Tag: earth’s climate system

Wrong, Associated Press, Computer Simulations Don’t Mean Smashed Heat Records Will Occur

The Associated Press (AP) claims in “Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says” that Earth is “overwhelmingly likely” to repeatedly surge past the 1.5°C threshold and experience escalating heatwaves and extreme weather from 2026 to 2030. This is highly misleading if not outright false. The story is built almost entirely on computer model projections, not observed data, and it treats speculative model simulations as though they reflect measured trends.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

The Associated Press (AP) claims in “Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says” that Earth is “overwhelmingly likely” to repeatedly surge past the 1.5°C threshold and experience escalating heatwaves and extreme weather from 2026 to 2030. This is highly misleading if not outright false. The story is built almost entirely on computer model projections, not observed data, and it treats speculative model simulations as though they reflect measured trends.

The AP admits that its claims are “based on the averaging of about 200 runs of computer simulations using 13 different climate models.” That is the core of the story. Not thermometers. Not weather station records. Not satellite observations. Computer simulations. Climate model outputs are not data.

Climate models are tools, consisting of assumptions about greenhouse gas forcing, feedbacks, ocean heat uptake, and cloud behavior, fed into computers. They are useful for exploring scenarios. But they provide no real evidence that specific outcomes will occur. As documented in Climate at a Glance’s analysis of climate models versus measured temperature data, model ensembles have historically projected more warming than satellite and balloon observations show. The divergence between model runs and measured lower troposphere temperatures is not trivial. It is persistent.

The AP story warns of “limit-smashing global warming” and ties that to more extreme heatwaves. But heatwaves are not new, nor are they unprecedented in the historical record. The United States experienced severe, prolonged heatwaves in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl era, long before modern emissions levels. Climate at a Glance’s review of U.S. heatwaves explains that frequency of extreme heatwaves in the United States was higher in the 1930s than in recent decades. That is based on NOAA historical data, not projections.

If heatwaves were strictly “driven” by rising CO2 concentrations, we would expect a clear, monotonic increase in frequency and intensity corresponding to emissions growth. The observational record does not show that. Instead, it shows strong variability influenced by natural factors such as ocean cycles, soil moisture patterns, atmospheric blocking highs, and El Niño events.

The AP article itself acknowledges that “nearly all the shorter-term forecasts call for a strong El Niño.” El Niño is a natural ocean-atmosphere oscillation that temporarily boosts global average temperatures. It has nothing to do with fossil fuels. If 2027 turns out hotter due to a strong El Niño, that would reflect a cyclical Pacific warming phase, not proof of accelerating man-made climate forcing.

AP also emphasizes that there is a “75% chance” that the five-year average will exceed 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. But that 1.5°C threshold was a politically chosen “threshold,” not one identified by science as bringing catastrophe. The 1.5℃ temperature was a 20-year average benchmark under the Paris Agreement. Even the report’s co-author admits it is “not kind of a cliff edge that we’re going to fall off.” Yet the headline language suggests imminent planetary destabilization.

Short-term variability is a defining feature of Earth’s climate system. Volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, ENSO phases, and ocean circulation shifts can all nudge global averages up or down by tenths of a degree. The planet does not warm in a straight line. The idea that five years of elevated readings would constitute some irreversible tipping point is not supported by historical climate behavior. In point of fact, much of the warming of the past few years was likely driven by the Hunga Tonga near sea surface volcanic eruption, which injected enough water vapor into the atmosphere – water vapor being the dominant greenhouse gas – to, in the words of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “cause a rapid change in chemistry.” The water vapor added by Hunga Tonga is only slowly diminishing, meaning its lingering effects will add to the expected El Nino. Meaning if the politically determined 1.5℃ threshold is breached, it will be combination of natural factors, not human caused climate change to blame. In either case, there is no real reason to believe dangerous tipping points will flow from it.

Climate at a Glance’s discussion of model fallibility documents multiple instances where model projections overstated warming trends or extreme event changes relative to observations. This fact means confidence in precise five-year forecasts should be restrained.

The broader problem is attribution inflation. When a heatwave occurs, it is immediately cited by an overzealous press (such as AP) as evidence of climate change. But weather is not climate. Heatwaves occurred before the Industrial Revolution. They occurred during the Medieval Warm Period. They occurred during the 1930s Dust Bowl as seen in the figure below.

Heat wave Index. Source: EPA

Specific events are influenced by immediate meteorological dynamics, not by abstract multi-decade averages alone. Climate change is a long-term statistical trend. It does not dictate the formation of a particular blocking heat dome over North America in June 2027. It does not create or prevent El Niño. It does not eliminate natural variability.

The AP story closes with sweeping claims that “every nation is already paying a huge price” from a “global climate crisis.” That alarmist rhetoric goes far beyond what five-year model ensembles can justify and, based on mortality, agricultural, and economic data, is flat false.

Forecasts based on 200 model runs are not measurements. They are scenario outputs, outputs only as good as the assumptions, data, and the accuracy of the modeled interconnections between disparate physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, built into the models. In fact, most of the factors that impact global and regional climates are only poorly understood and accounted for in models, as even the IPCC has admitted. (See the graphic, below)

The models used by the IPCC have a low Level of Scientific Understanding (LOSU) concerning impact of clouds, solar irradiance (that is the impact of the sun), and aerosols on climate change. Note the models don’t even attempt to account for volcanic impacts, or the impacts of changes to large scale ocean currents, changes in vegetation, or the Earth’s wobble and shifts in its tilt. Yet all of these impact climate on a regional or global scale. Thus, treating inadequate model forecasts as inevitabilities is unjustified as a matter of science and science reporting. The AP is choosing to promote an alarming climate narrative over the deep uncertainty that is the fact of the causes and present and future consequences of climate change.

No External Shock Required: Internal Variability Drove Classic Maya Megadroughts

A major new climate modeling study published in Quaternary Science Reviews (2026) delivers a powerful reminder: Earth’s climate system is perfectly capable of generating severe, multi-decadal megadroughts through its own internal variability—without any external “shock” from volcanoes, solar minima, or human greenhouse gases.

AI generated by Grok

A major new climate modeling study published in Quaternary Science Reviews (2026) delivers a powerful reminder: Earth’s climate system is perfectly capable of generating severe, multi-decadal megadroughts through its own internal variability—without any external “shock” from volcanoes, solar minima, or human greenhouse gases.

Researchers at Stockholm University ran advanced simulations (EC-Earth3 8K) driven only by realistic orbital and greenhouse-gas changes over the past millennia. They found that when multiple natural hydroclimatic cycles—operating on timescales from centuries down to decades—aligned in their “dry” phases, the result was prolonged, intense droughts across the Yucatán Peninsula that match the paleoclimate record from the Terminal Classic Maya period (roughly 800–1000 CE).

These cycles operate on different timescales:

  • Multi-centennial (~600 years)
  • Centennial (~150–200 years)
  • Sub-centennial (~50–90 years)
  • Multi-decadal (~10–40 years)
  • Inter-annual (~2–10 years, e.g., related to ENSO-like patterns)

When the dry phases overlap, they can push regional rainfall far below normal for decades, creating conditions severe enough to stress agriculture, water supplies, and complex societies.nd marine cores from the Maya lowlands. No external trigger required. Internal variability alone was enough.

Paleoclimate proxies (lake sediments, speleothems/stalagmites, marine cores from the Cariaco Basin) have long documented a series of intense droughts during the Terminal Classic period, with particularly severe episodes around 760, 810, 860, and 910 CE—coinciding with phases of city abandonment, political fragmentation, and population decline or relocation in the Maya lowlands. Some records indicate multi-year to multi-decadal dry spells, including one reconstructed 13-year drought. The new modeling demonstrates that internal variability alone can generate events of this magnitude and duration in the Maya region.

This doesn’t mean climate was the sole cause of the Maya “collapse” (a term debated by archaeologists, as Maya culture persisted in adapted forms, with continuity in northern lowlands and post-Classic centers). Factors like overpopulation, deforestation, warfare, trade disruptions, soil degradation, and political instability likely interacted with environmental stress.

Earlier studies noted that Maya land-use changes (widespread forest clearing for agriculture and cities) may have locally amplified droughts by reducing evapotranspiration and increasing surface heating—making natural dry periods worse.

The study underscores a key principle in climatology: regional climate is highly sensitive to the superposition of internal oscillations. The planet’s climate system has built-in variability on multiple timescales—even in the absence of strong external forcings. This internal “noise” can produce extreme events that look catastrophic when they cluster.

It serves as a reminder when interpreting modern climate risks:

  • Not every regional drought, heatwave, or flood requires a dominant human fingerprint or a single villain (CO₂, volcanoes, etc.).
  • Societies have always faced climate variability; resilience depends on adaptation capacity, governance, agriculture, and water management more than the climate anomaly itself.
  • Models that underplay internal variability risk over-attributing recent extremes solely to anthropogenic trends while underestimating how “natural” alignments can still deliver surprises.

The Maya case illustrates both vulnerability and adaptability.

Some centers suffered depopulation or transformation under drought stress, yet Maya people and culture endured through migration, diversified farming, reservoirs, and shifted political centers.

Today’s discussions of climate “tipping points” or inevitable collapse under variability would benefit from this historical nuance: climate stress often acts as a multiplier of pre-existing weaknesses rather than a standalone apocalypse trigger.

In short, Earth’s climate system is capable of generating serious regional disruptions through its own dynamics. The new Maya drought simulations add weight to the view that we should expect—and prepare for—such variability, whether or not it overlaps with longer-term greenhouse gas trends.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Internal Hydroclimate Variability and the Decline of the Classic Maya Civilisation

Katherine Power et al., Quaternary Science Reviews 382 (15 June 2026):

DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2026.109974

A new high-resolution climate modeling study by Katherine Power and colleagues at Stockholm University provides strong evidence that the severe, prolonged droughts coinciding with the Terminal Classic period of Maya civilization (roughly 800–1000 CE) could have been produced entirely by the internal variability of Earth’s climate system—no external forcing from volcanic eruptions, solar minima, or other shocks was required.

Using the EC-Earth3 Transient 8K (Tr8K) simulation, driven solely by realistic time-varying orbital parameters and greenhouse-gas concentrations, the authors show that the convergence of multiple natural hydroclimatic cycles in their “dry” phases generated intense, multi-year to multi-decadal droughts matching the paleoclimate record from the Yucatán Peninsula.

The study does not attribute the “decline” (a term used cautiously, given cultural continuity, northern-site resilience, and Postclassic flourishing) solely to climate. Pre-existing vulnerabilities—high population densities, inter-polity warfare, trade disruptions, soil degradation, and elite decision-making—interacted with the hydroclimatic stress. Widespread Maya deforestation for agriculture and urban centers likely amplified local drying by reducing evapotranspiration and increasing surface heating.

The key advance: earlier hypotheses often invoked external triggers (volcanoes, solar variability) to explain the droughts. This work shows such forcings were unnecessary. Internal dynamics alone were sufficient.

All Tr8K model output is publicly available via Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19203963).

Published just weeks ago, the paper arrives amid ongoing debates about climate-society interactions. It underscores a fundamental feature of the climate system: regional hydroclimate is highly sensitive to the superposition of internal oscillations. The planet can generate disruptive extremes through its own “noise” and cycle alignments—even under stable external forcing.

For past societies, this highlights resilience factors (water management, agricultural diversity, governance, adaptive capacity) as much as the climate signal itself. Some Maya centers adapted better than others; outcomes were not uniform.

In contemporary terms, the study serves as a reminder that internal variability remains a core driver of regional extremes and will continue to interact with any longer-term trends. Preparing societies through robust infrastructure, diversified food systems, and flexible institutions has historically been more effective than assuming every drought requires a single dramatic villain or overarching anthropogenic cause.

A rigorous, data-driven contribution grounded in state-of-the-art modeling and proxy validation. The Classic Maya droughts were not necessarily an omen of inevitable doom from outside forces—they were a demonstration of how powerful Earth’s own internal climate swings can be.

Rebuttal to: ‘2023 Marine Heatwaves Unprecedented and Potentially Signal a Climate Tipping Point’

Another day, another groaner of a climate alarmist press release—this time from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), touting a new study that claims the 2023 marine heatwaves were “unprecedented” and may “signal a climate tipping point” posted at EurekAlert, July 24th, 2025.

A tranquil ocean scene with colorful reflections on the water at sunset, featuring a gradient of warm hues in the sky.

From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

Another day, another groaner of a climate alarmist press release—this time from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), touting a new study that claims the 2023 marine heatwaves were “unprecedented” and may “signal a climate tipping point” posted at EurekAlert, July 24th, 2025.

The press release: 2023 marine heatwaves unprecedented and potentially signal a climate tipping point

The breathless tone is familiar, and the underlying logic is seriously flawed. But hey, if we scare people into action, we just might save the planet.

Let’s unpack this claim using a simple but often overlooked principle: context matters. Particularly in climate, which has cycles that span millennia, not just decades.

The foundational flaw in this study is its timescale. The research relies on satellite data beginning in 1982. That gives us about 40 years of observational history, which is virtually nothing in terms of Earth’s climate system. Prior to satellite coverage, comprehensive, high-resolution global measurements of sea surface temperatures simply didn’t exist. Claims of “unprecedented” events must be framed within that very limited context. As I’ve said before, declaring a “record” based on such a short window is like calling a coin flip streak a “trend” after four tosses.

Ocean temperatures fluctuate naturally over decadal, centennial, and even millennial scales. Our current observational capacity doesn’t cover even half of one oceanic oscillation cycle, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which paleoclimatology suggests runs as long as 50-70 years. To suggest a climate “tipping point” based on this short dataset is not just premature—it’s scientifically irresponsible.

The study makes much of the marine heatwaves’ “extreme” scale and persistence, yet it also quietly admits the 2023 heat spikes were linked to a strong El Niño. This is a naturally recurring phenomenon, not a man-made one. El Niño has been driving global climate variability for thousands of years, influencing ocean currents, sea surface temperatures, and atmospheric patterns.

The Tropical Eastern Pacific, one of the hottest zones in the 2023 event, is historically the epicenter of El Niño conditions. It should surprise no one that temperatures peaked there. What’s odd is the leap from observing a known, cyclical pattern to proclaiming it a new climate threshold.

The modeling mirage is strong with this one. Dong et al. used ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean – Phase II), a high-resolution ocean model that ingests satellite data to reconstruct conditions like mixed-layer heat budgets. While ECCO2 is a valuable scientific tool, let’s not forget: models are not measurements. They are educated guesses constrained by initial assumptions and historical tuning.

All models are simplifications, and when dealing with something as complex as ocean-atmosphere interactions, even a small error can yield a wildly different output. Yet here, model outputs are used not just to analyze the past but to hint at an ominous future—a future where every warm patch of seawater is a harbinger of ecological doom.

The press release tries to go for the jugular by suggesting that these marine heatwaves might “portend an emerging climate tipping point”. That’s a phrase straight from the climate playbook of fear, designed to bypass critical thinking and stampede policymakers into hasty action. Even the photo supplied with the press release was chosen to look “hot” and drive fear. Nowhere in the abstract or methods is there clear empirical evidence linking this event to irreversible climate shifts. It’s pure conjecture, wrapped in technical jargon and served up with a greasy side of urgency.

According to the press release, the authors cite “region-specific drivers” for each major marine heatwave. In the North Atlantic, enhanced shortwave radiation and a shallower mixed layer were culprits. In the Southwest Pacific, the heat was attributed to reduced cloud cover and increased advection. The Tropical Eastern Pacific was influenced by oceanic advection.

Notice anything? These aren’t unified, global changes due to increased CO2. They are local, meteorological, and oceanographic phenomena—exactly the kinds of natural variability we should expect in a dynamic system. The fact that these local causes are acknowledged undercuts the paper’s own argument for a singular, global cause rooted in greenhouse gas emissions.

Bad science and an unjustified extrapolation is the gist of this study and press release. Perhaps the most egregious leap comes in the suggestion that the 2023 marine heatwaves might represent a “tipping point” in the Earth’s climate system. The term “tipping point” implies a sudden, irreversible shift—a planetary point of no return. But what evidence is there for this? The authors provide none beyond the temperature anomalies themselves and vague references to mixed-layer dynamics.

No historical precedent is given. No paleoclimatic comparisons are offered. No quantitative thresholds are defined. It’s all speculation dressed up in technical language.

Predictably, the press release connects the marine heatwaves to coral bleaching, fishery losses, and ecological disaster. While it is true that marine heatwaves can affect ecosystems, the narrative ignores the fact that marine species have adapted to variability over millions of years.

Corals, for instance, have survived past periods of much higher global temperatures. Many fish species migrate or dive to avoid surface heat. And let’s not forget: ecosystems are resilient. The doom-and-gloom language betrays a bias that prioritizes alarm over understanding.

My conclusion: another tale of confirmation bias

The 2023 marine heatwaves were notable, yes. But were they a sign of a planetary tipping point? Unlikely. The evidence is thin, the dataset is short, and the logic is stretched.

Here’s what we actually know:

  • Our observational record of global ocean temperatures is limited to a few decades.
  • Natural variability, including El Niño and decadal oscillations, can easily account for short-term spikes.
  • The study’s own data points to region-specific, localized drivers.
  • The models used, while complex, are not infallible representations of reality.
  • No historical context or thresholds are provided to justify claims of a tipping point.

Science should seek to inform, not frighten. The AAAS release on this study opts for drama over depth, projection over precision. In doing so, it exemplifies what’s wrong with climate discourse today: a preference for narrative over nuance.

Let’s not mistake a one year snapshot for a trend—or worse, for a crisis.

The paper: Record-breaking 2023 marine heatwaves

Dong et al., Science 24 Jul 2025 Vol 389, Issue 6758 pp. 369-374

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr0910

Abstract

The year 2023 witnessed an extraordinary surge in marine heatwaves (MHWs) across Earth’s oceans, setting new records in duration, extent, and intensity, with MHW activity totaling 53.6 billion °C days square kilometer—more than three standard deviations above the historical norm since 1982. Notable events include the North Atlantic MHW (276-year return period) and the Southwest Pacific (141 years). Using ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean-Phase II) high-resolution daily data, we conducted a mixed-layer heat budget analysis and identified region-specific drivers: enhanced shortwave flux and a shallower mixed layer in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, reduced cloud cover and increased advection in the Southwest Pacific, and oceanic advections in the Tropical Eastern Pacific. The 2023 MHWs highlight the intensifying impacts of a warm climate and the challenges in understanding extreme events.

Toward A New Climate Paradigm

What got me into investigating climate science a quarter-century ago? The astounding stability of the Earth’s global surface mean temperature (GMST). For example, since the year 1900, a century and a quarter, the Earth’s temperature has gone up by 0.46 ± 0.07 percent.

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

What got me into investigating climate science a quarter-century ago? The astounding stability of the Earth’s global surface mean temperature (GMST). For example, since the year 1900, a century and a quarter, the Earth’s temperature has gone up by 0.46 ± 0.07 percent.

I’ll say it again. In a century and a quarter the Earth has warmed by less than half a percent

The Earth’s climate system is a curious thing. It is a giant solar-driven heat engine. A heat engine is a device that turns heat into mechanical motion. In the case of the climate, the mechanical motion is the endless, ceaseless motion of the ocean and the atmosphere. Like all heat engines, the climate heat engine is heated at the hot end, and then the heat is transferred to the cold end and leaves the engine.

So I started out to discover why the temperature is so stable. Yes, I know that from our tiny human perspective it seems unstable, but for a heat engine, the temperature varying by less than half a percent over a century and a quarter is very stable. And here’s what I found out.

Like all flow systems far from equilibrium, the climate is ruled by the Constructal Law, one of the most under-appreciated discoveries of modern thermodynamics. The Constructal Law governs the evolution of flow systems.

And as the Constructal Law requires, the climate heat engine is constantly evolving to maximize the flow. The Constructal Law is a sort of Ten Commandments for anything that flows—rivers, blood, traffic, and, yes, the climate itself. The basic idea?

Everything that moves is constantly evolving and morphing to make movement easier. Life, it turns out, is just one big game of “How can I get from here to there with the least amount of fuss?” The Constructal Law is why river deltas look like the branches of a tree, which in turn look like the alveoli in our lungs. They are all controlled by the Constructal Law.

From a Constructal Law point of view, the climate is not a fragile, teetering system on the verge of collapse, but a gigantic, heat-hauling Rube Goldberg machine.

The sun pours energy onto the tropics, the poles are the cold end of the heat engine, and the atmosphere and oceans get busy shuttling all that heat from the equator towards the poles, where it escapes to space far more easily than at the tropics. Here’s a map of what areas lose or gain energy by this flow.

Figure 1. Average of flow of heat which is constantly being exported from the tropics to the poles, March 2000 to February 2024.

According to Bejan, the climate doesn’t maximize temperature, or CO₂, or even the number of climate conferences in Paris.

No, what it’s really maximizing—relentlessly, remorselessly, every minute of every day—is the flow of heat from where it’s hot to where it’s not.

Picture the earth as a planetary HVAC system, always rearranging its ductwork to get the job done faster. The Hadley cells, the jet streams, the ocean currents—none of these are accidents or the result of a committee meeting. They’re the system’s way of morphing itself to maximize that poleward heat flow. The boundaries between the warm and cold zones, the size of the tropical belt, the speed of the trade winds—Bejan’s math predicts them all and the numbers line up with the real world.

And here’s the kicker: when you let the system optimize for maximum heat transport, a bunch of other things fall into place. The average surface temperature, the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, the total amount of heat getting shunted north and south—Bejan’s model nails them all, without the need for fudge factors, hand-waving, or appeals to the climate gods.

How do I know that? I know because I created and ran what I believe is the first actual real-world based exemplar of Bejan’s theoretical climate model on my computer and saw how successful it was. The whole process is described in the post below.

Testing A Constructal Climate Model

So what’s the grand takeaway?

The climate isn’t a delicate flower, always on the verge of wilting. It’s a brawny, self-organizing, heat-moving machine, always rearranging its own plumbing to maximize the flow from hot to cold. It doesn’t care about our politics, our models, or our carbon taxes. It just wants to get the job done, and it’ll keep morphing until it does.

In short: if you want to understand the climate, stop thinking about balance, and start thinking about flow in a constructally-ruled world. The Earth’s climate is a heat engine with a mission, and it’s not going to let a little thing like equilibrium get in its way.

My best wishes to all,

w.

Of Course … when you comment, I politely ask that you quote the exact words you are discussing. Makes things clear.

Underestimating Clouds: A Climate Mistake We Cannot Afford

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been predominantly portrayed as the chief culprit driving global warming. For decades, this misconception has guided international policies, prompted ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions and driven a shift from reliable and affordable energy resources like coal, oil, and natural gas toward problematic wind and solar sources.

From Watts Up With That?

By Vijay Jayaraj

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been predominantly portrayed as the chief culprit driving global warming. For decades, this misconception has guided international policies, prompted ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions and driven a shift from reliable and affordable energy resources like coal, oil, and natural gas toward problematic wind and solar sources.

However, this theory overlooks important factors that influence Earth’s climate system, including a critical variable in the climate system – the role of clouds, which remains woefully underestimated.

Recent work by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer challenges this prevailing paradigm: Their new paper, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggest clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2 because they have a greater impact on the comparative amounts of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and escaping to outer space.

The Overshadowed Influence of Clouds

Clouds simultaneously reflect incoming sunlight back to space (cooling the Earth) and trap outgoing heat (warming the Earth). This dual nature makes clouds both powerful and perplexing players in our climate system. The net effect of clouds on climate is a balance between these opposing influences, thus a central component of the Earth’s energy budget.

A recent study by van Wijngaarden and Happer, titled “Radiation Transport in Clouds,” delves into this complexity. The 2025 paper says the radiation effects of clouds can easily negate or amplify the impact of CO2. The researchers highlight that clouds have a more pronounced effect on Earth’s radiation budget than greenhouse gases like CO₂.

For instance, their research reveals that a modest decrease in low cloud cover could significantly increase solar heating of the Earth’s surface. In comparison, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations reduces radiation to space by a mere 1%: “Instantaneously doubling CO₂ concentrations, a 100% increase, only decreases radiation to space by about 1%. To increase solar heating of the Earth by a few percent, low cloud cover only needs to decrease by a few percent.”

This stark contrast highlights the disproportionate influence of cloud dynamics compared to CO2 fluctuations. Most state-of-art climate models are still in their infancy. We need more accurate measurements of clouds’ properties and their influence on the electromagnetic components of solar radiation if they are to be useful inputs for climate models.

Implications for Energy Policy and Reliability

Current strategies assume a direct and dominant link between CO2 emissions and global temperatures to justify aggressive “decarbonization” efforts and an increase in the use of solar and wind energy.

However, solar and wind are inherently intermittent, rendering them unreliable and very expensive as components of a power grid. The infrastructure required to support these technologies entails substantial upfront investments, higher operating costs and increasing utility bills for consumers.

Blackouts, energy shortages and price spikes are becoming increasingly common in regions that have prematurely decommissioned fossil fuel plants without adequate backup solutions. This trend disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, exacerbating energy poverty and hindering economic development.

The major justification for using solar and wind has been that they counter global warming by reducing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. If small variations in cloud cover actually overwhelm the effects of CO2, then the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is being significantly overestimated. This has profound implications for policy.

Attributing global warming predominantly to CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels is a gross oversimplification. While CO2 undoubtedly has a warming effect, it is relatively modest and beneficial, mainly moderating the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. On the other hand, clouds, with their multifaceted interactions and feedbacks, represent a critical and underappreciated component of this puzzle.

The findings of van Wijngaarden and Happer highlight a broader issue within climate science: the tendency to oversimplify complex systems for the sake of political expediency. As the global energy landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative that decisions be based on sound science rather than political dogma.

The time has come to reassess our approach to both climate science and energy policy. The stakes are too high to continue down a path of destructive policies based on erroneous analyses. We must prioritize reliable, affordable energy sources and grid stability over useless reductions in emissions of a harmless gas.

Click here to access the entire Radiation Transport in Clouds paper.

This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on February 10, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.

Global Warming Big Lie–Skip the Distractions

The notion that CO2 from human activities causes global warming has multiple flaws, many of which have been dissected and rebutted here and elsewhere.  But The Big Lie is to fundamentally misrepresent how Earth’s climate system works. Richard Lindzen explains in the above interview with Jordan Peterson.  For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

The notion that CO2 from human activities causes global warming has multiple flaws, many of which have been dissected and rebutted here and elsewhere.  But The Big Lie is to fundamentally misrepresent how Earth’s climate system works. Richard Lindzen explains in the above interview with Jordan Peterson.  For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

JP: When you started to object to the narrative, back say in ‘92, To what narrative were you objecting and on what grounds were you objecting?

RL: You’re touching on something that took me a while to understand. You know Goebbels famously said: If you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, it’ll become the truth. there’s been a lot of that in this. But there are aspects of establishing the narrative, that is, what makes something the truth that I hadn’t appreciated.

So the narrative was the climate is determined by a greenhouse effect
and adding CO2 to it increases warming. And moreover, besides CO2
the natural greenhouse substances–water vapor, clouds, upper-level clouds–
will amplify whatever man does.

Now that immediately goes against Le Chatelier’s principle which says: If you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting that, it will. And our system is so capable.

So that was a little bit odd. You began wondering, where did these feedbacks come from? Immediately people including myself started looking into the feedbacks, and seeing whether there were any negative ones, and how did it all work?

But underlying it, and this is what I learned: if you want to get a narrative established, the crucial thing is to pepper it with errors, questionable things. So that the critics will seize on those and not question the basic narrative.

The basic narrative was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. In point of fact the earth’s climate system has many regions, but two distinctly different regions. There are the tropics roughly minus 30 to plus 30 degrees latitude, and the extra Tropics outside of plus or minus 30 degrees.

They have very different dynamics, and this is the crucial thing for the Earth by the way. And this is a technicality and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97 percent of scientists agree.

This is actually a technical issue. The Earth rotates. Now people are aware that we have day and night, but there is something called the Coriolis effect. When you’re on a rotating system it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation. So, at the pole the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface, while at the equator it’s parallel to the surface: it’s zero.

And this gives you phenomenally different Dynamics. So where you don’t have a vertical component to the rotation, vector motions do what they do in the laboratory in small scales. If you have a temperature difference, it acts to wipe it out.

Figure 11. Most sunlight is absorbed in the tropics, and some of the heat energy is carried by air currents to the polar regions to be released back into space as thermal radiation. Along with energy, angular momentum — imparted to the air from the rotating Earth’s surface near the equator — is transported to higher northern and southern latitudes, where it is reabsorbed by the Earth’s surface. The Hadley circulation near the equator is largely driven by buoyant forces on warm, solar-heated air, but for mid latitudes the “Coriolis force” due to the rotation of the earth leads to transport of energy and angular momentum through slanted “baroclinic eddies.” Among other consequences of the conservation of angular momentum are the easterly trade winds near the equator and the westerly winds at mid latitudes.

And so if you look at the tropics the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat: they don’t vary much with latitude. On the other hand you go to the mid Latitudes, in the extra Tropics the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole. We know that about how temperatures are cold at high Latitudes. And if you look at changes in climate in the Earth’s history, what they show is a Tropics that stays relatively constant, and what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole.

During the Ice Age it was about 60 degrees Centigrade, today it’s about 40.  During 50 million years ago something called the eocene the difference was about 20. So that’s all a function of what’s going on outside the tropics. Within the tropics the greenhouse effect is significant but what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect.

It is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that a temperature difference with latitude generates instabilities. These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. You can see the tropics are very different from even a casual look at a weather map.
The systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the tropics. Within the tropics they travel from east to west. The prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections.

Sometimes people say that changes due to the greenhouse effect are amplified at the poles. That is not true: there’s no physical basis for that Statement. All they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in mid-latitudes and that’s determined mainly by Hydrodynamics.

Okay that’s complicated to explain to someone and yet it’s the basis for those claims of seemingly large significance of these small numbers. You know they’re saying if Global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees it’s the end. That’s based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that. But all one and a half degrees at the equator would do or in the greenhouse part of the Earth is change the temperature everywhere by one and a half degrees, which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch.