Hot and Bothered About Heat Waves
“…the most recent (2021) report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not support the common claims about drought, floods, hurricanes and other severe weather events. Not only does the last IPCC report find no clear trends, it offers “low confidence” in predictions of future trends.
The one exception is longer heat waves, which the IPCC says with “high confidence” have already begun. And yet the current heat waves both in the United States and in Europe, while lasting longer than average in some places like Arizona, is setting few new record highs. In the U.S., the EPA’s own “Heat Wave Index” for the continental states shows that the 1930s was by far the hottest decade of the last century.
The exploitation of this summer’s heat waves is yet another example of the situational “truth” of the climate campaign. Whenever an unusual cold weather anomaly occurs that cause some people to say “what global warming?,” the climate campaigners stamp their feet and assert, “Weather is not climate!” Which is correct, except for when extreme heat waves offer convenient scare headlines apparently.
Curiously the media has neglected to report several studies in the scientific literature over the last several months that posit the dramatic Hunga-Tonga volcano eruption in the South Pacific last year, which is estimated to have injected 40 trillion gallons of water vapor (a significant warming agent in our climate system) into the upper atmosphere might, in the words of Nature Climate Change, “increase the net radiative forcing. . . increasing the chance of the global surface temperature anomaly temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees C over the coming decade.”
Science magazine separately reported that the Hunga-Tonga eruption may have increased upper atmospheric water vapor by as much as 5 percent, while a European study thought the increase in water vapor might be as high as 13 percent. While this effect will be temporary—just as Mount Pinatubo’s 1992 eruption cooled the planet by almost a degree for 18 months on account of its massive ejection of sulfate particles into the high atmosphere—might it account for slightly elevated heat waves this summer? (Hunga-Tonga emitted less than 2 percent as much sulfate as Pinatubo, which is why it does not portend any offsetting cooling effects.) You can count on this possible factor in this summer’s heat being suppressed in the media and by the climate enforcers.
Does anyone trust the scientific community after our experience with Covid?
