OPINION:
The heat wave that customarily triggers midsummer misery is in full swing across the continental U.S. Policy shapers have been highlighting the scorching discomfort of summer to drive home their argument that it’s past time to abandon fossil fuels and dial back the heat they insist has been altering the world’s climate.
Before forswearing the lifeblood of civilizational progress, it would help to know whether the problem is real or imagined.
U.N. General-Secretary Antonio Guterres channeled Chicken Little when he recently declared: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” Other globalists have likewise seized upon the seasonal sizzle to boil over with hyperbole, holding humanity guilty of environmental malfeasance.
It happens that an underwater volcano erupted on Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai, part of the South Pacific’s Tongan archipelago, in December 2021. The upheaval climaxed the following month with the largest atmospheric explosion ever recorded.
NASA described the blast as hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
As Thomas Lifson pointed out in American Thinker on July 31, the eruption thrust “an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere — enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.”
Vexed Americans have been languishing for weeks beneath the relentless rays of the summer sun. Phoenix in particular obliterated its record for the most consecutive days above 110 degrees, reeling off 31 in a row. And the ocean off the Florida coast hit a steamy 108 degrees in July, threatening to parboil its coral ecosystem.
Mr. Guterres intended to indict the human race for its practice of spewing heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But mention of the greater effect of water vapor, nature’s most abundant greenhouse gas, was glaring in its absence from his remarks.
Indeed, a study published by the journal Nature in December by U.S., European and Asian atmospheric scientists used satellite and ground-based observations to gauge the Tongan event’s effects. They found “evidence for an unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% relative to climatological levels, and a 5-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load, the highest in the last three decades.” Moreover, the researchers believe the excess water vapor could remain aloft for several years.
In any event, neither higher concentrations of water vapor from the Tongan eruption thus far, nor carbon dioxide from human-made causes, have had more than a fleeting effect on the thermometer’s needle.
Readings taken from thousands of weather stations across the world show an average global temperature of 57.46 degrees — just 0.26 degrees above the planet’s 30-year norm.
Nearly 90% of the world’s population dwell upon the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. Naturally, more angst is vocalized over the summer swelter in, say, New York, where Mr. Guterres’ United Nations is headquartered, than chilly complaints emanating from cities in the Southern Hemisphere now locked in winter.
South Africa’s Johannesburg, for one, is shivering under its first snowfall in a decade, but who knew?
Talk of human-caused “global boiling” is hemispheric hyperbole that overlooks nature’s awesome power.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.