Naturally Hot, Exaggeration Not
By Kennedy Maize -- October 21, 2024
“What has come to be known as ‘weather attribution,’ research assigning causation to observed weather events, is fraught with methodological problems. Veteran climate scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr. in his Substack publication The Honest Broker calls it ‘weather attribution alchemy’.”
Last year was hot, unusually so. The global temperature was almost 0.3°C above 2022 levels, so much higher that even conventional analyses of global warming didn’t appear to explain it. As a recent article in Science magazine notes, iconic climate scientist James Hansen was suggesting that a new, air-pollution-driven warming mechanism might be at work. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt posited that a novel, unknown force could be involved.
Wrong, says a team of six climate scientists led by Shiv Priyam Raghuraman (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana). The culprit is more likely the familiar climate confounder, El Niño (technically, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO).
Writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, published by the European Geosciences Union, the scientific team writes,
https://www.masterresource.org/debate-issues/naturally-hot-exaggeration-not/