Two weeks ago we noted that Javier Vinós had made a prediction and issued a challenge with regard to global temperature, the Hunga Tonga eruption and models that overstress CO2 and can’t handle volcanoes. He said temperatures would fall from the unexplained spike in 2023-24. Which they did, with sea surface temperatures back to 2022 levels. Which didn’t stop Bloomberg Green from whimpering “The global average temperature numbers are in for 2025 and they’re not good. Last year was the third-hottest on record, trailing only … the previous two years.” Or Canada’s government from rushing in where the informed fear to tread, “Canada forecasts 2026 to be among the hottest years on record”. Canada being of course its government not its people, land mass or um temperature record. It gives the impression that those in power have gone out on a limb. Hardly. If they’re wrong, the media won’t call them on it and they won’t admit it or change their tune or lyrics.
Such thinkers manage to bungle a lot of thoughts with considerable determination. That government press release says, among other things, that:
“Environment and Climate Change Canada’s latest global mean temperature forecast indicates that 2026 will likely be among the hottest years on record, comparable to 2023 and 2025 and approaching 2024, which remains the warmest year ever observed. Based on current modelling, the global mean temperature in 2026 is predicted to fall in the range of 1.35 °C and 1.53 °C above pre-industrial levels, meaning that global temperatures will remain at least 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels for the 13th consecutive year. Looking ahead, Canada’s long-term forecasts indicate that the period from 2026 to 2030 will likely be the hottest five-year period on record.”
As we have said before, “on record” is an ignorant and misleading phrase. Surely the Holocene Climate Optimum is “on record” since we know about it. And not even ECCC believes 2026 will be hotter than 6000 BC. Or maybe it does; one hesitates to assume our bureaucrats and politicians know about the HCO any more than the people Bloomberg Green has write on climate do.
If they did, they would not describe 2024 as the warmest year ever observed since humans have observed, and mentioned, some very hot years in the past, ones that proxy records again confirm were much warmer than today. What they really mean is “in the modern thermometer record” but if they said it, people might start asking awkward questions about what other records we have and what they say.
It’s not a trivial point. Even when it comes to this rubbish about “1.35 °C and 1.53 °C above pre-industrial levels”. Because those famous “pre-industrial levels”, by which they actually mean post-industrial levels because they refer to the period around 1850, seventy-five years after Watt’s improved steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution, do not fall within the modern thermometer record.
It is absurd, whether absurd ignorance or absurd gall, to tell us the temperature to two decimal places today given that, as we also observed two weeks ago in a different blog post, the top models disagree as to what it is by some 2.5°C, meaning the whole alleged warming since 1850 is swallowed by an error bar. And it is effrontery to tell us what it was to that degree of precision back in 1850. But of course if you don’t know what it was to two decimal places in 1850, then even if you did know what it is today to that astounding level of precision you still couldn’t determine the difference to that level. And surely someone at ECCC knows it.
Um guys? Are you fools or knaves? We really want to know.
Oh well. They won’t say. And we won’t belabour the point about “on record” regarding their prediction that “the period from 2026 to 2030 will likely be the hottest five-year period on record.” Instead we will insist, with Vinós, that if it’s not, their models don’t work and they should stop using them.
The Economist begs to beg the question instead. Their emailed “The Climate Issue” started in unselfaware manner:
“Some things in climate writing feel trite. The planet is warming, unrelentingly so. As the years tick by, the extremes pile up. Old extremes become new norms and new extremes appear. There comes a point where, if an event is ‘only’ the second- or third-highest in a series it hardly seems unusual enough to mention. But that’s a trap. So here is why, despite being only the third-hottest year on record (as shown in a climate data dump published this week) 2025 is worthy of note.”
If what you’re writing seems trite, maybe look deeper. But not too deep lest you find something that displeases you, like that 2025 being part of a downturn not a continuing surge contradicts what you believed was happening. Instead they blithely skim the surface:
“First, you need to know that 2024, the hottest year on record, and 2023, the second-hottest, were both influenced by an El Niño – a recurrent and natural pattern of ocean currents that pushes the global average temperature upwards. By contrast 2025 was a La Niña year, meaning it was under the influence of an opposite pattern which temporarily cools the globe. Yet it was barely a whisker cooler than 2023. Some analyses even have it tied joint-second hottest. Second, this trio of hot years from 2023 to 2025 constitutes a spike in warming, or, if the trend continues, a departure from the rate of warming of the previous five decades. As researchers at Berkeley Earth, an American research institute, put it: ‘Over the previous 50 years, global warming [had proceeded] in an almost linear fashion, consistent with an almost linear increase in the total greenhouse gas forcing. The warming spike in 2023 to 2025 suggests that the past warming rate is no longer a reliable predictor of the future’.”
No. Not really. First, warming wasn’t “almost linear” over 50 years. There was a hiatus. Second, the correlation between GHGs and temperature is strong in the late 20th century but not at almost any other point no matter how far back you look. So they don’t look. And third, the warming spike of 2023 to 2025 suggests that the models are wrong about that correlation since they could neither predict it ahead of time nor explain it afterward.
The writer makes a brief acknowledgement of the unknown, saying it might be due to cleaning up aerosols from sulphurous fuel or “Some of the three-year spike in warming could be due to natural variability. It’s too soon to say for sure.” So they immediately say for sure:
“What does it all mean for the future? Accelerated global warming will mean a faster onslaught of extremes.”
And notice what’s missing? Any acknowledgement of Hunga Tonga, let alone that those who consider it important did predict that 2025 would be cooler not because oh that’s weird ignore it but as part of their explanation.
Bloomberg Green offers part of the same semi-scientific argument:
“What makes this result extraordinary, scientists say, is that 2025 saw a cooling phase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, or La Niña, that suppresses global temperatures. In other words: Heat from greenhouse gases countered that cooling influence enough that the year still landed among the very warmest.”`
But what about the volcano, and the duelling predictions? Isn’t it how science is done?
Um guys?
P.S. The press release quoted at the outset even has the gall to boast that “the forecast is based on a made-in-Canada climate prediction system”, that “To address the drivers of rising global temperatures, the Government of Canada is taking action to reduce emissions” of precisely the sort that didn’t reduce emissions meaningfully in the last decade, and that “As global warming continues to affect people, communities, and infrastructure across Canada and around the world, access to reliable climate data supports informed planning and decision-making that helps protect Canadians and the places they call home.” Right. So why don’t you check your own data about whether any significant weather index is actually getting worse, instead of just babbling? Um guys?
Will we ever be able to convince those skeptics who find variability in weather to be almost unbelievable that actually it changes all the time, which means hot - cold, storms - calm, wet - dry, and that "climate change" doesn't cause anything. The CO₂ warming effect (if there is one) is logarithmic (diminishing returns) and would see the biggest change in the first 100 ppm (a point, according to these skeptics, that we have passed). We do seem well past that. Secondly, the change in CO2 levels is very small, only happens over long periods of time (decades), is a massive, complex natural system that manages huge amounts of CO2 that dwarf by many multiples any output attributable to the activities of modern societies.
And finally, any of that CO2 output that is attributable to the activities of modern societies that could cause the an increase in atmospheric CO2 would maybe have a 1%-0% influence on weather for at least many centuries, but will go towards having significant benefits to mankind's welfare.