Did volcanic dust from Hunga Tonga cause flooding in Australia?

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai

By Jo Nova

Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent

On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.

The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.

The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and […]

March 15th, 2022 | Tags: , , | Category: Geology, Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Bill Gates launches giant chalk advertising campaign to “block sun”

The purpose of the hot air balloon adding two whole kilograms of chalk to the atmosphere is a glorious multipurpose marketing exercise. It might as well be a skywriting advert.

Building a sunshade for the whole planet radiates cinematic desperation — it’s advertising the terror of climate change — Really, we need to do that? It’ll get everyone talking about climate change for another five minutes, as if it mattered. But make no mistake, it’s such an ambitious Manhattan-scale idea, it’s advertising Bill Gates the billionaire, too. This is meant to raise his global cachet too. Super-Bill to the rescue. Is he God?

But it’s also advertising other things, like how stupid the climate models are, how fake the pious planetary-care is, and how daft the whole UN-herd is.

Bill Gates plans to launch a bag of chalk into the stratosphere and somehow get useful data out of it about whether we could build an Earthly sunshade to cool ourselves on the same scale as a super volcano. ( To that end, if it looked like he might succeed, watch the Paris agreement dissolve a nanosecond after someone starts to get serious about shading one nation and not some other […]

March 25th, 2021 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Study shows we can save the Arctic with ship pollution?

Shipping tracks, cloud patterns over the ocean. | Photo NASA.

Ships leave a trail of sulfur dioxide in the sky behind them which seeds clouds and causes cooling. At the same time, black soot drops out on the arctic ice, absorbs sunlight and causes warming. So which effect is bigger? Scott Stephenson et al tried to figure out that out and the cooling effect won.

The researchers also factored in global anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gas concentration trajectories, adopted by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at a level closely aligning with today’s trends, along with global economic output that will drive the transport of goods.

“We attempted to fully integrate the interactions between the various components of the climate system in ways that have not been done before,” Stephenson says.

The main result was that the cooling effect won out over the warming effect in the simulations, to the tune of about one degree Celsius.

Zowie. One real degree of Arctic cooling sounds like rather a lot — even undoing greenhouse gas warming as well as soot based warming.

The cooling effect stops if we clean the smoke stack and remove […]

September 19th, 2018 | Tags: , | Category: Atmosphere, Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Cooling in the North Atlantic

Something is going on in the North Atlantic.

Paul Homewood notes the region is cooling rapidly and it is not just surface cooling, it applies to the 700m depth that Argo buoys measure. Graphs thanks to Ole Humlum.

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To give it some perspective that cooling is back to temperatures of about 20 years ago (see below). This is localized, not global, but still interesting (rather especially to our European friends).

This is the area mentioned in a recent study on solar winds which found faster solar winds correlate with a cooler north Atlantic.

A year ago a different paper predicted colder times were coming to the North Atlantic due to natural cycles.

The man-made aerosols prediction that bit the dust…

A paper by Robsom et al in the last couple of weeks said that the cooling trend was clear, started in 2005 and really shouldn’t have happened if man-made aerosols were controlling the North Atlantic.

“Here we show that since 2005 a large volume of the upper North Atlantic nOcean has cooled significantly by approximately 0.45 C.”

“The observed upper ocean cooling since 2005 is not consistent with the hypothesis that anthropogenic aerosols […]

June 14th, 2016 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |