Wood Romances

 We're now just past half way through 2023. At the beginning of the year, it was expected that there was a good likelihood that we would transition into El Niño conditions sometime in the Spring or Summer, and this might lead to a new record high GMST in 2024, with a small chance of this happening in 2023. However, with developments occurring over the last couple months, all that has changed. On Twitter, Zeke Hausfather provided data from Berkeley Earth that, barring some event like a large volcanic eruption, there is an  81% chance  that 2023 would beat out 2016/2020 as the warmest year on record. In fact, the year-to-date average already surpasses 2020, and there's a small potential that this year could be the first year to hit the +1.5 ° C above the 1850-1900 mean. Hitting 1.5 ° C would not mean that we have missed the IPCC target of 1.5 ° C, since that target is built on the 30-year average, not a single year. But what changed from the beginning of the year ...

In a recent post by Willis Eschenbach[1] at the Watts Up With That blog, we are again being told that there has been a recent decline in global temperatures. The argument was that a breakpoint analysis of multiple datasets reveals a break around 2015, and trends following that breakpoint are either flat or cooling. Yet it's completely unsurprising that such a breakpoint was found in 2015, since that was the beginning of a very large El Nino, and we haven't had a significant El Nino since. Instead, La Nina conditions have prevailed. Yet, the following is indisputable from the GMST data we have: 1. El Nino years are warming at about the same rate as La Nina years (both are warming at 0.2 C/decade since 1980). 2. El Nino years average almost 0.2 C warmer than La Nina years (the difference in the Y direction between the red and blue lines above). 3. The AGW warming signal is about 0.2 C/decade since 1980. 4. ENSO cycles between El Nino and La Nina inside of decadal time scales. Tha...