Wood Romances

On January 15, 2022, the volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai (hereafter Tonga) erupted. Normally, volcanic eruptions such as this send sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere that cause a short-term cooling effect in the troposphere (and warming effect on the stratosphere) for a couple years.  However, the Tonga eruption was somewhat unique in that it erupted in shall water and therefore injected 146 MtH2O along with 0.42 MtSO2 into the stratosphere.[1] The injection of water vapor into the stratosphere created the potential that this particular volcano might not cause the short-term tropospheric cooling normally expected. Ever since the anomalous warming began in 2023 (roughly coinciding with the onset of El Nino conditions), a lot of misinformation has circulated on social media that the Tonga eruption is responsible for the warming spike the globe is currently experiencing. This misinformation appears to come from 1) a misreading of one early study[1] that examined only the impact of...

Every year I try to think of a way to update my simple calculations for ECS and TCR. My methods don't really change that much; they reflect updated data and become a little more complex. Make no mistake, they are simple calculations based on estimates of forcings, temperature and EEI using the energy balance equation. It doesn't compete with peer-reviewed studies by Sherwood[1] or the assessments of the IPCC. My intent with this is to show that the central estimates of the IPCC (and most climate models) are very consistent with empirical data.   The first step in the calculating ECS and TCR values is assessing the earth's energy imbalance and collecting the relevant forcing data. Earth's Energy Imbalance There are several estimates for EEI to choose from, but I think the most conservative approach is to use an average value for the full time frame between 2005 and 2019, when observations become much  more reliable. One study, Loeb et al 2021[2] estimated EEI to be 0.77 ...