The Crisis Report - 68

A "Short Take" on some climate news.

Hi Ho, the Witch is dead. The Giant is slain. Now things go back to NORMAL, right?

The powerful El Niño weather event which along with climate change has helped push global temperatures to new highs, has ended, say scientists.

We survived the GREAT EL NINO of 2023. Crisis past, right?

This was a lead story from the BBC this morning.

Climate change: El Niño ends with uncertainty over cooler future

— BBC 041624

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says the Pacific Ocean has “cooled substantially” in the past week. The naturally occurring “El Nino” episode that began last June brought warmer waters to the surface of the Pacific, adding extra heat to the atmosphere.

But what happens next is uncertain, say researchers.

A string of recent global monthly high temperature records has led some scientists to fear that the world could be tipping into a new phase of even faster climate change.

Here’s the WEIRD and very revealing part about that sentence. Before you look, guess which scientist they are talking about. I am going to bet close to 100% of you guess James Hansen. You would be wrong.

So, what they are hoping, Is that this will be a replay of 2016. It took 7 years for temperatures to climb above 2016 levels again. They are PRAYING we get something like that again. March 2024 was +1.68C warmer than “pre-industrial” times — before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels — according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Now, go see who the “scientist” the BBC is referring to actually is.

“By the end of the summer, if we’re still looking at record breaking temperatures in the North Atlantic or elsewhere, then we really have kind of moved into uncharted territory,”

— Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

“Scientists are struggling to explain exactly why the end of 2023 was so warm”, says the BBC.

Here’s some more from Gavin.

“(It’s) Harder to predict the future”

“Our predictions failed quite dramatically for the specifics of 2023, and if previous statistics don’t work, then it becomes much harder to say what’s going to happen in the future.”

Still above 2023.

Yah THINK Gavin?

I would be preparing for a HOT Summer.

Because here’s what I see.

I see the Head of GISS admitting he doesn/t have an F’ing CLUE about what’s happening with the Climate System.

That’s my “short take” on this.

• rc 04162024

Personal Note:

As a student of Bureaucratic Behavior this REEKS of CYA. It tells us that GISS really doesn’t KNOW what’s about to happen. He is laying the groundwork for his Senate testimony about why GISS failed to warn everyone how HOT this Summer is going to get.

Just in case.