Beware Media Hype. It’s Not the El Nino! (Hansen et al.)

Beware the “surprise” record high being blamed on an extreme El Nino on top of global warming otherwise consistent with IPCC estimates. Instead, record warmth provides additional evidence of high climate sensitivity and increased net climate forcing in the past decade.

If you bear with our discussion to the end, you will find some possible good news.

The 2026 global SST surpasses the 2024 global SST by mid-June; thus, given the lag, 2024 might remain warmer than 2026 in July, but the final five months of the year should have 2026 as warmer than 2024. We expect the gap in the stretch run (November, December) to be so large as to (unfortunately) make 2026 the hottest year – until 2027, which will be even hotter.

There are reasons to hope that the warming rate might slow down. [...] O.K., so we were grasping for straws. We didn’t really have good news. If we want the accelerated warming to slow down, we must get Earth’s energy imbalance (lower panel of Fig. 6) to decrease. That means the world needs to get serious about reducing the humanmade climate forcing, and the world has not got very serious yet. Sorry, we will keep searching for some good news in our planet’s data.