMST, does not exist. Our 2026 peer-reviewed paper on the invalidity of Argo-based ocean heat content with co-authors Dave Legates, Keston Green, Ole Humlum, Franklin Soon, and Willie Soon. Our 2026 paper with co-author Willie Soon on the dominance of natural CO2 dynamics currently under review.
My pre-print proving my new physical tether theorem. And most recently, our paper with co-author Willie Soon analyzing 50 years of global bomb radiocarbon decay, falsifying the key assumptions of the IPCC carbon cycle framework. I want to acknowledge all my co-authors, and in particular, my mentor and dear friend Willie Soon, whose decades of courageous work made much of this possible. I also want to honor the truly seminal contributions of Christopher Essex and Demetris Koutsoyiannis, whose work laid the foundation for all my papers here.
So let’s start with the verdict. Every major public-facing claim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, is scientifically invalid and categorically false. Not uncertain, not weakened, not in need of more research, false. I’ll prove this in the next 35 minutes or so by math, physics, and data. Words lie. Math does not. A statement is either derivable from its premises or not. There is no, quote, 97% of mathematicians agree nonsense. There’s proof or there isn’t.
For 38 years, the IPCC has paraded a framework draped in equations, satellite data, supercomputer models, academy awards, even Nobel Prizes. A snake eating its own tail. Each piece appears to validate the next. Once you see that the circle is empty, the entire framework collapses. Each lie leads to the next. None stand on their own.
GMST,Global mean surface temperature, the number that has purportedly risen 1.1 degrees since 1850, the number whose further rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees is, “catastrophic”, what some have called, “the most important number in the world”. CMIP, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, those are the general circulation models tuned to reproduce GMST.
OHC stands for Ocean Heat Content,a physically meaningless global aggregate constructed by the same averaging machinery as GMST. EEI, Earth’s Energy Imbalance, the energy gain inferred from OHC overriding satellite radiation measurements. CO2, atmospheric carbon dioxide, the persistence and attribution modeled by Bern impulse response functions validated against CMIP purported driving force in the entire attribution chain.
And then the loop closes back on itself. GMST tunes the models. The models produce Bern. Bern produces the budgets. Budgets define the targets. Targets are written in GMST. Each of the five nodes is independently falsified by physics, data, and math.
Let’s begin. Node 1, GMST is physically meaningless.
It’s the anchor of every policy claim. The Paris Agreement is written in degrees of GMST. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is defined in GMST. Transient climate response is defined in GMST. Attribution regressions use GMST as a dependent variable. CMIP models are tuned to reproduce GMST trajectories.
But GMST was proven meaningless in a 2007 paper by Essex, McKitrick, and Andresen unrefuted in 19 years. Two months ago, my physical tether theorem paper established from axioms of classical science alone that GMST cannot exist in the real world. It’s completely physically meaningless.
You take valid local thermometer readings, average them, get a global average. Seems right. Why not? Think telephone numbers. Average the phone numbers of everyone in Boston and Halle. Then ask three simple questions. Whose phone number is it? Is it a phone number? Does it mean anything at all?
Temperature is an intensive property defined only under local
thermodynamic equilibrium in single connected systems, like a
phone number that applies to one point on a telecom network.
The Earth’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere are not in equilibrium. They’re an open-driven non-equilibrium system. Persistent gradients, persistent fluxes, in-homogeneity at every scale. Physics has no law for aggregating local temperatures into a global mean. Disconnected systems cannot affect each other. Unlike quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance, which Einstein doubted and my friend and colleague John Clauser proved real, there is no thermodynamics at a distance.
The temperature in Boston has zero effect on the temperature in Halle. Temperature is defined only in a connected equilibrium system, and it is precisely the partial derivative of U, internal energy, with respect to S, entropy. Every thermometer agrees.
For an aggregate of disconnected systems, there is no thermodynamics, period. The GMST formulas imposed by the IPCC, NASA, or NOAA are just made up. The output is a number, not a temperature. Not anything in the physical, real world. The 2007 Essex paper showed the consequences for averaging arithmetic, area weighted, mass weighted, fourth root, enthalpy weighted. They all yield different numbers and different trends from the same data.
The choice is arbitrary. This isn’t a quarrel over data adjustments. We’re not talking about urban heat islands, homogenization, data improvement. No amount of data improvements can fix a category error. No averaging convention can rescue it. My physical tether theorem states it formally.
An abstract math formula is scientifically valid if and only if it is connected to the physical world by a unique, physical law-governed objective link. For a connected, equilibrated system, that link exists. Temperature is precisely the partial derivative of U with respect to S, and every valid thermometer agrees. A unique mapping exists. For disconnected systems, no physics, no mapping, just arbitrary statistical aggregations with no unique operational definition. The outputs are meaningless numbers.
GMST is a number the IPCC has falsely labeled as a temperature. Consequences are immediate and total. The 1.5 degree C limit is not a physical threshold. It’s an arbitrary number with a fake label applied to a meaningless calculation. The claim that the planet is warm by 1.1 degrees C is not a measurement. The equilibrium climate sensitivity defined as a change in GMST per CO2 doubling is equally physically meaningless.
The AR5 attribution statement, “more than half of observed warming is anthropogenic”, is a regression on a dependent variable that doesn’t exist. Every claim built on GMST is null and void. And AR6 went further. They abandoned their own calibrated uncertainty language and declared human influence, “unequivocal”, and then proceeded to use the word at least 37 times.
Unequivocal is not a science word. Science does not produce unequivocal claims.
Math proofs do. Empirical science operates within probability and falsifiability. Karl Popper settled this long ago. By its own word choice, the IPCC has abandoned science. Node 1 falsified. Every quantity dependent on GMST collapses with it.
Node 2, CMIP models are tuned to a fiction.
Every IPCC projection comes from CMIP, the coupled model intercomparison project. The models are tuned so simulated GMST matches the numerically calculated and physically meaningless GMST. Remember, there is no observed GMST. Those are just Orwellian words that the IPCC uses. It is purely a calculation.
Models that fail to reproduce historical GMST are discarded or retuned. GMST is physically meaningless. The model tuning target is physically meaningless. The model extracted parameters are extracted against a physically meaningless target. This is not a small effect. Cloud feedbacks, radiative forcing, equilibrium climate sensitivity, transient climate response, every one is an emergent property of models optimized against a physically meaningless target.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity, look at what IPCC actually means by this. ECS is defined as the change in GMST between models at 280 and 560 ppm CO2 both run to model equilibrium. But the earth is never in equilibrium. The fact that a model converges to equilibrium proves it isn’t modeling the earth. The equilibrium is a feature of the model, not the earth.
And even that’s not true. The CMIP model purveyors don’t actually run to that fictional equilibrium. They run 150 years or so, observe the drift, and extrapolate. They assume the model will reach an equilibrium that it never reaches.
ECS is an assumed extrapolation of an unreached state of a model
that fails reality at the level of being able to converge in the first place.
All to promulgate a number physically meaningless by definition. If A is meaningless and B is meaningless, then A minus B is meaningless. A and B are both meaningless GMST values. I know this is twisted IPCC Orwellian stuff, but follow me here because this is what is actually happening. Trillions of dollars of policy are calibrated to a number that does not exist in the real world, to a fake equilibrium state that never occurs in a model that fails to represent earth by virtue of having that equilibrium state in the first place.
And the model itself contains essentially none of the physics that drives earth’s permanent non-equilibrium state, namely meaningful cloud microphysics and feedbacks, real solar variability, turbulence, phase changes, biological dissipation, and more. Node 2, falsified.
Node 3, IPCC’s Argo-derived ocean heat content is physically meaningless.
You’ll notice I keep repeating those words. It’s not just a tick. My personal favorite from the circle of lies. Argo has deployed roughly 4,400 autonomous floats across the oceans. Each measures local temperature, salinity, and pressure as they drift.
And ocean heat content is a real physical concept and a physical
phenomenon, but what the IPCC presents as ocean heat content is not.
Orwell strikes again. Argo-derived IPCC OHC is a global statistical aggregate fabricated from local measurements through five layers of processing that destroy all physical meaning. This is the official Argo map, and it looks impressive, but it’s cropped to hide the poles and doesn’t differentiate deep from upper floats.
This is the real picture from NOAA showing every float that surfaced in the 12 days prior to March 25. Look at the poles. Virtually no floats beyond 60 degrees. And the entire deep Argo fleet has deployed only 230 floats to the bottom half of the ocean, below 2,000 meters, where literally half of the thermal energy resides. But the Argo program calls that, “nearly complete global coverage” in perfect Orwell style. Let that sink in for a moment.
Half the ocean’s volume sits below 2,000 meters, and it’s not sampled at all.Twenty-five percent of the surface is excluded entirely. Continental shelves, the Mediterranean, South China Sea, the Arctic, all ice-covered regions, add continental slopes and polar undersampling, and the IPCC interpolation scheme covers at most 40 percent of ocean volume.
Within the 40 percent, the volume actually sampled around the temperature sensors is one part per billion, 10 to the ninth. So here’s how each of the 4,200 non-deep floats works. They descend to 1,000 meters. They drift for nine days doing nothing. They drop down to 2,000 meters. They ascend slowly to the surface over 6 to 10 hours, collecting about 1,000 temperature measurements. Then they spend about 15 minutes at the surface to get a GPS time and location fix, transmit the measurements to a satellite, rinse and repeat for a few years until the battery dies.
Now, to be fair, that’s valid local data gathering,
but that’s also where reality ends.
Five steps destroy the physics. Number one, there is no subsurface positioning. Every measurement from the ascent is assigned to the one surface GPS time and location fix. Two, 12,000 profiles per month are extrapolated onto 45,000 grid cells using correlation scales up to 2,800 kilometers. Every single gridded value is calculated, not measured, and extrapolation does not increase information content. It decreases it. Number three, the same invalid process constructs a reference climatology over an arbitrary 15-year baseline, adding an entire other layer of invalid averaging.
Then anomalies are computed, which we like to call the ghost minus ghost trick, a discrete sum over these calculated meaningless anomalies, not an integral, which would require continuous data, multiplied by incorrectly assumed constant density and heat capacity.
EEI is then declared to be 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter
despite 60% of the ocean unsampled and true uncertainty easily
exceeding plus or minus 1 watt per square meter.
The actual result, EEI (Earth’s Energy Imbalance) is no different from zero. Even without thermodynamic nullification, at least seven independent uncertainty sources, mesoscale variability, deep ocean ignorance, sea level closure, framework bias, baseline bias, and more easily exceed plus or minus 1 watt per meter squared. The claimed signal of 0.7 is smaller than the noise. Now in 1998, the founding document designed ARGO for real-time forecasting, namely hurricane intensification, marine weather, search and rescue, ship routing, fisheries, ENSO outlooks, decision windows of hours to weeks. Neither ARGO nor land weather stations were designed for centennial energy accounting. The original ARGO objectives contained no mention whatsoever of global ocean heat content or earth energy imbalance because ARGO was never designed for global climate monitoring.
That idea was forced on the system more than a decade later during ClimateGate when Kevin Trenberth emailed hockey stick Michael Mann and the entire climate science hockey team. He wrote,
“We can’t account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data shows there should be even more warming, but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate”.
What followed was a 12-year program to repurpose ARGO as the global energy accounting tool, force series to match ARGO, and codify the result into AR6 as EEI equals 0.7 plus or minus 0.2. Our OHC paper published on March 10th this year agrees with Trenberth’s 2009 assessment. His response a few days later, he said, “It is absolute nonsense. I don’t want to waste my time on it”. Clearly, we’re over the target. Node 3 falsified. ARGO derived OHC is physically meaningless.
Node 4, Earth’s energy imbalance is indistinguishable from zero.
First, look at the name, Earth’s energy imbalance. Watts are power, not energy. The correct name would be net radiative flux or power balance at the top of the atmosphere. But honesty is not an IPCC concern. The IPCC’s founding mandate charges them with assessing, “the risk of human-induced climate change”. Not whether humans are causing it, but that humans are causing it. The conclusion is built into the question.
EEI is computed in one of two ways.First, from CERES top of atmosphere satellite measured net radiation flux. And second, from ARGO derived OHC growth divided by Earth’s surface area and elapsed time. The CERES team itself admitted in Loeb et al. 2018 that its instruments cannot measure the absolute energy budget. And yet AR6 figure 7.2 went ahead and reported EEI as 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter with no caveat. Notice, by the way, that the number sits down at the surface on the ocean, not at the top of the atmosphere.
Hmm. Where does that number come from? CERES quietly reports an absolute imbalance of 4.3 watts per square meter, then silently adjusts it to match the ARGO derived 0.7. The matched values are then cited as independent confirmation of each other. AR6 page 935 documents the adjustment openly. Circular reasoning, not validation. The signal is indistinguishable from zero. Node 4, falsified.
Node 5, bomb radiocarbon falsification of the carbon cycle.
My newest paper with Willie Soon titled, One Equation Reproduces 54 Years of Bomb Radiocarbon Decay and Challenges Central Assumptions of the IPCC Carbon Cycle Framework. We extracted two atmospheric time scales precisely from the data. It falsifies every Bern IRF model the IPCC has published. It shows post-industrial CO2 rise is natural. And it closes every standard IPCC and consensus escape hatch, including the Suess effect.
Between 1955 and 1963, atmospheric thermonuclear, aka hydrogen bomb testing, roughly doubled atmospheric carbon-14, known as radiocarbon. After the 1963 test ban, the excess decayed. We have measured that continuously for over 50 years. This is the most precise impulse response experiment ever done. We created the pulse. The atmosphere gave us the response. No model, no tuning, a direct measurement of nature’s eeigenvalue.
The IPCC has had this data set for 40 years and never used it to check,
validate, or falsify any of its carbon cycle claims.
They ignored it. We don’t. Start with two definitions from AR6 glossary, page 2237. Number one, “carbon dioxide is an extreme example. Its turnover time is only about four years” because of the rapid exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean and terrestrial biota. Number two, “response time or adjustment time is the time scale characterizing the decay of an instantaneous pulse into the reservoir”. Both are measured atmospheric quantities.
The global measured turnover time given by atmospheric inventory divided by gross output flux is 3.8 plus or minus 0.12 years. Computed two independent ways. First, snapshot mass balance from AR6 figure 512 and refined reservoir routing on Mauna Loa data. They agreed to better than 1% supported by dozens of peer-reviewed studies over 40 years. Even the IPCC quotes about four years.
The adjustment time, the decay of an instantaneous pulse is exactly what the radiocarbon experiment measures. The 1955 to 63 nuclear tests were the pulse. The answer, decay time scale is 18.383 plus or minus 0.015 years. Single exponential R squared 99.998% over 54 years.
Using the IPCC’s own AR6 definitions, the two atmospheric time scales are 3.8 years for CO2 turnover and 18.383 years for bomb radiocarbon adjustment time linked by the bridge equations shown on the slide. Not 1,000, not 10,000, not hundreds of thousands. That’s what the data says. Now, look at what the IPCC has published. The Bern IRF model is the carbon cycle equation underlying every IPCC CO2 projection, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, every net zero pathway. The IPCC labels its time scales as policy relevant, then applies the Bern IRF models at 100, 200, 500, and even 1,000 year horizons.
The IPCC’s published Bern IRF models take a specific mathematical form, a permanent fraction, A0, plus a sum of exponentials. AR2 used five exponentials, AR3 through 6 used three exponentials. Now, look at the E folding time, T sub 1 over E. AR5 and 6 say it’s 165 years, AR4 says it’s 96 years, AR3 says it’s 46, and AR2 says it’s 41. Look at the permanent fraction, A0. AR5 and 6 say it’s 22%, AR4 says it’s 22, AR3 said it was 15, and AR2 said it was 14%. Very strange.
Now, look at the tau 1, which is the longest time constant. AR5 and 6 said it was 394 years, AR4 said it was 173, AR3 said it was 171, and AR2 said it was 372. Real physical impulse responses don’t double and halve and double again as modeling groups update their codes.
The bomb radiocarbon record was a single exponential decay the whole time. Bern was not. Now, look at all four Bern IRFs against the actual data. Everyone diverges within the first year or two. The Bern models predict 33 to 48% of a pulse will remain after 54 years. The data at 54 years says 4%.
The divergence from reality grows dramatically, a factor of 10 by 2020, a factor of 90 by 100 years, and a factor of 18,500 at 200 years. What does the IPCC say? AR5 box 6.1, multiple residence times for an excess of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, stating, “15 to 40% of CO2 emitted until 2100 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years”.
Now, step back for a moment. Why are they using this functional form at all? Why a sum of exponentials with a permanent constant added? The multi-exponential family is the natural function class for linear relaxation processes. That part is correct mathematics. But the family is general. The simplest member of the family, which is one exponential with no permanent fraction, decays to zero with a single time constant. Exactly what the data shows, 18.383 years, permanent fraction zero.
The data picks the simplest answer within the IPCC’s own function class. But the IPCC doesn’t allow that answer. Their published forms require permanent fractions from 14 to 22%. They require three or more exponentials. And neither of those requirements comes from physics or reality.
There are constraints imposed on top of the function class
to purposely exclude the single exponential point.
Why? The single exponential has no permanent fraction. The permanent fraction is the entire policy payload. It’s what creates the multi-thousand year residence result. It is the lie buried in the math. It justifies cumulative carbon budgets, net zero targets, the claim that an emission today is committing the atmosphere for a thousand years or more. All lies. Set the permanent fraction to what the data shows, i.e. zero, and the cumulative emissions framework collapses. Set the number of modes to what the data requires, i.e. one, and the long tail disappears. The function class is correct, but its constraints were chosen to to preserve a predetermined political conclusion.
Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. We call this the parallel serial fallacy. A sum of exponentials is the impulse response of independent parallel reservoirs each draining directly on its own time constant. That is how the Bern IRF manufactures the long tails.
But reality is serial. Carbon flows from the atmosphere to
the surface ocean. Surface ocean to the thermocline
to the deep ocean. Each stage feeds the next.
The deep ocean is not a parallel drain on the atmosphere. It is the end of a serial pipeline. Parallel and serial systems are governed by entirely differential equations with different solution spaces. No parameter choice in the parallel family produces the serial answer.
The actual physical serial cascade observed from upstream collapses to a single dominant fast mode. Exactly what the bomb radioarbon data show. Wrong differential equations, wrong solution space, wrong functional form, structural falsification.
Now, we play Whack-a-Lie, the thousand-year defense.
So, where does the thousand-year tale come from? What’s the evidence? Answer: There is none. Not from measurement, not from observation, not from math, only neverending popup assertions.
The first one that always pops up is 14 C is just a tracer. It’s not the bulk. We proved the operator equivalence theorem OE and it it closes that completely.12 CO2 and 14 CO2 are exchanged by the exact same physical processes. Their mass balance operators are identical up to a small fractionation factor. Identical linear operators have identical eigen values. The bulk and the tracer decay with the exact same time constants.
Whack that one and out pops, the bomb pulse is too small. So the Revel nonlinearity kicks in at larger amplitude. The the OE closes that too. eigenvalues are intrinsic to the linear operator, not the input amplitude. And there is no evidence of a global ocean sink slowing ever.
Whack that and we get revel plus slow deep ocean circulation manufactures the tail. Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. Rapid cycling to the thermocline drains the surface. The deep ocean is downstream, not in parallel. Whack that. You’ve now whacked all three. and they cycle back to tracer versus bulk as if you never mentioned it.
Now, one other defense I didn’t put on the slide. They’ll come and say, “But the surface ocean is observed to be saturating.” What they’re talking is about is there are three subtropical gyre stations between 22 and 32° north. One is called HOT in Hawaii,BATS in Bermuda, and ESOC in the Canary Islands. The combined area of those three points in the ocean is less than 1 millionth of the ocean surface.
The only regimes where revel buffering could show up first because gyres have the lowest exchange flux and the surface is only half the story. To slow that drain, the entire water column below down to the abyss would have to be saturated too with DIC (Dissolved Inorganic Carbon) . There is no such measurement. Argo OHC is meaningless. DIC sampling is even sparer. No global time series at policy precision.
And the IPCC’s claimed 2 and a half gigaton per year ocean sync isn’t measured at all. It’s a budget residual. Emissions minus atmospheric growth minus an alleged land sink. Even granting them their imaginary 2 gigaton per year ocean sink. The ocean holds 38,000 gigatons of carbon. That’s 0.66% per year below the precision of a single DIC measurement. That would be 666% per century. Saturation on any policy relevant time scale is mathematically impossible.
The bomb radiocarbon record proves it directly. Eight independent fit windows
across 50 years return the same value to within four parts in a thousand.
The global atmospheric sink rate has not slowed anywhere ever.
This is Whack-a-Lie. Each retreat has zero supporting evidence. When closed, another pops up. When they’re all closed, the cycle starts over again. They fail Popper’s criterion. The thousand-year claim is unfalsifiable by their own standards.
IPCC airborne fraction confusion.
The IPCC reports a “stable airborne fraction” of “about 44%” cited as evidence that the ocean sink will saturate. But there are two distinct quantities both commonly called airborne fraction totally contradictory and both used by the IPCC imperfect Orwellian double speak lock step.
First is called ABF subL where L stands for logical. That’s the fraction of cumulative anthropogenic mass still airborne exactly as in IPCC’s own glossary definition. Under mass balance with the 3.8 year residence time, ABF subL is approximately 5.3% not 44%.
The second is called ABF subC. C is for crazy. That’s my word. I think Koutsoyiannis called it computational, but I prefer crazy. The the annual ratio of atmospheric increase to anthropogenic emissions, that’s a year-by-year number. And from 1966 to 2019, it ranges between 18 to 77%. Up and down.It’s not like uniformly increasing or anything. It’s just randomly up and down between 18 and 77, a range factor of four.
The Orwellian “stable 44%” doesn’t exist. That arises only from unmentioned 15 to 30 year smoothing windows and then the constancy is a property of the smoothing operator. The variance collapses by a factor of two at a 4-year smoothing independently supporting our tow of 3.8 years.
The atmospheric CO2 inventory is rising. There is a net input of CO2. So what’s the signature of that net input? Note, I’m not talking about the signature of the atmosphere, but the signature of the net input to the atmosphere over the instrumental years. Koutsoyiannis measured it directly using the standard Keeling plot intercept method that you see on the screen. He calls the number delta 13 C subi meaning for input. Koutsoyiannis computed it across the 40 plus years from 1978 to 2022 at four clean air stations both hemispheres. The result -3.2 plus or minus.3 per mill constant no trend no drift.
Proxy reconstruction extended the analysis back 500 years to the little ice age. Same value invariant minus3. If fossil fuel carbon at 28 per mill were a significant fraction of the net input, the flux weighted signature would have to have drifted more negative values. It doesn’t. Fossil fuel carbon is below the detection threshold as a quantitative driver of the observed CO2 growth. Period.
The Suess effect that declining total atmospheric delta is evidence of fossil fuel dilution is completely falsified by this finding alone. The decline of total delta 13C by about 2 per mill is consistent with natural CO2 being added at the natural signature. But the constant net input signature of -3.2 per mill is not consistent with fossil fuel dilution. Suess effect al falsified. These three independent lines converge on the same verdict. The bomb radioarbon value which is 18.383 the constant delta 13 C subi which is -3.2 and the direct mass balance. Different physics, different data, same answer. The atmospheric rise of CO2 over 62 years is natural. The human contribution to the rise is negligible. Node 5 falsified.
The loop is closed. I’ve walked the circle of lies. GMST is not a physical quantity. It’s falsified by the physical tether theorem and Essex et al. CMIP is tuned to a fiction. OHC is an untethered global average over a non-equilibrium fluid. EI is indistinguishable from zero. Bern IRF mathematically incompatible with single exponential.
The rise is natural. The five nodes do not stand independently. GMST tunes the models. The models project OHC and EEI. The Bern IRF preserves the energy budget. The budget preserves GMST. Remove any node. The others lose their bases. Remove all five. The framework is gone. Every downstream quantity collapses with them. Every 1.52° threshold, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, it’s all void.
Every single IPCC climate metric is physically meaningless
because they’re all built on the same falsified constructs.
More than 30 IPCC metrics gone. All physically meaningless.
And now we’re back to the empty circle.
Their Whack-a-Lie Orwellian defense is that they have multiple lines of evidence. But even that fails because 5 * 0 equals 0. 38 years. How many of the major public-facing claims of the IPCC survive? Zero. Every major public-facing claim of the IPC is scientifically invalid and categorically false. For 38 years, the IPCC has rewritten Western energy policy. Net zero by 2050, hundreds of trillions in projected expenditure, bans on combustion engines, natural gas, the cancellation of modern industrial civilization.
The IPCC never subjected its claims to proper falsification.
It declared them facts by repetition. “Unequivocal” 37 times in AR6.
We performed the falsification steps. They skipped. Five hypotheses flatly falsified. Direct empirical absolute. 38 years. All lies. Zero physical foundation. Words lied. Math didn’t. Math never lies. Galileo told us that God wrote two books, the Bible and the universe itself. He said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, in the language of mathematics. The math is the universe speaking. We listened. The IPCC did not.”
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, which dropped back toward normal values. Now in August 2026 there is again an El Nino peaking, albeit at a lower level.
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 ~66 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.
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
August 2026 UAH Temps: Ocean and Land Warms in All Regions
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 a low in January 2026. Since then El Nino in the Tropics has risen sharply pulling up all regions despite a drop in July.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for August 2026. 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 I posted recently on July 2026 El Nino Spikes SSTs Warming, 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. 2025 showed a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February. Then in November and December SH land temps spiked while ocean temps showed litle change. In February 2026 NH land temps doubled, from Dec. 0.53C up to 1.14C last month. Despite SH land changing little, and Tropical land cooling, the Global land anomaly jumped up from 0.53 to 0.93C. That reversed in March with both NH land and Global land anomaly back down to 0.63C. That cooling offset SH Ocean warming doubling from 0.19C to 0.38C. In May was a warming spike in Tropics and SH ocean air while NH ocean air was flat. At the same time, Land air temps warmed in Tropics and NH while dropping in SH. The unusual end result for May was Global, Land and Ocean air temp anomalies all showing the same 0.53C. In June and July there were ups and down, and now in August an upward bump in NH and SH, both land and sea.
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 August 2026. 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.
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. During 2025 there were ups and downs, but in November/December all regions were cooler, led by a sharp drop in SH bringing the Global ocean anomaly down to 0.02C. In 2026, ocean warming was evident, with Tropics and SH pulling up Global ocean air temps despite little rise in NH ocean. Now in June and July that has reversed with SH cooling and pulling down the Global ocean anomaly, even despite tropical warming. Now in August all regions are up again, near summer of 2024 values, though Tropics rose only 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 Augusr 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.
In 2026 January and February Global land rebounded up to 1.14C, led by a NH warming spike. That NH spike was reversed in March and April back down to 0.43C. In June land temps in SH plunged nearly 0.6C down to 0.2C, pulling Global land anomaly down more than 0.1C. July and August saw Global land temps up again with warming in all regions.
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, later months declined steadily dropping. to 0.3C in December. In 2026 the global anomaly was little changed through April, then rose to a new peak of 0.68C in August.
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.
But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.
In fact our climate is remarkably stable, compared to the range of daily temperatures during a year where I live.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
