It's been raining a lot

It was the explosion heard almost around the world, yet now all but forgotten. The Hunga Tonga/Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami devastated much of the island kingdom of Tonga, displacing hundreds of people from the outer islands, and propelling a record-breaking amount of water vapour into the Earth's stratosphere -- enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

As an underwater volcano, it thrust an unprecedented amount of water into the sky, increasing total stratospheric water content by about 10% -- enough to cause a rapid change in atmospheric chemistry. That additional water vapour from the eruption is still up there, still decaying steadily, not expected to return to its pre-eruption range until around 2030.

Talking to a friend recently about the rain, the floods, the wet weather events in the last few years, you have to wonder whether that massive uptick in stratospheric water might still be playing a part?

Hunga Tonga erupted in January 2022. MetService recorded 53 severe weather events in 2022, and issued 182 severe weather warnings. In January 2023 Auckland had its worst flood in memory, a record 539mm of raining falling in January. Cyclone Gabrielle arrived in Feb 2023. Extreme rain events occurred throughout 2024, from extreme rainfall events occurred throughout the year, from Dunedin to Westland. The North Island got a Red Alert and the South Island a state of emergency in May 2025 for record rainfall and strong winds. And this week Wellingtonians were stuck with severe flooding and landslides after 77mm of rain fell in less than one hour, causing the worst flooding event since Wellington's disastrous 1976 storm.

Naturally, NIWA says "nothing to see here." (They don't seem to have even mentioned the eruption since 2024.) The influential 2025 Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report frustratingly focusses more on temperature than rainfall. But just as the atmospheric water increase still lingers, so too a few studies suggest some lingering interest in the question -- examining especially how much the eruption  may have nudged rainfall patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, including New Zealand.

A January 2026 study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found some statistically significant extratropical regional climate responses to the eruption, driven by circulation changes. A recent finding from the Austrian Polar Research Institute), published just weeks ago, found that the eruption continues to influence stratospheric patterns, increasing chances of extreme precipitation events at mid-latitudes-- which includes New Zealand.

Yet while they're happy to go on the record about their modelled "causes" of recent rainfall events, the largest volcanic eruption this century remains the climate event no local climate scientists want to talk about. 

I can't imagine why.

"Neither climate nor climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather. Yes, you read that right"

"It is now a ubiquitous cultural ritual to blame any and every weather event on climate change. Those hot days? Climate change. That hurricane? Climate change. The flood somewhere that I saw on social media? Climate change.
    "With today’s post, the first in a series, I go beyond the cartoonish media caricatures of climate change, which I expect are here to stay, and explore the actual science of extreme events — how they may or may not be changing, and how we think we know what we know, and what we simply cannot know. ...
    "Let’s correct one pervasive and pathological misunderstanding endemic across the media and in policy, and sometimes spotted seeping into peer-reviewed scientific research:

Neither climate nor climate change cause, fuel, or influence weather.

"Yes, you read that right.
    "Climate change is a change in the statistics of weather — It is an outcome, not a cause.
    "I often use hitting in baseball as an analogy. A hitter’s batting average does not cause hits. Instead, a batter’s hits result in their overall batting average. Lots of things can change a batter’s hitting performance, but batting average change is not one of them.

"As the Google NGrams figure above indicates, the idea that climate change is a causal agent has become increasingly common in recent decades, departing dramatically from its use in the IPCC and much of the scientific community. I am sure you can point to examples that you encounter every day. ...
    "Weather can be characterised statistically, but weather does not occur as a result of simple statistical processes. Weather is the the integrated result of at least: dynamical, thermodynamical, chaotic, societal, biospheric, cryospheric, lithospheric, oceanic, vulcanological, solar, and, yes, stochastic processes."

~ Roger Pielke Jr. from his post 'Climate-Fuelled Extreme Weather.' [Emphasis in the original. Hat tip Kip Hansen]

 

"The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. "

Pic from Watts Up With That

"The forthcoming 28th session (COP28) of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ... will convene from 30 November to 12 December in the United Arab Emirates. The ‘Parties’ are UN member states plus some observers. The last one, COP27 at Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, had 12,000 delegates from over 200 countries.
    "There has been one every year since except for 2020. All 27 have warned about the increasingly noxious state of the atmosphere and declaring that something must be done about it before it’s too late. ...
    "The CO2 content of the atmosphere has been measured since 1957 and has risen steadily every year. The twenty-seven Conferences so far have had no effect on total global emissions. Nations have realised their people’s need for electricity had to come first. The cheapest and quickest way to provide that is by way of fossil-fuelled power stations.
    "Leaders of nations may also have wondered at the increasingly manic shouts of: ‘global boiling’; ‘July the warmest in human civilisation’s history’; ‘oceansgrowing hotter … triggering global weather disasters … heat searing enough to knock out mobile phones’; ‘daily temperatures hitting a 100,000 year high’; ‘the September data shows … the planet’s temperature reached its warmest level in modern records and probably in thousands of years.’
    "Advisers to leaders of nations may have pointed out that we have only been measuring daily world-wide temperatures for about 140 years. NASA makes it quite clear that ‘before 1880 there just wasn’t enough data to make accurate calculations.’ The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago; the advisors may have advised that it would therefore seem reasonable to expect that records will be broken, will continue to be broken, and may or may not have anything to do with global warming.
    "There has curiously been very little comment about the willingness of the UN to go on having Conferences calling for actions that don’t [and shouldn't] happen."

~ Ivor Williams, from his post 'Why COPs Should Have No Teeth'

"At this point it’s fair to ask: What is the difference, if any, between the climate alarmists and the religious cults that predict the end of the world"

"It was David Viner, a senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, who told the Independent in 2000 that within just a few years, winter snow was going to become 'a very rare and exciting event.'
    “'Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,' he said, 22 years before snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere reached a record high....
    "Viner is of course only one of many climate doomsday prophets who have made forecasts that seemed more like the rantings of a mental hospital patient. Their miserable record has been covered by esteemed columnists, reputable think tanks, and occasionally the media. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to climate change predictions.
    "At this point it’s fair to ask: What is the difference, if any, between the climate alarmists and the religious cults that predict the end of the world, and rather than humbly rethink their premises after their predictions fail, claim that they just got the day wrong and double down on the loco?
    "Our answer: The only real difference is that while the doomsday cults have no political power and are routinely skewered by the media, the climate alarmists have nearly unchallenged political clout, deep and wide institutional patronage, and the uncritical support of a press that is not merely sympathetic but actively promotes a deception agenda."

~ Issues + Insights Editorial Board, from their op-ed 'The Climate Alarmists Are Deeply Disturbed People'

Hat tip Gus Van Horn, who notes: 

"One of the most common mistakes is to allow a consensus, real or imagined, to cause oneself to assume that one's own thinking is incorrect or fruitless.
    "Just because a movement is large and powerful does not mean it is correct or that its size and power are a testimony to objectivity or virtue of any kind. Or that it is not, in fact, a cult."

 

Minisinformation, green gloating, and apocalypse porn

"Remember when a flood was just a flood? A watery calamity that might make roads impassable, homes unliveable and sometimes, in the worst cases, claim lives? Not anymore. Now it’s always a deluge, an apocalypse, a portent of the horrors to come if mankind keeps on sinfully heating the planet. Now a flood is always a lesson from on high – from a ticked-off Poseidon, presumably – warning hubristic humans to ‘reduce carbon emissions.’ Floods are our fault now, like everything else.
    "This neo-Biblical view of floods, this pre-modern belief that gushing waters are divine wrath for human misbehaviour, was much in evidence following the flooding of New York City on Friday....
    "The flooding was bad, there’s no question about that. ... [But t]here’s been a nauseating streak of apocalypse porn in the chatter about New York’s floods.... Hacks have been trying to outdo each other in the hyperbole stakes. ... With dire predictability, Friday’s flooding has been blamed on climate change – which is to say on that pesky, polluting modernity created by mankind. ... we must [they howl] ‘reduce carbon emissions and stop the ongoing heating of the planet’ or else these violent visitations from Mother Nature will ‘become more extreme’ ... In short, appease the weather gods, offer up industrial society as a sacrifice, and maybe they’ll leave us alone. ...
    "There is something distinctly medieval in this view of extreme weather as nature’s rage with mankind. You see it all the time. In response to wildfires in Australia, heatwaves in Europe, big storms in the US, the same cry goes up: we’re being punished for our eco-crimes. ...
    "It is a testament to the creeping irrationalism in chattering-class circles that every weather event is now interpreted as a ‘sign,’ a species of heavenly punishment. Like pre-modern peasants, who at least had the excuse of having never heard of science, they’re incapable of shrugging off rain or heat or wind as perfectly normal events. No, they’re rebukes, lessons, all providing ‘a glimpse of the possible winter world we’ll inhabit if we don’t sort ourselves out.’
    "The idea that weather is turning more violent, and that it’s all down to climate change, is essentially misinformation. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, ever-fewer people are dying in natural disasters. Even as the human population has quadrupled over the past hundred years, deaths from climate calamity have dropped 20-fold. The risk of a human dying in one of nature’s catastrophes has fallen by 99 per cent since the 1920s. Modernity isn’t taking lives – it’s saving them.
    "Which is why we need more of it, not less."

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his column 'Stop this green gloating over New York’s floods: Friday’s flooding was bad, but it was not an eco-apocalypse'

"Disinformation?" "You want disinformation, then look at the Green movement"

"'The green movement *is* a disinformation campaign’...
    "There has been a concerted effort since the 1990s to convince people that climate change is making natural disasters worse. ... But a disaster is defined by two things: deaths and costs. And we’re not seeing an increase in either. In fact, deaths from extreme weather events have actually drastically declined over the past century. Only a few hundred people now die each year from natural disasters in the US, for example. So the climate movement is undeniably a disinformation campaign....
    "In the recent cases in California, Greece and Hawaii, for example, it was bad fire prevention, bad forest management or bad grasslands management that played a key role. In the American cases, authorities failed to clear the area around electrical wires, which are often the trigger for fires. They also failed to stabilise electrical poles, which likely collapsed and contributed to the fires. Hawaii in particular did not have the proper kind of disaster preparedness, such as working sirens and widespread training, that would equip people to escape unharmed.
    "In the case of the Greek fires, we were told by the media that the main cause was climate change, then it emerged that arson was more likely to blame....
    "Blaming climate change only serves the interests of powerful politicians. ... to cede responsibility for their own failures. ... to raise money and demand more subsidies for renewables.
    "At the same time, stirring up predictions of a secular apocalypse feeds people’s spiritual needs.... to embody an almost superhero self-image... to sound the alarm and ultimately harmonise humankind with nature.... Telling people that they must play a role in avoiding the ultimate apocalypse serves a perfect storm of political, financial and spiritual interests all at once."

~ Michael Shellenberger, from his interview at Spiked: ‘The green movement is a disinformation campaign’

It's all about the "narrative," not about the science.

In the beginning, it was simply "global warming." Then, when the 1988-2013 Pause proved that title insufficiently accurate, it became "climate change." But as that was insufficiently frightening it quickly became a "climate crisis," then a "climate emergency," and now ... "global boiling":

"‘The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived’, decreed UN chief António Guterreslast week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth....
    "Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to [recent] heatwaves that have hit some countries ... ‘Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying’, he said. We see ‘families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat’ and ‘it is just the beginning’, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget ‘climate change’, he said. Forget ‘global warming’, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Bible's Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to ‘boil like a cauldron’. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now....
    "Let’s be clear: ‘global boiling’ is not a factual or scientific phrase. Rather, it represents yet another ramping up of the green politics of fear. It’s the latest addition to the already fat dictionary of eco-dread. Economic inflation isn’t the only problem we face today – there’s threat inflation, too. The catastrophism of climate change in particular is puffed up on pretty much a weekly basis. This is why we’ve gone from climate change to climate crisis to climate emergency. And it’s why we’re now going from global warming to global boiling. Language is used to terrorise the masses, to snap us out of our supposed apathetic coolness on the issue of climate change and force us to agree with the cranky elites that the end really is nigh, and it’s our fault....

"They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling ... Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary, is ‘the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them’, then that lunatic Evening Standard cover [asking 'Who Will Stop earth Burning'] was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology....
    "The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the ‘world is ablaze’ is pure bunkum....
    "Heat has always been with us. What’s different today is our apocalyptic interpretation of heat as Gaia’s violent punishment of flying, driving, shopping, eating, polluting, horrible mankind. It isn’t the weather that’s changed so much as our willingness to see weather as a reprimand by the gods for our exploitation of nature’s resources....
    "[B]eing told that humans are a plague on the planet – when in truth life expectancy has risen and deaths from natural disasters have plummeted in accordance with industrial breakthroughs – I know misanthropy is at play more than calm, honest fact-gathering."

~ Brendan O'Neill, composite quote from his posts 'Global boiling? Don’t be ridiculous' and 'The real crisis is global gaslighting' 

“The man who manufactured weather.”

"The heat wave of 1901 was brutal across the eastern United States, setting some records that persist to this day. One of these occurred in St. Louis were, according to a recent retrospective in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 'For nearly seven weeks, temperatures were above 90 on all but three days. It was 100 or hotter on 15 days, including a terrible four-day run of at least 106.”
    "At a time when the electric ceiling fan was a new invention, there was little hope for relief. To mitigate the suffering, the Post-Dispatch raised funds from its readers to distribute ice to the poor from refrigeration plants at the city’s breweries. Still, hundreds died in St. Louis. It is estimated that 9,500 people died of the heat across the country. Crops withered, and factories closed to prevent workers from collapsing.
    "There is a lot of talk about the summer of 2023 being unusually hot due to global warming, though it is also thanks to the naturally recurring 'El Niño' weather pattern. But as the heat wave of 1901 indicates, dangerously hot summers are an old problem, particularly in the American South. And one man gave us the solution, making civilized life in the summer possible: Willis Carrier, the inventor of modern air-conditioning...
    
"He patented his device in 1906 and made continual improvements to its mechanical operation.
    "But he went beyond that, developing a whole sub-science to support his discoveries. In 1911, he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers his paper, 'Rational Psychrometric Formulae,' which described the relationships of temperature, humidity, relative humidity and dew-point that provide the theoretical basis for air-conditioning. 'Psychrometrics' comes from the Ancient Greek word for 'cold': 'psuchron.' You could call it the science of comfort.
    "In 1915, Carrier partnered with a group of young engineers to found the Carrier Engineering Corporation devoted to manufacturing and improving air-conditioning systems.
    "Carrier’s achievement made him, as I put it, 'the man who manufactured weather'."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'The Man Who Manufactured Weather'

"Talk of hottest temperature ‘all hot air’"

"Two of America's top climate scientists say July wasn’t the hottest month in the last 100 years let alone in 120,000 years, as some reports have claimed....
    "Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being 'misinformed on a massive scale': 'It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive ... I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”. …
    "John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century were at least as intense as those of more recent decades based on consistent, long-term weather stations going back over a century. 'I haven‘t seen anything yet this summer that’s an all-time record for these long-term stations, 1936 still holds by far the record for the most number of stations with the hottest-ever temperatures' ... referring to the year of a great heatwave in North America that killed thousands.
    "Professor Christy said an explosion of the number of weather stations in the US and around the world had made historical comparisons difficult because some stations only went back a few years; meanwhile, creeping urbanisation had subjected existing weather stations to additional heat. 'In Houston, for example, in the centre it is now between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside' ....
    "Professor Christy, conceding a slight warming trend over the last 45 years, said July could be the warmest month on record based on global temperatures measured by satellites – 'just edging out 1998' – but such measures only went back to 1979.'
    "Professor Mass said the climate was 'radically warmer' around 1000 years ago during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when agriculture thrived in parts of now ice-covered Greenland. 'If you really go back far enough there were swamps near the North Pole, and the other thing to keep in mind is that we‘re coming out of a cold period, a Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850.'
"'Global warming, it‘s a serious issue, but it’s a slow issue, it’s not an existential threat'."

~ from the article 'Top climate scientists rubbish claims July was the hottest month ever'

New Study: 21st Century Rainfall Trends Have Become *Less* Intense Globally, Not More

There's a regular drumbeat of 'wisdom' out there from a commentariat who like to politicise our weather:

"Climate Change Likely Fueled Rain That Led to New Zealand Floods' - BLOOMBERG

"Climate change is adding energy to the atmosphere and the oceans. This in turn fuels more intense storms and heavy rainfall." - THE CONVERSATION

"Climate Change supercharged [sic] Cyclone Gabrielle" - STUFF

We're told (by the Imperial College of London no less, whose modelling of Covid deaths was so out-the-door crazy it set off a worldwide scare) that their modellers have found that "the rainfall from ex-tropical cyclone Gabrielle was like 30% heavier" due to something called "climate change." Expect more of the same, they say, and lots of it!

A lot of the idiocy is summed up in this report at the taxpayer-funded Spinoff:

Brutal, unexpected, record-breaking, destructive, tragic. The torrential rainfall that engulfed Auckland on Friday night is all those things, and, as is now widely accepted, linked to climate change.
    “It’s a one-in-100-year weather event, and we seem to be getting a lot of them at the moment,” said PM Chris Hipkins. “I think people can see that there’s a message in that … Climate change is real, it’s with us.” After initially expressing uncertainty, mayor Wayne Brown jumped on board. “As the prime minister has said, this is climate change,” he stated. “And I agree.”
    Similarly, media reports increasingly note the climate change link. Analysis by Dot Loves Data for The Spinoff found a lift in references to climate change in Auckland related coverage of 255% across the month of January, with 42 mainstream articles making mention of climate change in flooding coverage, “showing that the nexus between the two is strong.”

Except, except ... it turns out that none of that is true. Not only is the "nexus" not strong, it arguably points the other way. ('Dot 'should be looking at better data, I'd suggest.)

For years, the climate "modellers" have told us that their models tell us that as global carbon-dioxode emissions increase, so too will global rainfall. We'll be getting wetter as the world gets warmer, they say. 

So how has that worked out when actual scientists take their eyes of their models and look instead at the real world? Here's the answer for the last twenty years: 

Per a new study, global precipitation intensity, measured in mm/hour per century, has exhibited flat (large precipitation systems) to declining (medium and small systems) trends from 2001 to 2020.

This is over a period in which atmospheric CO2 has increased by around 40ppm (rising from 371ppm in 2001 all the way to 414ppm in 2020).

For those sitting up the back, this means that as these emissions have increased over this century, rainfall levels have decreased.

Not at all what you would have heard. So I'll say it again, in colour:

As carbon emissions have gone up over this century, rainfall has gone down.

Further: 

The highest frequency of global-scale extreme rainfall events occurred from 1960-1980 − when there were concerns about cooling.
    Since then, the frequency and intensity of rainfall events have “decreased remarkably” (Koutsoyiannis, 2020).

Asked by reporters what this means for their pronouncements, Hipkins, Wayne Brown et al said ... well, they said nothing at all, of course, because our pitiful taxpayer-funded media here are never going to ask them that question, are they.

Pathetic.

The modellers are wrong again. But the politicians will still be using their misbegotten models to peddle their policies of impoverishment.

May I suggest politicians, reporters, and modellers look at research about the real world, instead of interviewing their own computers and each other.

 

"Relying on weather-dependent energy sources for an energy transition, ostensibly needed to fix the weather…"

"1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dspatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources?

[…]

"2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim [local] climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, [James Shaw claims that his gift of taxpayers' money to the owners of NZ steel will save one percent of NZ's total emission, which constitute just 0.17% of global CO2 emissions'] and that this will somehow impact climate change? But this dose of real science doesn’t stop [politicians like him] from telling us that this will stop the global emissions [that caused our local storms].

[…]

"3. Back to electric vehicles. Green-tinted but surely practical Bloomberg admits that more than 85% of Americans can’t afford an electric car, since they are well more than double the price of oil-based cars. [So just ask yourself how many NZers can?]

[…]

"4. How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to 'get off fossil fuels' when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it."

~ energy researcher Jude Clemente, from his article 'Five Things I Don 't Understand About the 'Energy Transition''

 

Life Expectancy: Our World in Data

Energy Consumption: Bjorn Lomborg, LinkedIn

"There has never been an energy transition.
    "Nor will there ever be an energy 'transition' before we harness nuclear fusion power… And that’s a good thing.
    "On a per-capita basis, we consume as much 'traditional biomass' for energy as we did when we started burning coal. We have just piled new forms of energy on top of older ones. Now, we have changed the way we consume energy sources. In the 1800’s the biomass came from whale oil and clear-cutting forests. Today’s biomass is less harmful to whales and forests.
    "From 1800 to 1900, per-capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per-capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel production (coal, oil & gas). This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I can’t say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldn’t have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum."

~ David Middleton from his reposting of Jude Clemente's article [emphasis in the original]

 

Climatologist Dr Judith Curry: “There’s no emergency”

Dr Judith Curry (Pic by BizNews)

"The 1970s and 1980s was a relatively benign period of weather. And so, if you just do the trend since 1970, 'Oh, the weather is worse now.' Well, yes, but it’s not worse than the 1930s or 40s or even the 50s.
    "And people are much more prosperous. Globally, poverty is way down. Life expectancy is up. We’re doing very well as we reduce poverty and human development advances. A lot of that has been fueled by petroleum and coal. Are there better fuels out there? Well, hopefully in the future ... But ... [y]ou can’t run an industrial economy on wind and solar, at least not in the way it’s currently envisioned. It requires a huge land footprint.
    "People haven’t thought this out, and there’s no emergency. Economically, we’re all expected to be four times better off worldwide by the end of the 21st century. And a little bit of that might be shaved off because of damages from global warming. But we’re all going to be better off moving forward through the 21st century unless we do really stupid stuff like destroy our energy infrastructure before we have something better to replace it with. That’s the biggest danger. The biggest climate risk right now is a so-called transition risk; the risk of rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels....
    "Even if we’re going to transition to all wind and solar, we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to accomplish that, to do all the mining and establish the supply chains and all the transport and everything else. So, in the near term, even if the plan is to go to all renewable wind and solar, then we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to get us there. People just repeat these mantras without any thought. It’s not a good place."

~ Dr Judith Curry from her interview: '“There’s no emergency” – dissident climatologist Dr Judith Curry on the ‘manufactured scientific consensus’ on climate change'

"...it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change"

Hunga Tonga Volcano Eruption 

[pic source: 'NEW VIDEOS of Hunga Tonga Volcano Eruption; Shockwaves, 

Ash & Lapilli' - YouTube] Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space 

Flight Center, said the eruption of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano on 

January 15, 2022 released "hundreds of times the equivalent mechanical energy of the 

Hiroshima nuclear explosion." The eruption near Tonga sent volcanic material surging as high

as 

40 kilometres into the atmosphere and generated tsunami waves up to 15 metres high.

"For months the country has felt as if it’s under a state of siege – not from a hostile foreign power, but from extreme weather. 

    "This week, the north of the country has been pummelled again by torrential rain, gale-force winds and high seas. RNZ reported this morning that more heavy rain warnings had been issued for the west coast of the North Island and the top of the South.

    "But please, whatever you do, don’t mention Hunga Tonga....

    "Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the underwater volcano that erupted near Tonga in January last year.... the most powerful eruption so far this century. 

    "According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than 100 years, measuring nearly 6 on the volcanic explosivity index – roughly equivalent to that of Krakatoa. The eruption created a volcanic plume that reached 58km into the mesosphere. 

    "An article in the scientific journal 'Earth and Environment' – one of many devoted to the event – noted that major volcanic eruptions are well-known drivers of climate change and said the magnitude of the Hunga Tonga explosion ranked it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era. Researchers calculated that it resulted in a 13% increase in global stratospheric water mass and a fivefold increase in stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in three decades. 

    "One study estimated the amount of water displaced as 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the entire water content of the stratosphere... 'Earth and Environment' said the eruption had “potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate.” 

    "Similarly, 'Atmosphere' magazine devoted a special issue to the eruption, calling it an epic event that would have a continuing effect on the climate, both locally (that probably includes us) and globally. 

It seems reasonable to conclude that an eruption of that scale might at the very least be a factor in the freakish weather patterns of the past few months.

    "Yet I can’t help suspecting that the eruption of Hunga Tonga is the climate event none of the New Zealand experts want to talk about, possibly because it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change."

~ Karl du Fresne, from his post 'Are we allowed to suggest that Hunga Tonga is the cause of the weather mayhem?' [hat tip KiwiWit]

Another one-in-100-year event?

 

I'M ALREADY SEEING IDIOTS bleating, after today's rain here in Auckland, that "one once-in-a-hundred year weather event in a year is unfortunate; two in a few months is beginning to look like a trend. Of course, we know what that trend is called [he says]: climate change... Twice in one year should be a warning. We need to ... address the cause, rather than just blithely dragging out feet to apocalypse."

Statistically, this is just flat wrong.

It's a common error, mostly made by those who don't understand statistics. But for the record, here's a meteorologist in Texas explaining it: 

You may have ... heard the phrase “a 100-year flood,” especially around hurricane season. Perhaps you heard this phrase two years in a row or even two months in a row!
    What does this mean? In the weather world, it’s about probability of the event happening, not the timing. It does NOT mean that a 100-year flood should only happen once in a hundred years.
    As with “once in a hundred years,” it’s a statistical way of describing a weather event has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
    Now you know!

Clear enough? A once-in-a-hundred year event is equivalent to saying there's a 1% chance of that event happening somewhere in any given year.

Still and all, as a more local fellow adds explanatorily:

Many people are surprised by the feeling that one-in-100-year events seem to happen much more often than they might expect. Although a 1% probability might sound pretty rare and unlikely, it is actually more common than you might think. There are two reasons for this.
    First, for a given location (such as where you live), a one-in-100-year event would be expected to occur on average once in 100 years. However, across all of Australia you would expect the one-in-100-year event to be exceeded somewhere far more often than once in a century!
    In much the same way, you might have a one in a million chance of winning the lottery, but the chance someone wins the lottery is obviously much higher.
    Second, while a one-in-100-year flood event might have a 1% chance of occurring in a given year (hence it’s referred to as a “1% flood”), the chance is much higher when looking at longer time periods. For example, if you have a house designed to withstand a 1% flood, this means over the course of 70 years there’s a roughly 50% chance the house would be flooded at some point during this time! Not the best odds.
    Incidents like these 1% annual exceedance probability events are often referred to as “flood planning levels” or “design events”, because they are commonly used for a range of urban planning and engineering design applications. Yet this presupposes we can work out exactly what the 1% event is, which sounds simpler than it is in practice.

Got all that? 

So when you hear idiots like the above bleating that too many one-in-100-year events too soon is just too much, just remember that's not true, statistically.

THE CONCLUSION THAT THE idiot draws from his statistical error is dead wrong too, by the way: dead wrong scientifically this time.

Dead wrong because -- even if you accept the climate scare, and were to accept the claims that human industry as a whole are causing these events -- then there is not a thing we in New Zealand could do that would cause a blind bit of difference to that. The entirety of New Zealand could slip into the sea, and all of us with it, and the world's carbon emissions would diminish by so little as to be unnoticeable.

So his claim of causality has just too much distance between his alleged cause (you and I driving our utes today) and tomorrow's alleged apocalypse  -- let alone today's rain in Auckland. Too distant, and too inconsequential.

And I'll bet some of those utes are becoming damned useful about now.

You may see now why the idiot stopped taking comments on his blog.

PS: And for those who've been inquiring: yes, me and mine are fine. Thanks for asking. 

"Bad weather is humanity’s fault. We can only stop it if we live our lives more miserably."

Pic from Watts Up With That 

"Bad weather is never simply bad weather anymore; every hurricane, flood or tornado is now imbued with deeper significance. Bad weather is humanity’s fault. We can only stop it if we live our lives a little more miserably....
    "The fact that the politics of climate science so closely mirrors religious apocalypticism ought to prompt some reflection."

~ Daniel McCarthy, from his post 'Climate Science Makes a Bad Religion'

"India plans to institute an emergency law that will require maximum output at coal plants to prepare for record consumption expected this summer"

"Recently, India asked its utilities not to retire their coal plants until 2030 and the country plans to institute an emergency law that will require maximum output at coal plants that use imported coal to prepare for record consumption expected this summer.... India expects its power plants to burn about 8 percent more coal in the financial year ending March 2024....
    "Due to expected high electricity demand, India asked utilities to not retire coal-fired power plants till 2030, just over two years after committing to eventually phasing down its use of coal. Last May, India indicated that it plans to reduce power generation from at least 81 coal-fired plants over the next four years, but the proposal did not involve shutting down any of its 179 coal power plants. India has not set a formal timeline for phasing down coal use and this move indicates it will not happen soon....
    "India is one of the best economic performers among the G20 nations and its industrial activity has driven increases of around 14 percent in electricity generation ... Coal-fired generation accounted for most of the increase ...
    "[The] India[n government] wants its country to continue to grow economically and realises it cannot do that without continuing to use its coal plants. While the country is adding wind and solar power, it fell short of its 2022 renewable energy addition target by nearly a third because there is a disconnection between government targets and various operational, financial and regulatory constraints....
    "Now that governments have begun to control energy policies, it will be important for people to scrutinise the differences between their plans and their performance. In India, available, reliable and affordable energy seems to be the priority."

~ Institute for Energy Research, from their post 'Like China, India Intends to Continue Its Use of Coal' [emphasis mine]

"How would we know if disasters are becoming more costly due to climate change?"

Source: Pielke 2018

"To show that disasters have become more costly because of human-caused climate change, several criteria must be met. First, there must be an actual increase in the costs of disasters. Second, there must be a detectable increase in either the frequency or intensity of weather events which are associated with the disasters. Such an increase must be on time scales of decades or longer. Third, the detected increase in frequency or intensity must be attributed to human causes, typically defined narrowly in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but other causes are also possible.

    "This framework of detection and attribution comes directly from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ...
    "[S]ome researchers have decided to abandon the IPCC framework of detection and attribution in favour of an alternative approach, called single-event attribution.... While such studies are intellectually interesting, they are also deeply problematic.... The abandonment of the IPCC framework for detection and attribution with respect to extreme events can also look like a political strategy ...
    "The rise of 'event attribution' studies offers science-like support to those focused on climate advocacy, but it is not clear that they offer much in the way of empirical rigour, particularly as compared to the IPCC detection and attribution framework."

~ Roger Pielke Jr, from his post 'How would we know if disasters are becoming more costly due to climate change?'

"Managed Retreat"?

Folk resting beside Ancient Egypt's Nile. (Annual flooding not shown.)

SO IMAGINE YOU'RE AN ancient Egyptian. You know: pharaohs, camels, mummies, pyramids, the Nile flooding every year....

Every. Damn. Year!

Or ... you're an ancient resident of the banks of the Tigris, or the Euphrates -- these places where civilisation began. And these rivers that feed your crops and bring down life-giving nutrients from the mountain streams also occasionally, you discover, bring you floods.

Yes, you'd get a bit sick of it after a time. So after a time you could do one of two things.

1, you could adapt to nature and organise a "managed retreat." Nature knows best, you might say.

Or, 2, you could invent hydraulic engineering, tame the rivers (adapting nature to yourselves, you might say) and so put us on the path to human progress that got us to where we all are today. Relatively prosperous.

Man v Dragon

There was a time when it was widely accepted that it was a good thing to adapt nature for our own ends. Indeed, that's the only way we humans can survive. Nature has dragons; left unprotected from them, and they will devour us. 

And on our own, compared to nature's power, we human beings are weak. Left exposed and naked and without the food, shelter and technology produced by our adaptation of nature, if we merely settled for adapting ourselves to nature's dragons then ever single one of us would struggle for survival. But adapt nature to ourselves -- make it more humane and set nature's processes and nature's bounty working for us rather than agin us-- and then as a species we're off to the races.

This path -- adapting nature to ourselves -- was the path of centuries of human civilisation and flourishing, starting all the way back in settlements around the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Nile where floods were tamed and used to produce abundant wealth from the enormously fertile soil.

This is not the view nowadays however. Not so much.

THE PREDOMINANT VIEW NOWADAYS is that protecting ourselves from nature is wrong. That "the environment" trumps human beings. That nature must take its course. That natural processes have rights, but human beings don't. 

If sand dunes move and the sea threatens, in a more rational time men built protection from dunes and from sea. Nowadays however the call is for people to just move away from the coast. 

If rivers or drainage systems silt up or threaten, in a more rational time men built stop banks and better drainage systems -- and they cleared up the silt. Nowadays instead the call is to let nature take its course, and we hear folk from the Prime Minister on down call for "a debate" about whether townships and horticultural producers should simply move away from the hazard. Or be forced to.

This is not a climate problem or an engineering problem. It's an attitude problem. It's an attitude borne of bad philosophy: of the ethics that says that Gaia comes first, and humans a far distant second.

We didn't always think this way, or we would never have come so far as a species.

However it's now a notion that's philosophically entrenched in present generations, and in most government departments (central and local). It's also legally entrenched in the RMA (which gives rights to the "intrinsic value of ecosystems," but not to humans wishing to protect themselves from the often dangerous natural processes inflicted upon us by ecosystems). And don't think David Parker's various replacement bills for the RMA will improve things either -- to read those legislative tributes to Gaia is to understand they will only make things harder all round.

Just imagine if this attitude was predominant around the Nile in the times of the pharoahs; if instead of taming the Nile and its regular floods to produce abundant crops, invent hydraulic engineering and to build a civilisation the Egyptians ran away instead. As a culture they'd now be deservedly lost to history. As would all the cultures and civilisations (i.e., ours) that built upon those first beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

And that goes for any culture that opts out of the ongoing battle against the dragons of nature -- and it goes for us too.

Folk dig out after the 1938 Esk Valley flood

CIVILISATIONS HAVE BUILT OTHER solutions too since pharaohs controlled things and simply ordered people around. We've built and understood things like common law and property rights too, and inventions for managing risk like insurance. And when they're allowed to work (which things like he RMA make more difficult) they developed organic processes of their own that create a kind of spontaneous order. So, for example, instead of having a nationwide debate about whether "we" as modern-day pharaohs should "allow" folk to build on flood- or slip-prone land, why not allow these organic processes to work?

Economist Eric Crampton suggests we can, and has a starter proposal for how. It looks like this:

1. People should be able to build where they want.

2. Insurers should be able to set premiums to reflect risk. EQC could make that safer for private insurers by leading the way. They have decades of claims history.

3. Councils should reserve the right to discontinue services in places that are too expensive or difficult to maintain. In such cases they could offer existing residents a choice:

a. Special ratings district that imposes a differential higher levy reflecting higher costs of providing council services in those areas, and a promise that there will be no cross-subsidies from safer places, reminding that that means that if their road washes out and they want it reinstated, the levy will have to go up;

b. Setting of a special purpose local board that becomes the owner of local infrastructure, governed by its residents, and able to set its own levy on properties for service. Councils would need to sharply reduce rates for those properties to reflect that council is no longer providing those services.

4. Ability to set those special purpose local boards should be extended more broadly, such that a group of farmers could set one to take on the debt that funds flood protection works and finances that debt through a levy on protected properties, on approval of those properties’ owners.

5. EQC to recognise mitigation works when setting premiums. Private insurers would do similarly so long as that market is sufficiently competitive.

6. Make damned sure that there aren’t regulatory barriers unduly hindering insurance entry, including provision of parametric insurance products.

7. Land values in high-risk places no longer cross-subsidised by low-risk places would drop. If government worries about the equity implications of that, it could provide a one-off payment in compensation. Ideally it would set a cap on such compensation because it will disproportionately go to rich people living in unsafe places who have been cross-subsidised by poorer people living in safer places for ages. (On this point, remember the 2018 Motu work that said that cross-subsidies in current insurance through EQC mainly run to the benefit of richer neighbourhoods.) ...

Seems simple enough. No need for government or council to decide who's allowed to live where. If you want to live in a risky place at your own expense, that should be up to you.

As it should be.

Green politicians are politicising the weather. Again. [Updated]

EVEN AS PEOPLE ARE cleaning up and recovering -- and mourning -- after the worst weather event in New Zealand this century, Green politicians and other warmists are out there politicising these recent weather events.

Sub-tropical Cyclone Giselle, claims James Shaw, Green leader and minister of cyclone's devastation, is proof that global warming "is real ... is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse." (His standard of proof, clearly, being different to that of formal logicians. And his proposed "solution"-- i.e., that New Zealand drastically reduce its agriculture and industry, and all us non-politicians spend less on air travel than he does -- is perhaps further proof of that.) 

Meanwhile, his fellow Green MP Julie Anne Genter took the opportunity of the devastation around the North Island to ... not to get out there and help, but to take the opportunity to jump on Twitter to lambast the Act Party, whose "extreme ideology," she says, "has never been less relevant."

You'd think she'd have better things to do. Like get on her bike and deliver help, perhaps. And James might have better things to do too. Like think, perhaps about the difference between climate and weather, and about the dangers of generalising from the latter to the former. Especially, you would think, about the dangers of generalising from weather here to "global action" everywhere -- action that is, in truth, just government action to ban private actions.

YES, THIS IS THE worst weather event here this century. No question. So, no matter how passionate you might feel about your reckonings, you'd think even a politician might wait a day or two before spewing them forth. But because these political creatures have no gag reflex, it requires others to respond to their bile, however briefly. For that, I apologise.

First quick point: while we probably do all agree that this is New Zealand's worst weather event this century, it shouldn't need to be said however, that it's not the worst weather event New Zealand has ever had. The fifty-four people who died in the 1968 Wahine disaster, for example, are one tragic reminder of that. That was Sub-Tropical Cyclone Giselle. And we've been through several alphabet's worth of cyclones since then, everything from Bola to Hola, and worse, to come around again to Gabrielle's letter 'G.'

And there have been many worse cyclones in the South Pacific over the centuries before human industry began. But they either didn't hit these islands, thank goodness, or there was no-one here to record them.

Another thing to note: bad as things are and have been these last few days, fewer people have died in the more recent weather events than those in previous centuries. More than fifty died in that 1968 storm. More than 200 died in an 1863 storm and blizzard in Otago. Storms have taken ships aplenty, and landslides, caused by heavy rain, have been endemic. One in 1846 took 60 souls on the shores of Lake Taupo, in a place called Waihi.

Indeed, if we "think global," as Air-Miles James and his party faithful frequently implore we do, we can see that climate deaths worldwide haven't increased either over the decades that human industry has increased. Instead, just as they have here in New Zealand, climate-related deaths have decreased. Dramatically. In fact "as population has quadrupled," records Bjorn Lomborg, "deaths have dropped twenty-fold. Death risk from climate," he calculates based on data from the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database, "is down 99% from 1920s."And that's despite temperatures increasing, and the globe enjoying more people, living in more places that get threatened by severe weather -- and enduring more and more politicians talking bollocks.

Explain that one, James. Or at least, you know, take it on board while keeping your damned mouth shut.

ONE REASON FOR FEWER climate-related deaths is that severe weather events globally are themselves generally either decreasing or showing no particular trend. And that's not just me and climate scientists like Roger Pielke Jr saying that. It's the IPCC, who find no trends in flooding globally; no long-term trends in meteorological or hydrological drought; no upward trend either in so-called atmospheric rivers, and no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes or tornadoes either in the US or globally. None. And the US Govt, whose official metric records a general decrease in heatwaves since the 1930s -- or the international insurance industry, who record a decline in both US and European disaster-related losses. And the World Bank agrees. Meanwhile, even as alarmists like James talk about sea level rise inundating coastlines in the near future, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that ongoing sea level rise since 1880 amounts to only 240mm, i.e., just 17mm per decade -- measurable, but steady, and not accelerating -- and recent research shows many coastlines worldwide to be prograding rather than retrograding (i.e., shifting seaward) and at a globally-averaged rate of 260mm per year, reducing even this slow but steady threat. And the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU records that cyclone frequency in the South Pacific (the very reason we're here talking about this stuff) has, since 1980, been declining. (Click those links if you'd like to see the peer-reviewed data, graphs and studies, or to send them to James and Julie Ann.)

But the other main reason for climate-related deaths to fall so dramatically is that the very thing James and Julie Ann decry so loudly and monotonously, human industry, is the very thing that keeps folk safer from weather events like these recent ones. It was the Netherlands' rising wealth, for example, that allowed them to build the dikes and dams that immunised that protected their sub-sea level provinces from flooding. And mortality from extreme heat in the US for example, as heat waves have recently kicked up and more and more people have moved to live in desert regions, has fallen pretty much all over the country over the past 50 years. In this case, it's because of things like air conditioning and better medicine that more and more people can afford.

And in the general case, as Bjorn Lomborg explains is succinctly, it's "because richer and more resilient societies are much better able to protect their citizens." 

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this [points out energy advocate Alex Epstein] because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place that we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it liveable through development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate liveable for 7 billion people.
    As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fuelled machines to build a durable civilisation highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.

It's not just that GDP is correlated with fewer climate-related deaths and disasters, although it is; it's that the whole relationship between economic progress and human flourishing itself is actually causal. The richer and wealthier a society is, the better able it is to train the engineers and raise the capital and devise and build the infrastructure that allows human beings in all the many places on this fragile planet to master all the many things that nature is ready to throw at us. 

And James's and Julie Ann's governments action to ban private actions -- like banning the exploration and extraction of the fossil fuels that help power all the industry that makes us wealthier and keeps us all safer -- will only make that harder. 

So I suggest they both shut the fuck up. At least until people have cleaned up, and are ready to debate this stuff with a clearer head.

"And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather."

"The science is settled, except we only just realised that the benzene and toluene gas over the vast Southern Ocean were not man-made pollutants after all, but were made by industrious phytoplankton. For the first time someone went and measured the benzene and toluene in the water and discovered that, instead of being a sink for human pollutants in the air above, the ocean was the source.
    "This matters because these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by, wait for it, between 8% and up to 80%, in bursts. And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather.
    "And the expert climate models, upon which a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry depends on for its very existence, did not know this. If hypothetically there has been less phytoplankton in the worlds oceans in the last few decades, there may also have been less cloud cover, and thus more warming. But who knows?
    "The modellers are always saying climate change can’t be natural because they can’t think of anything else that could have could have caused the warming, then people keep finding another factor they forgot to put in the models…"

~ Jo Nova, from her post 'Ocean life is seeding the clouds above it, and the modellers didn’t know'