WRINGING OUT THE ATMOSPHERE.

In the summer of 2023, there was more water in the atmosphere, which affected summer humidity.  "That volcano, it transpires, was at just the right depth to superheat water enough to push through the water pressure at depth and boil off into the atmosphere. More water in the atmosphere, more humidity, more air you can wear, and in corn country the evening aspiration of the corn plants manifests itself."  Atmospheric water can be an effective greenhouse gas, that is, until the next rainfall.

Without additional undersea volcanic eruptions, sooner or later, the hydrologic cycle returns the atmospheric moisture levels to equilibrium.

Warmists were ecstatic over the 2023 increase, which they attributed to “climate change.” (It makes no sense to say that a change was caused by change, but put that aside for the moment.) As to the subsequent decline, they were almost entirely silent.

It seemed obvious to me that the most likely explanation was the extraordinary eruption of the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano in January 2022. That eruption, unprecedented in recorded history, sent vast quantities of water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is, of course, the principal greenhouse gas.

That hypothesis is confirmed in this article by Javier Vinos. It is long and detailed, but fundamentally it makes the point that an unprecedented leap in temperatures requires an extraordinary cause; while, likewise, the sharp subsequent decline must be accounted for and not simply ignored.

The climate crisis establishment clung to their priors when they might better have been thinking about the nature of evidence that might persuade them to revise those priors.  Mr Vinos suggests an underwater volcanic eruption that boiled off a lot of sea water might have been precisely that sort of evidence.

According to Occam’s razor, a climatic event of unparalleled magnitude in modern records requires an exceptional cause. The factors responsible for normal climate variability are insufficient. The only extraordinary factor preceding the 2023 event was the explosion of the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano. The 150 megatons of water vapor that it released into the stratosphere are without precedent in our records. We do not know all the effects this may have had on the climate. Eruptions that reach the stratosphere have radiative, chemical, and dynamic effects. However, only the first two are well known.

There are several aspects of the Tambora eruption in April 1815 that scientists have not yet explained satisfactorily. First, the effects were delayed, as the anomalies that led to the year without a summer in 1816 did not begin until 15 months after the eruption. The usual explanation is that atmospheric dynamics delayed the radiative effects in the Northern Hemisphere. However, this explanation conflicts with the second unexplained aspect: the climatic effect on the Northern Hemisphere was much greater than on the Southern Hemisphere. The cause of this inequality between the hemispheres is unknown since volcanic aerosols and their radiative effects are distributed across both hemispheres in a tropical eruption.

Climate models do not adequately reproduce the effects of the 1815 Tambora eruption, suggesting that dynamic atmospheric changes caused by stratospheric eruptions or other factors have a much greater impact on climate than previously thought. It is striking that the evolution of the ocean temperature anomaly generally coincides with the evolution of water vapor anomalies in extratropical middle-stratospheric latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere but not in the entire stratosphere.

Which is to say, there are opportunities for future research.  Proper research, though, is about understanding anomalies, and although it is proper, methodologically, to ask how make sense of anomalous evidence within the prevailing theoretical framework, there comes a time when that framework becomes untenable.

Climate science has failed the test of an externally forced natural climate event. Most scientists who have published studies on the 2023 climate event have not recognized its nature. Any climatological manifestations of the event that do not align with the dominant consensus have been treated as either natural variability or rare events whose probability has increased due to anthropogenic climate change. No studies have addressed the climatic event in all its manifestations or analyzed its possible causes without relying on models clearly not designed to shed light on something we did not know was possible.

Rather than trying to determine the causes of the event, scientists have attempted to fit it into the dominant theory using models. In light of evidence of major natural climate change, this approach reveals its greatest flaw: the theory relies on an excessive focus on greenhouse gases and aerosols as the cause and temperature changes as the effect.

And once that extra atmospheric water returned to the rivers and the seas, winters became more like normal winters.  No, we didn't have a White Christmas at Cold Spring Shops headquarters: all that post-Thanksgiving snow melted away at the end of Advent, and Rockford reported a record high temperature during one of those warm days.  Those occasional high temperature days can be a thing all through meteorological winter: the Rockford forecast reader includes the record high for the day, which can be in the 50s with the odd sixtysomething (Fahrenheit) every day, although those observations tend to be from different years and almost nothing consecutive.  Consecutive days of record lows are more common, including a few from the last ten years or so.

The deep freeze returned again after Three Kings, and any smart groundhog is likely to be hibernating this weekend.  I confess to cracking wise about an atmospheric river colliding with a polar vortex.  Didn't quite happen here, although I understand the southeastern states had a rough time of it last weekend.  Even there, though, there was reason to call out the doomsday forecasters.  Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds, who, as far as I know, did not have a rooting interest in any of the remaining pro football teams, filed observations from the ice storm.

I’m writing this from Knoxville, Tennessee, where the entire town was more or less shut down by fears of a historically huge blizzard that never happened. At one point last week, there were models showing upward of 29” of snow for us:

I discounted that at the time, but the models’ consensus was still over a foot of snow.

We actually got a few flurries and some rain and sleet that never even turned into an ice storm as predicted.

Now I don’t mean to fault the weathermen, and women, too much. Theirs is an uncertain and chaotic — in the literal, mathematical sense — discipline. And big snows where I live occur when we get a clash of cold air from up north, and warm moist air from the Gulf. Mix ‘em just right and you can get a foot, or even two, of snow. Get it just a bit wrong and you get rain, or no precipitation to speak of at all.

So it often is with extrapolation models, and complex adaptive systems, which are chaotic in the mathematical sense, do what they do.  And frightening people might be what weather forecasters do.

And, to be fair, the weather people hype everything now, including naming “winter storms” and summer weather events that used to just be called “blizzards” and “thunderstorms.” I understand that The Weather Channel needs viewers, and so do local news and weather broadcasts, but have too many underperforming hyped storms and people will tune out future warnings, which might actually be correct.

(We’ve seen the same thing with hurricanes, where “hurricane hype” has sometimes left people reluctant to evacuate in time after previous false alarms.)

To be fair, my local weather people did note the uncertainty in all of these predictions, to a greater degree than a few years ago, or at least so my memory suggests. And maybe there was less panic.

Make of it what you will that the early Advent storm was "Bellamy" and the Conference Championship Weekend storm was "Fern," four weeks later.  Thus far, the impending nor'easter has not yet been given a name, although you're seeing "bomb cyclone" references; and if you have a rooting interest in a team playing in the Black and Blue Division, suck it up, buttercup, as "Lake-effect snowstorms and pure arctic cold outbreaks are not named."