2023’s record heat partly driven by ‘mystery’ process: NASA scientist

It’s warming, but not as they thought they knew it. ‘Everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn’t quite add up.’ Aerosols, undersea volcano, El Niño, ‘new processes’ – the list of suspects goes on, but nothing convincing so far. Settled science has been unsettled, but persists with its usual assertions blaming humans anyway.
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It’s no secret human activity is warming the planet, driving more frequent and intense extreme weather events and transforming ecosystems at an extraordinary rate, claims Phys.org.

But the record-shattering temperatures of 2023 have nonetheless alarmed scientists, and hint at some “mysterious” new processes that may be under way, NASA’s top climatologist Gavin Schmidt tells AFP.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Schmidt:

Can you put what we saw in 2023 into perspective?
It wasn’t just a record. It was a record that broke the previous record by a record margin.

We started with La Niña, this cool phenomenon in the tropical Pacific. That was still around until March. And then in May, we started to see the development of an El Niño, the warm phase of that cycle.

It normally affects the temperatures in the following year. So that would be 2024. But what we saw in 2023 was that the temperatures globally seemed to go up with the El Niño event, in a much greater way than we’d ever seen it before.

The long term trends we understand, and it’s being driven by the greenhouse gases, it’s being driven by anthropogenic effects. We’re expecting that to continue, decade by decade, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which we haven’t done yet.

But what happened in 2023 was that, and then plus something. And that ‘plus something’ is much larger than we expect, or as yet can explain.

What are the leading hypotheses for that ‘plus something’?
There have been emails and conversations going on around the world, among the scientists who are looking at this, and people say, ‘Oh, let’s look at the Earth’s energy imbalances. Let’s look at the aerosols, let’s look at the El Niño, at what’s happening in the Antarctic, in the North Atlantic.’ And everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn’t quite add up.

Full article here.