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Michael Cohen was back in court this week and it did not go well.  The former fixer for Donald Trump was in court seeking a reduction in his federal sentence and to answer for his use of Google’s AI chatbot to submit arguments with fake case authority. However, things went off the rails when his counsel cited his prior testimony as evidence of his rehabilitation. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman called the argument “perverse” and noted that Cohen is clearly a serial perjurer and cited the need for continued “deterrence.” That is hardly a promising review before Cohen appears as the star witness for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the prosecution of former president Donald Trump.

If lying were an art form, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen would be its Rembrandt.

Throughout his career, the disbarred lawyer has found powerful clients who valued his reputation for supporting any side that offered the biggest payback.

For full disclosure, I have been a critic of Cohen for years, including columns when he was still representing Trump.

Cohen has been repeatedly accused of perjury. For example, after Cohen turned on Trump, he went from being a pariah to a hero for many Democrats. Yet, he continued the same pattern. When he was called before the House to testify against Trump soon after his plea agreement with the Justice Department, Cohen was again accused of perjury:

The House Oversight Committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, began his questioning by noting that he told him that he had better testify truthfully this time or be nailed to the cross. “Didn’t I tell you that?” Cummings asked. “Yes, you did, more than once,” Cohen replied.

Then Cohen went forward and claimed he had cared nothing about jobs or pardons from Donald Trump. However, a number of news organizations reported that Cohen was upset after lobbying for the White House counsel, chief of staff, or other jobs in the administration. Despite a multitude of such sources, Cohen has insisted, “I was extremely proud to be the personal attorney for the president of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs.” There is little ambiguity here. Either multiple witnesses lied or Cohen once again lied to Congress.

Then Cohen stated, “I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.” That also directly contradicts multiple sources who say his lawyer pressed the White House for a pardon, and that Cohen unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon after FBI raids on his office and residences last year. (Roughly a month later, he decided to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller.).

Even after being stripped of his bar license and sentenced to three years in prison, Cohen continued the pattern. In 2019, Cohen failed to appear to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing the inability to travel due to a medical surgery. However, he was seen partying before the hearing date with five friends with no apparent problems.

Even in jail, Cohen was accused of lying to a court in violation of an order for early release due to medical problems. He was ordered back into custody after being spotted at a high-end restaurant.

After Cohen admitted to various criminal acts in federal court to secure his plea agreement, he then declared that he lied. In his 2018 guilty plea before U.S. District Judge William Henry Pauley III, Cohen admitted to this conduct under oath.

Cohen was later asked by Trump counsel “Did you lie to Judge Pauley when you said that you were guilty of the counts that you said under oath that you were guilty of? Did you lie to Judge Pauley?”

Cohen matter-of-factly responded “yes.”  He was then again asked “So you lied when you said that you evaded taxes to a judge under oath; is that correct?” He again responded “yes.”

Despite just admitting to a federal crime of perjury, the Justice Department and specifically the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.

Cohen was useful again and had found powerful allies who valued his curious skill set of being able to say anything at any time to help his patrons.

Indeed, that is the unique perversity of Michael Cohen. He has continued to game the system and play the media to his own advantage. Even admitting perjury on the stand did not produce a criminal charge. He has found new allies who need his unique ability to support their cause without the burden of accuracy or veracity.

What will be truly amazing is to see Bragg call Cohen to the stand in light of this record. Bragg’s weak criminal case will turn in great part on a serial liar and disbarred lawyer. Defense counsel need only read from past transcripts to establish a self-impeaching record of contradictions and lies. For Bragg to present Cohen as credible is incredible, particularly given this latest finding in 2024 by a federal judge. It is hard to present a witness as a redemptive sinner when he does not have a single redemptive moment to show a jury.

None of this may matter to a New York jury. Cohen learned long ago that you need to know your audience. No one looks to Michael Cohen for the truth. They look to him to say what needs to be said to rationalize a result. What is most perverse about Michael Cohen is the continued perverse need for Michael Cohen.

N.B.: Cohen responded to a tweet yesterday where I incorrectly referenced Judge Pauley rather than Judge Furman. I later deleted the tweet. Cohen however objected “Wrong you idiot (@JonathanTurley). Judge Pauley didn’t make the statement, Judge Jesse Furman did.” Indeed, you are right Michael, I did confuse the two names on X. It was Judge Furman who called you a perjurer. Of course, I have long admitted to being a serial offender of “Twitter” typos. That is bad but it is not quite as bad as being accused of being a serial perjurer.

In the days before his death, John Barnett was in Charleston, giving a deposition for the whistleblower suit he had filed against Boeing. According to one of his lawyers, Rob Turkewitz, he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously—and the rejection of those efforts by his bosses, who, according to Barnett, simply didn’t want to hear about it. 

The last day of the deposition was scheduled for Saturday, March 9. But that morning, he was found in his truck, a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand. The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.”

The reaction from people who knew Barnett was utter disbelief. On that last day, his lawyers told Time magazine, “he was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on. We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.” A family friend told ABC News that he had told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” 

The internet lit up. It was an “alleged suicide,” or “an apparent suicide.” “Whatever happened to John Barnett, the Boeing whistle-blower who declared he wasn’t suicidal and then died from ‘an apparent suicide?’ ” read one post on X. The clear implication was that Boeing was somehow involved in his death. (In a statement, the company said, “We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.”)

As suspicious as his death was, no one in a position of power is calling for an investigation. And they’re not likely to. But I do know this: everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too.

On Monday, two weeks after Barnett’s death, Boeing announced that three top executives, including the CEO and the chairman of the board, were being booted out of the company. Finally, it seems, Boeing was waking up to the fact that its internal culture was destroying its reputation. There were the crashes of the two Boeing 737 MAX planes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people. In January, a door panel flew out of an Alaska Airlines plane made by Boeing, while it was in flight, nearly pulling one of the passengers out with it. Was Barnett’s suicide—if that’s what it was—the last straw? 

Perhaps it was. For seven years, from 2010 to 2017, assigned to the company’s South Carolina assembly plant and appalled by the lax controls, Barnett had tried to persuade his managers that the mistakes they were letting slide could one day be fatal. In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”

After he left the company—pushed out, he later alleged—he filed the whistleblower suit that led to that deposition in mid-March. And whenever a Boeing accident took place, he was the media’s whistleblower too, as journalists scrambled to interview him. 

“I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy,” he told The New York Times in 2019. 

What is particularly painful about Boeing’s fall from grace is that it was once the gold standard in American manufacturing. Building an airplane requires great engineers, and that’s what Boeing had. It was a company proudly run by engineers, for engineers—for which it made no apologies. There was no need to impress upon employees the importance of safety because it was part of the engineers’ mindset. The company’s stock price? As Jerry Useem noted a few years ago in The Atlantic, “The company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt ‘Tell them not to worry.’ ”

Then came one of the stupidest moves in the history of corporate America. In May 2001, Boeing’s CEO Phil Condit and its president Harry Stonecipher decided to move the company’s headquarters to Chicago—1,700 miles from its assembly plants in the Seattle area. Condit actually said that the move was made in large part to insulate the top brass from the “day to day business operations.” In other words, Condit and Stonecipher were deliberately divorcing themselves from Boeing’s engineering culture.

What they cared about was the stock. Wall Street no longer had the patience to recommend companies with flat or even slowly rising shares. All that mattered were fast-growing companies with fast-growing stock. In addition to pleasing Wall Street, it also made the top executives very rich because, since the 1980s, so much of their compensation was paid in stock options.

Then, in 2003, Condit was forced to resign after Boeing suffered a series of scandals, the last one being his affair with an underling. His successor Stonecipher was ousted two years later when he, too, was caught having an affair—though not before he proudly proclaimed that he was the reason Boeing was “run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” 

Stonecipher was replaced by James McNerney, a former executive at General Electric, the company that, under Jack Welch, had led the misguided quest to place shareholder wealth above all other corporate values. At least Condit and Stonecipher, who joined Boeing after a merger with McDonnell Douglas, had aviation backgrounds; McNerney had none. By then, as airline expert Mike Boyd told me, “Instead of building airplanes, all they cared about was building the bottom line.”

In 2014, McNerney’s last full year with the company, he pulled down a cool $29 million in compensation. Originally, Boeing was going to build a new airplane from scratch. But seeing that its chief competitor, Airbus, was getting record orders for its new plane, McNerney decided to build the 737 MAX on top of the existing 737 frame—but market it as a new airplane. Boeing was in a huge rush to catch up to Airbus; indeed, by the time it started delivering the plane it had thousands of orders. 

“They threw the MAX together at the last minute,” said Boyd. But hey, it would save money—which would increase profits and boost the stock price. The combination of that decision, along with shortcuts Boeing now regularly made that compromised safety, was a terrible mistake. 

Then came the two 737 MAX crashes. The first, Lion Air 610, crashed within minutes of its departure from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. The second, five months later, Ethiopian Airlines 302, again crashed minutes after takeoff. All 157 people on board died. 

After each crash, Boeing apologized profusely, but also insisted that, as then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg told Congress, “Safety is in our DNA.” But everyone could see that it wasn’t. In an effort to get the plane out quickly, Boeing, with the assent of the FAA, had even told the airlines that their pilots didn’t need to conduct flight simulator tests. That was a critical mistake, because the pilots would have discovered the issue that caused the planes to crash. The company was excoriated by Democrats and Republicans alike, furious that Boeing had so blatantly put profits over safety.

Internal Boeing documents made public by Congress showed that the company’s engineers were disgusted by what they were being asked to do in building the 737 MAX. “This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” read one internal email between engineers. A second one read: “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd.” And a third: “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.” There were also comments about how all the company cared about was cutting costs.

That is what John Barnett was so urgently trying to impress upon his bosses when he was a quality control manager at Boeing: the company was making unsafe planes, and someday people were going to die as a result. And it’s what he tried to tell the rest of us once he became a whistleblower. In addition to all the interviews he gave after the various Boeing mishaps—let’s not forget the wheel that fell off a 777 during a takeoff at San Francisco’s airport earlier this month—his lawsuit was going to expose some critical safety errors at the company the world didn’t yet know about.

Boyd, who is highly critical of the modern Boeing culture, told me that the company has completely lost its way. And the safety issues are only part of the problem. For years, Boeing’s chief competitor, the European company Airbus, lagged behind the American behemoth. Not anymore. “Airbus is ten years ahead of them,” Boyd said. Boeing, he said, has “nothing on the drawing boards. Firing a few executives isn’t going to change Boeing. What they need to do is take a bulldozer to the entire board of directors.”

It is difficult to imagine America without Boeing, the company that pioneered the famously gargantuan 747, which began flying in 1969 and is still considered one of the greatest airplanes ever made. John Barnett is dead. But his mission should be kept alive. If Boeing is to have any chance of becoming great again, it needs to listen to what he had to say.

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The Free Press and the co-author of The Big Fail. Follow him on X @opinion_joe.

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Let me tell you about some Vanderbilt girl’s tampon.

It all started yesterday morning, when a wave of undergrad students rushed Kirkland Hall, where Vanderbilt’s chancellor’s office is located. Thus began their sit-in—a response to the college administration shutting down a student government vote over whether the school should divest funds from Israel. 

The protesters remained there for nearly 21.5 hours—blowing Harvard’s 12-hour “hunger strike,” also known as a good night’s sleep—out of the water, before police began removing and arresting students, some of whom have since been suspended. 

There are many dumbfounding moments from this latest campus frenzy—for example, when the students, arms linked, called the black police officers protecting the chancellor “puppets.” When the administrators brought in food from Panera Bread for the officers but not the students, it was treated like a human-rights abuse.

But the tampon takes the cake. (Major props to Steve McGuire for compiling the best episode of the internet since. . . yesterday.)

Here’s what went down: during one of those 21.5 hours of the protest, probably at an ungodly one, a few of the student demonstrators decided to call 911. That’s because their friend, who was part of the sit-in, had to change her tampon.

Specifically, she was “being denied the right to change her tampon that has been in for multiple hours, which leads to an increased risk of toxic shock syndrome.”

The frankly Zen-like 911 operator, who deserves a raise, was understandably confused. “Ma’am, do you have an emergency?” 

Um, yes?! The student on the phone requests urgent medical assistance. 

“You’re telling me your friend in Kirkland needs an ambulance. Is that what you’re telling me?” 

Then in another video, one of the protesters—in a keffiyeh and a mask—approaches the police and an administrator, who was indeed in a sweater vest, demanding to know WHAT. WILL. HAPPEN. to her friend, should she leave the sit-in to change the tampon in question. The adults calmly explain that she won’t be arrested if she leaves the building. But can they confirm that she will never be arrested, ever?! 

“She does not feel safe,” someone says off-screen, punctuating it with claps. 

This whole thing makes the Nick Christakis Halloween costume struggle session look like a teachable moment. It must be seen to be believed. Watch all the videos in Steve’s thread here. 

For starters, if having a tampon in for “multiple hours” is grounds to call for an ambulance, I should have been dead years ago. Second, this student was being denied no such right. All she had to do was get up, leave the protest, and find one of the hundreds of bathrooms that she had access to elsewhere on campus. Pro tip: wear a pad to the all-night protest. The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad. 

It’s all very Karen, to borrow a trope from 2020, especially when a protester demands the administrator find someone who can get them some answers. Just like middle-aged women who think dressing down the manager will somehow earn them a full refund, these students have convinced themselves that by linking arms and screaming “shame” at their college’s chancellor, they are stopping a war in the Middle East.

Don’t these authority figures realize they are standing in the way of a global intifada, which is also—obviously—totally a good thing? 

We find out in a subsequent video that indeed the tampon was removed, though not in any bathroom. Reader, it came out at the sit-in, like so much urine in so many plastic water bottles. A woman on the microphone calls it “the most depraved shit I’ve seen in my entire life.” 

Hard agree. 

Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.

Below is my column on Fox.com for the hearing this week on the corruption scandal involving the Biden family. For years, the Democrats have opposed any effort to investigate the Bidens, including as part of the current impeachment inquiry. Various members misrepresented my earlier testimony during the hearing on the basis for the impeachment inquiry. Members like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) stated that I joined other witnesses in saying that there was nothing that could remotely be impeachable in these allegations. That is demonstrably untrue. My testimony stated the opposite. I refused to pre-judge the evidence, but stated that there was ample basis for the inquiry and laid out various impeachable offenses that could be brought if ultimately supported by evidence. I also discussed those potential offenses in columns. The purpose of the hearing was not to declare an impeachment on the first day of the inquiry. Unlike the two prior impeachments by many of these same Democratic members, this impeachment inquiry sought to create a record of evidence and testimony to support any action that the House might take.

Here is the column:

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their latest assessment report (AR6) in 2021. In 2023, the Clintel Foundation published a report which criticizes AR6.

Clintel is short for Climate Intelligence, and the Clintel Foundation doesn’t think there’s a climate emergency. Overall, Clintel’s main criticism is that the IPCC hasn’t reviewed the scientific literature in an objective way, as is their stated mission.¹⁾

This article focuses on the topic of chapter 2 of the Clintel report: The Resurrection of the Hockey Stick.

What is a “hockey stick” temperature graph?

The image below shows a “hockey stick” temperature graph for the past 1000 years. This particular version is from the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s third assessment report from 2001, and it applies only to the Northern Hemisphere.

The graph is called a hockey stick graph because the shape somewhat resembles an ice hockey stick with a long, flat “shaft” and a big “blade” shooting up at the end. If there had been more variability in the temperature before the “blade” – meaning that the “shaft” wasn’t flat – then it wouldn’t be a hockey stick graph.

Why is the hockey stick important?

A hockey stick temperature graph is convincing evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gases have a big impact on the climate, and according to IPCC, humans are responsible for roughly 100% of all warming over the past 150 years.

For Clintel, who doesn’t think there’s a climate emergency, it would make their argumentation easier if past temperature variability were higher, as more of the recent warming could then be attributed to natural causes. They write that if past temperature variability has been high, then “the temperature rise of the past 170 years would have to be shared [between] anthropogenic and natural causes.” ²⁾

However, this way of thinking is a fundamental mistake, according to climate scientist Ulf Büntgen. He argues that a high pre-industrial variability would mean that the atmosphere is more sensitive to changes in e.g. greenhouse gases, than if pre-industrial temperature variability has been low.³⁾

In any case, what’s most important is, of course, to get a correct estimate (or “reconstruction”) of past temperatures — whose shape may or may not resemble a hockey stick. Let’s explore!

---

From Chapter 2 of the Clintel report:

One of the big surprises of the IPCC’s AR6 report was the comeback of the so-called “hockey stick“. This term refers to the northern hemispheric and global temperature development of the past 1000-2000 years. More than two decades ago, Mann et al. (1999) published a reconstruction in which the temperatures of the pre-industrial period 1000-1850 AD appear rather flat and uneventful (the “shaft” of the ice hockey stick), followed by a fast and allegedly unprecedented warming since 1850 (the “blade”). The hockey stick became world famous because it was featured prominently in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) in the IPCC’s 3rd Assessment report [see image at the top of this article].

The hockey stick graph received a fair amount of criticism, and Clintel explains that the hockey stick graph was subsequently corrected — resulting in a temperature reconstruction with more pre-industrial variability, and thus without a hockey stick shape. IPCC’s fourth and fifth assessment reports did not include a hockey stick temperature graph, but in the most recent assessment report (AR6), the IPCC once again presents a temperature reconstruction with low pre-industrial variability – a new hockey stick:

The new hockey stick temperature reconstruction is based on the work of PAGES 2k, the flagship of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) project. Clintel writes:

The PAGES 2k group is specialised in climate reconstructions and back in 2013 was comprised of the majority of all active paleoclimatologists. In 2019, PAGES 2k published a new version of the temperature development of the past 2000 years (PAGES 2k Consortium, 2019 ⁴⁾ [hereafter “PAGES 2k 2019”]). Surprisingly, it differed greatly from the predecessor version. Even though the database had only mildly changed, the pre-industrial part was now suddenly nearly flat again. The hockey stick was reborn[.]

And:

Evidence suggests that a significant part of the original PAGES 2k researchers could not technically support the new hockey stick and seem to have left the group in dispute.

It would be very interesting to read more about this. Unfortunately, Clintel doesn’t provide a reference.⁵⁾ Anyway, Clintel continues:

Meanwhile, the dropouts published a competing temperature curve with significant pre-industrial temperature variability (Büntgen et al., 2020)[.] On the basis of thoroughly verified tree rings, the specialists were able to prove that summer temperatures had already reached today’s levels several times in the pre-industrial past. However, the work of Ulf Büntgen and colleagues was not included in the IPCC report[.]. [Emphasis added]

Did they really prove it? Probably not.

PAGES 2k 2019 is a global multi-proxy temperature reconstruction. Büntgen et al. 2020, on the other hand, applies only to the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere, uses only one proxy-type – tree rings, and only looks at summer temperatures, not yearly temperatures. Still, it may actually make sense to compare Büntgen et al.’s reconstruction with PAGES 2k 2019, but that’s not immediately obvious, and a discussion of this by Clintel could have been beneficial.

The reason it may still make sense to compare Büntgen et al. 2020 and PAGES 2k 2019 is that PAGES 2k 2019 is also biased towards the Northern Hemisphere, towards summer temperatures, and towards the use of tree ring proxies:

PAGES 2k 2019 used 257 ⁶⁾ proxies out of a total of 692 proxies in the PAGES 2k database. 210 of these are high-resolution proxies with yearly resolution. In the below image, which is parts A, B and C from Figure 2 of Anchukaitis and Smerdon 2022, we can see
A) that most of the proxies with yearly resolution are based on trees (tree rings),
B) that the average latitude is not the equator, but 47 degrees north, and
C) that most of the proxies capture summer temperature (the growing season for trees in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere), not yearly temperature.

Criticism of PAGES 2k 2019 and IPCC

Anchukaitis and Smerdon 2022, where the above image is taken from, is an article that reviews “the strengths and limitations of existing global and hemispheric paleoclimate temperature reconstructions and highlight[s] likely sources of [existing] uncertainties, all in the context of [IPCC AR6].” They’re quite critical of the IPCC’s new hockey stick graph.

One thing they criticize IPCC for, is that the IPCC did not consider a variety of multi-proxy temperature reconstructions, which they had done in their previous two assessment reports (AR4 and AR5):

Despite the attempts in AR4 and AR5 to reflect uncertainties across multiple reconstruction efforts and to represent time-dependent uncertainties as they expanded back in time, these efforts were surprisingly abandoned in the most recent AR6 Working Group I (WG1) report in favor of a single ensemble-based reconstruction of global temperature with relatively static uncertainty bounds over the [past 2000 years.] […] The most recent assessment […] is thus a turn away from the attempts in previous reports to provide a full accounting of uncertainty in reconstruction efforts […], an incomplete representation of forward progress in both understanding and quantifying disagreement in temperature reconstructions of the [past 2000 years], and is an unnecessary return to a singular representation of large-scale temperature estimates that span all or part of the last several millennia.

Another point made by Anchukaitis and Smerdon, which they also touched upon in the above quote, is that the uncertainty range in the new hockey stick graph is far too narrow, especially when we get further back in time:

[T]he estimated uncertainties for this reconstruction used in AR6 only reflect the methodological differences as applied to the PAGES2k dataset at decadal and longer time scales. Much larger latent uncertainties are almost certainly present due to the change through time in proxy availability, sensitivity, and spatial distribution[.] Because the consequences of these uncertainties are poorly represented in AR6, which is intended to reflect an assessment of the current state of the science, the report fell short in its representation of what we know and what we have learned about Common Era [=past 2000 years] temperatures over the last two decades. [Emphasis added]

Clintel, of course, also criticizes PAGES 2k 2019:

Like its predecessor, the new hockey stick by PAGES 2k 2019 is based on a large variety of proxy types and includes a large number of poorly documented tree ring data. In many cases, the tree rings‘ temperature sensitivity is uncertain. For example, both PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) and PAGES 2k Consortium (2019) used tree ring series from the French Maritime Alps, even though tree ring specialists had previously cautioned that they are too complex to be used as overall temperature proxies (Büntgen et al. 2012; Seim et al., 2012).

In contrast, Büntgen et al. (2020) were more selective, relied on one type of proxy (in this case tree rings) and validated every tree ring data set individually. Their temperature composite for the extra-tropical northern hemisphere differs greatly from the studies that use bulk tree ring input.

In some cases, PAGES 2k composites have erroneously included proxies that later turned out to reflect hydroclimate and not temperature. In other cases, outlier studies have been selected in which the proxies exhibit an anomalous evolution that cannot be reproduced in neighbouring sites (e.g. [Medieval Warm Period] data from Pyrenees and Alboran Sea in [PAGES 2k 2013]) (Lüning et al., 2019b). Outliers can have several reasons, e.g. a different local development, invalid or unstable temperature proxies, or sample contamination.

However, starting from the third sentence, this text is virtually copy-pasted from a study by Lüning and Lengsfeld (2022). Clintel could have at least added a reference to that study. Also, it’s unclear whether the last paragraph applies to PAGES 2k 2019 or just to earlier PAGES 2k versions. If it does indeed apply to the 2019 version, then the Clintel report would have benefited from documenting it.

A new temperature reconstruction that includes short-term trends

As noted, PAGES 2k 2019 is a multi-proxy temperature reconstruction (although it may be biased towards tree-rings), while Büntgen et al. 2020 only uses tree rings. All things equal, multi-proxy reconstructions should be preferred over single-proxy reconstructions; according to Büntgen et al. 2022, there is “community-wide agreement that multi-proxy compilations are the most appropriate methodology to climate reconstructions“.

One reason that multi-proxy reconstructions are better is that some proxy types can reveal short-term temperature variability, but not long-term variability, while others can reveal long-term variability, but not short-term variability.

And while “tree rings are excellent at capturing short frequency variability, they are not very good at capturing long-term variability.” (Fundamentals of Tree-Ring Research, James H. Speer, 2009) This is also pointed out by Büntgen et al. 2020 itself, the study that used tree-rings only:

[Tree ring width] is particularly limited when reconstructing the amplitude and duration of climatic extremes[.]

And:

While we have no doubt about the timing of past summer cooling in our reconstructions, accuracy of the temperature amplitude remains somewhat challenging.

Since some proxy types are good for capturing short-term trends, while others are good for capturing longer-term trends, the best way to make a temperature reconstruction should be to use proxy-types that capture long-term variability for the long-term trends, and then use e.g. tree rings to show the short-term variations on top of the long-term trends.

Titled “A frequency-optimised temperature record for the Holocene“, Helen Essell et al. 2023 is a study that combines short-term and long-term proxies in this way. It’s the first study that attempts to “present […] temperature variability on interannual timescales over the past 12 000 years.” Previous studies have had a much lower (worse) time resolution, and hence the temperature graphs from those studies have been smoother and with less variability.

However, while “interannual signals ([less than] 10 years) are best captured by tree-ring chronologies (wood)“, only 3 tree-ring proxies were included in the study. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t discuss uncertainties related to the low number of short-term proxies.

The study performs a global temperature reconstruction, but like most other “global” reconstructions, there is a bias towards the Northern Hemisphere and summer temperatures.

Also note that the study looks at the time period 12,000 – 0 BP, where BP means “before present” and “present” is defined as the year 1950. This is a longer time period than we normally talk about for hockey stick temperature graphs, which is 1000-2000 years. Hockey stick temperature graphs also normally include the time period after 1950, which is often represented by thermometer data in addition to proxy data. Helen Essell et al. 2023 does not use thermometer data.

Although the time period is different, it’s interesting to compare IPCC’s hockey stick graphs with the new temperature reconstruction from Helen Essell et al. 2023, which looks like this (where light green shows the uncertainty range):

If the results of this study are broadly correct, then pre-industrial temperature variability has been high, which would mean that hockey stick temperature graphs are not correct.

Since Helen Essell et al. 2023 is a new and novel study, it may or may not contain important errors, but their criticism of the IPCC is very relevant regardless; the IPCC should not compare long-term average temperatures with recent yearly (high) temperatures:

[W]e remain critical of the interpretation of the smooth trajectories of existing Holocene temperature reconstructions, which have influenced policy debate. For instance, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and its ‘Summary for Policy Makers’ and ‘Technical Summary’ compared recent annual extremes against past centennial averages. Such unequal comparison has the potential to mislead portrayal of the threat of global warming as low- and high-frequency records reflect different aspects and amplitudes of the Earth’s climate system. [References removed]

Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre is a central figure in the hockey stick controversies. McIntyre thinks (as does Clintel) that the IPCC wanted to get a hockey stick temperature graph: “the IPCC remains addicted to hockey sticks“, he wrote in a 2021 article on his blog, ClimateAudit, where he explains some of his major complaints about the new IPCC hockey stick.

Stephen McIntyre is well-known for his criticism of Michael Mann’s original hockey stick graph. He has been reporting errors in the PAGES 2k temperature reconstructions since at least 2013, when the IPCC was set to use data from the PAGES 2k project in its 5th assessment report (AR5). Much of the proxy data was already familiar to McIntyre at the time, since many of the proxies used by PAGES 2k had also been used by Michael Mann and in other earlier temperature reconstructions.

So it’s safe to say that McIntyre is very knowledgeable when it comes to the proxies underlying the temperature reconstructions that have been published in the last few decades. And in 2019, McIntyre commented on Twitter that: “[…] I probably know the data better than the article lead authors[.]“

Asian tree ring chronologies: – It’s worse than anyone can imagine

There are many problems with the chronologies included in PAGES 2k 2019. Here, I’ll just focus on the most important issue. But see footnote ⁷⁾ for a summary of some other issues.

According to McIntyre, some of the tree ring chronologies included in PAGES 2k are incorrectly calculated:

It’s hard for a statistical methodology to be so bad as to be “wrong”. Mann’s principal components methodology was one seemingly unique example. PAGES2K’s Asian tree ring chronologies are another. It’s worse than anyone can imagine. [Emphasis added]

In a 2021 article, McIntyre writes about the Asian tree ring chronologies used by PAGES 2k. He writes that many chronologies were introduced without having been reviewed. The ones that made it into the latest PAGES 2k version were the ones that were the most hockey stick-shaped:

About 20% of the PAGES 2019 proxies are 50 Asian tree ring chronologies, all of which were originally published as chronologies in PAGES (2013). At the time, none of these series […] had ever been published in technical literature, peer reviewed or otherwise. Nothing in the Supplementary Information to any of these articles says who calculated these chronologies or how they were calculated. […]

PAGES (2013) was originally rejected by Science in 2012, because peer reviewers (including Michael Mann) objected to the introduction of so many new proxies in what was ostensibly a review paper; they sensibly recommended that components first be peer reviewed in relevant specialist journals. However, PAGES2K results had already been incorporated into a pending IPCC assessment (AR5), so the authors, now under a very short deadline, submitted to Nature, which was confronted by the same review problems that led to the rejection by Science. Keith Briffa had a clever, too clever, solution: publish the PAGES2K submission as a “Progress Article” – a classification that did not require the peer review procedure required for a Research Article. This would qualify the article for IPCC and nobody would notice the sleight-of-hand. (Even I didn’t notice it at the time; someone told me.)

One of the consequences of the 2013 manoeuvring was that several hundred Asian tree ring chronologies were introduced to paleoclimate archives with no technical publication or technical peer review, no information on how they were calculated or even who among the PAGES2K (2013) authors had calculated them.

Having been introduced through the back door, so to speak, nearly all of the 200+ Asian tree ring chronologies were carried forward into the PAGES (2017) compilation, and then a subset of 50 chronologies (more or less the most hockey stick shaped) was screened to become a substantial component of PAGES (2019) – the source of the IPCC Summary for Policy-makers Hockey Stick.

One of the new Asian tree ring chronologies is shown below. In addition to “Asia_207”, it also goes by the name “paki033” and “Asia-MUSPIG”:

The x-axis shows the year, and the y-axis shows ring width index, which corresponds to temperature in the region. The higher the ring width index, the higher the temperature. In an ideal world, at least.

Below are two chronologies that McIntyre calculated from the underlying tree ring widths using two normal standardization procedures (middle and right) compared with the PAGES 2k 2019 chronology (left):

As we can see, there is no hockey stick in the chronologies calculated using the standard procedures. And actually, temperature (or tree growth) seems to be going down rather than up in the 20th century, “so how did PAGES2K manage to get such a hockey stick? I have no idea“, wrote McIntyre in 2021.⁸⁾ In 2023, however, Hampus Söderqvist (@detgodehab on Twitter/X) had been able to reverse engineer the algorithm used by PAGES 2k.

It turned out that the algorithm had a tendency to add upticks at the end — making hockey sticks from non-hockey stick data. This was verified by McIntyre and Söderqvist by cutting off the last 50 or 25 years of data before applying the algorithm. From Twitter:

bingo. Excluding the last 50 years of data, paki033 had an even bigger blade //50 years earlier//. For good measure, @detgodehab did test excluding 25 years and got same big blade //25 years earlier//.

It didn’t happen for all tree ring datasets, though, but the fact that it happened for some, means that the algorithm can’t be trusted and shouldn’t be used. However, the algorithm was used not only for this one site in Asia, but for several others as well, contributing significantly to the hockey stick shape of PAGES 2k’s (and IPCC’s) temperature reconstruction:

@detgodehab has verified that same flawed algorithm was used for at least 8 other Pakistan sites. Note that these sites (together with Columbia U’s Mongolia chronologies) dominate PAGES19 list of heavy contributors to closing blade.

(See this sub-thread on Twitter for more details on what the algorithm did for certain tree ring data.)

The “signal-free” procedure

The problematic standardization procedure used by PAGES 2k is called signal-free detrending.⁹⁾ As we’ve seen, tree rings aren’t very good at preserving long-term temperature trends, and the signal-free procedure was created with the intention to at least partly solve this problem — to preserve medium-term (up to one century) variability in tree ring temperature reconstructions.¹⁰⁾

Looking to the scientific literature, we actually find a criticism of this procedure that’s very similar to McIntyre and Söderqvist’s; Pearl et al. 2017 found that

the signal-free detrending procedure increased the amplitude of the early and late ring-widths beyond reasonable growth patterns for the species[.]

and that

the use of [signal-free standardization] instead of traditional [negative exponential] chronologies results in an overestimation of recent temperature trends and a lack of reconstruction skill. [Emphasis added]

An overestimation of recent temperatures was exactly what McIntyre and Söderqvist found could happen.

How much can we actually know about past temperatures?

In light of the big differences between global temperature reconstructions, one might wonder how much we can actually be certain of when it comes to past global temperatures. In a 2021 article, The future of paleoclimate, Jan Esper and Ulf Büntgen address this issue:

Our understanding of natural climate variability rapidly declines over the Common Era (CE) [Common Era=past 2000 years] as the pre-instrumental temperature amplitude differs substantially among large scale reconstructions. Highlighting such differences and emphasizing paleoclimatic findings is crucial for placing [human-caused] climate change in a long-term context. We argue that more proxy records are needed to accurately reconstruct first millennium CE temperature variability[.] [Emphasis added]

The number of proxies as well as the quality of these series declines back in time, so that only a few records are available during the early centuries of the [Common Era]. All of these issues, i.e. the limited resolution, reduced replication, and increased dating uncertainty, affect our ability to accurately assess past temperatures and cause a blurring of the climate record back in time. [References removed]

In their opinion, we can know very little about global temperature variability prior to the year 1400:

Yet the circumstance that the next IPCC report will no longer include a paleoclimate chapter should not mistakenly be interpreted as evidence that natural climate variability is understood. The opposite is actually the case. We are in the dark already before 1400 CE, have a rather limited idea of the magnitude […] of pre-industrial warm periods, and know much less about the Southern Hemisphere[.] [Emphasis added]

Conclusion

Whether the average global temperature of the past 2000 years forms a hockey stick pattern or not might not be possible to determine from existing proxy records. And there’s disagreement in the scientific literature about how much the pre-industrial global temperature has varied since year 0.

Although the IPCC knew about the disagreement, they still chose to rely on a single temperature reconstruction for the past 2000 years (PAGES 2k 2019) in their latest assessment report. That in itself is unfortunate, since they’re supposed to make an objective assessment of the scientific literature. It’s even more unfortunate considering all the criticism PAGES 2k 2019 has received.

Did the IPCC want to present a hockey stick temperature graph? The Clintel Foundation and McIntyre believe so, and I wouldn’t be surprised, either. But it’s hard to prove.

Footnotes:

¹⁾ An objective review is at least one of IPCC’s stated missions. On their About page, one of the things the IPCC writes is:

An open and transparent review by experts and governments around the world is an essential part of the IPCC process, to ensure an objective and complete assessment and to reflect a diverse range of views and expertise.

²⁾ Lüning and Lengsfeld 2022 has the same perspective as Clintel. They write:

As a rule of thumb, the larger[…] the pre-industrial temperature changes, the higher[…] the natural contribution to the current warm period (CWP) will likely be, thus, reducing[…] the CO2 climate sensitivity and the expected warming until 2100.

³⁾ As part of Büntgen’s response to a question about whether his recent work would help the “climate deniers” or the “climate change proponents”, Büntgen argues that a high pre-industrial temperature variability would mean that the climate sensitivity is also high:

There is one thing that often gets taken wrong if we are reconstructing past climate and we show more natural variability. Some people, they don’t understand it fully, they would say “ah okay, you are able to show us that [the] climate system was always varying, so where is the problem?” This is the wrong assumption, the assumption is that this only indicates that the climate system is very sensitive, so it’s about the sensitivity. That means even without [varying amounts of] greenhouse gases, we had these fluctuations; we had cold and warm periods. So that means the sensitivity of the [Earth] system is very high, which makes the effect of greenhouse gases even bigger, right? So I think it is exactly the counter-argument. If we are able to show that pre-industrial temperature and precipitation changes were relatively big, it only means that the additional effect of greenhouse gases will be even further a problem.

I haven’t found a discussion in the scientific literature comparing the opposing perspectives of Clintel and Büntgen.

⁴⁾ Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the main text of PAGES 2k 2019 at Nature. However, a free version of the main text is available here.

⁵⁾ But an article by Swedish blogger Maths Nilsson may lend some support to Clintel’s claim. Nilsson had asked climate scientist and fellow Swede, Fredrik Ljungqvist, whether a new hockey stick had been commissioned by the IPCC, something that the Clintel report suggested might have happened. According to Nilsson, Ljungqvist’s answer was a categorical no:

So I contacted Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist (FCL), co-author of both the Page[s] 2k (2019) and Büntgen (2020)-papers. What did he say?

First of all, the IPCC did NOT in any way commission the Page[s] 2k-study as Clintel implies ([Ljungqvist] used the capital letters).

Nilsson’s next paragraph then hints at a possible justification for Clintel’s claim that some researchers seem to have left PAGES 2k in dispute — at the very least, there seems to have been disagreement:

[Ljungqvist] did however confirm that some leading [paleoclimatologists] do not think the Page[s]2k graph was properly used in the IPCC AR6-report. They don’t think there is sufficient data to even reconstruct a global mean temperature with precision 2000 years back (most data comes from northern [hemisphere]). [Ljungqvist] somewhat regrets putting his name on the Page[s]2k-study. [Emphasis added]

⁶⁾ Stephen McIntyre has made available a folder with two files. One file, proxy_pages2019.csv, shows an overview of all 257 chronologies (although only the tree ring chronologies were visible to me by default — I had to unhide the others). The other file, info_pages2019.xlsx, includes all yearly values (temperature, ring width index or similar) for all 257 chronologies.

The PAGES 2k 2019 study also links to much of the same data, but in a harder-to-read data format.

⁷⁾ Some of the other potential problems that McIntyre writes about:

The IPCC AR6 Hockeystick:
“The idea/definition of a temperature “proxy”“, McIntyre writes, “is that it has some sort of linear or near-linear relationship to temperature“. He argues that this is not the case for the proxies underlying e.g. PAGES 2k 2019. To illustrate his point, McIntyre visualizes random samples of 11 proxies from each of PAGES 2k 2017, PAGES 2k 2019, and tree ring chronologies from North America (used by PAGES 2k 2019), and compares them with PAGES 2k 2019’s resulting hockey stick graph. A few proxy chronologies have a hockey stick shape, but in those cases, according to McIntyre, the hockey stick shape was the result of errors in calculating the chronology. One chronology looks like an upside-down hockey stick. McIntyre suspects PAGES 2k 2019 flips it over (!), which means it would contribute positively to the final hockey stick shape.

PAGES2019: 30-60S:
PAGES 2k 2019 includes very few southern hemisphere proxies. In the 30-60 degrees south latitude band (southern extra-tropics), PAGES 2k has included only 8 proxies. Of the 8 proxies, 7 are tree rings, and none are ocean proxies despite 94% of the area being ocean. The 8 proxies had been reduced from 19 proxies in PAGES 2k 2017. Only one proxy goes back 2000 years, one goes back about 1200 years, and the rest are shorter than 600 years. The final PAGES 2k reconstruction has a much more pronounced hockey stick shape than any of the 8 proxies that it’s made up of.

PAGES19: 0-30S:
PAGES 2k 2019 includes 46 proxies in the 0-30 degrees south latitude band (southern tropics). However, only 2 of them go back 2000 or nearly 2000 years. Among the rest, none of the proxies go back further than the year 1500 AD, and about half have a start date after 1850. McIntyre comments: “None of these short series shed any light on whether the medieval period, for example, was warmer than modern period or not.” 43 of the 46 proxies are coral proxies, and strangely, there are only two proxies from land.

There are two different coral temperature proxies, δ¹⁸O and Sr/Ca. δ¹⁸O looks at the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes in the coral, the common ¹⁶O and the much less common ¹⁸O. The Sr/Ca proxy looks at the ratio of two different chemical elements in the coral, Strontium (Sr) and Calcium (Ca). According to McIntyre, “PAGES2K is primarily populated with d18O series – which, in specialist articles, are seldom, if ever, used as temperature proxies, as Sr/Ca is usually preferred. Changes in 20th century coral d18O are nearly always much more pronounced than corresponding changes in coral Sr/Ca. Perhaps that’s why they were selectively chosen into the PAGES2K network.” A little speculation at the end there, but from having read many of McIntyre’s articles, the speculation is certainly very understandable.

PAGES 2019: 0-30N Proxies:
PAGES 2k 2019 includes 41 proxies in the 0-30 degrees north latitude band (northern tropics), which is down from 125 proxies in PAGES 2k 2017. The removed proxies were mostly ocean sediments and tree rings, “all of which were much longer than the retained coral proxies“. Among the 41 remaining proxies in PAGES 2k 2019, only one extends back 2000 years, while two others go back around 1000 years. 8 of the proxies are from tree rings, two of which had upticks at the end. However, the upticks didn’t appear when standardizing the raw data using normal detrending-algorithms. “In response to a recent inquiry, the PAGES2019 authors were unable to identify how the chronology was calculated and refused to find out.” Presumably, they were calculated using the same flawed algorithm that was used for the Asian tree ring chronologies discussed in the main text (the signal-free procedure).

⁸⁾ The reason McIntyre didn’t know was that PAGES 2k hadn’t documented which standardization (or detrending) method was used to create each tree ring chronology. I already quoted McIntyre saying this (“Nothing in the Supplementary Information to any of these articles says who calculated these chronologies or how they were calculated“), and Klippel et al. 2020 confirms it:

[T]he PAGES2k database contains no information regarding the detrending method used to produce the tree-ring chronologies in its collection[.]

Also, when McIntyre asked two of the PAGES 2k authors about the standardization method on Twitter, Nick McKay replied that he didn’t know which method had been used.

⁹⁾ Here’s a technical explanation from McPartland et al. 2020 for why the algorithm is called signal-free:

The term “signal-free” refers to the creation of detrending curves that do not contain the common signals shared across the trees in a chronology, and are thus ‘free’ from common variance and should preserve this signal in the resulting chronology.

¹⁰⁾ McPartland et al. 2020:

In its original formulation, [signal-free standardization] was primarily intended to improve the expression of medium-frequency (i.e., decades to one century) variance associated with climate forcing.

by Javier Vinós

The unlikely volcano, the warmest year, and the collapse of the polar vortex.

The climate events of 2022-24 have been were truly extraordinary. From an unlikely undersea volcanic eruption to the warmest year on record to the collapse of the polar vortex after three sudden stratospheric warming events. This rare convergence presents a unique learning opportunity for climatologists and climate aficionados alike, offering insights into a climate event that may not be repeated for hundreds or even thousands of years.

1. January 2022, the unlikely volcano

Never before have we witnessed an undersea volcanic eruption with a plume capable of reaching the stratosphere and depositing a large amount of vaporized water. This extraordinary event occurred in January 2022 when the Hunga Tonga volcano erupted. The conditions for such an event are rare: the volcano must be deep enough to propel enough water with the plume, but not too deep to prevent it from reaching the stratosphere. Most undersea volcanoes do not produce plumes at all, which makes Hunga Tonga’s eruption all the more remarkable.

The Hunga Tonga volcano occupied a unique “sweet spot” at a depth of 150 meters the day before the eruption. In addition, the eruption itself must be exceptionally powerful for water vapor to rise into the stratosphere. The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga was the most powerful in 30 years, since the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.

Figure 1. The Hunga Tonga eruption from space.

Active undersea volcanoes at the appropriate depth are rare, and the likelihood of one erupting with such intensity is relatively low. We may be looking at an event that occurs once every few centuries, or maybe even once every millennium. Undoubtedly, it was an exceptionally rare event.

While the most powerful eruptions, such as Tambora in 1815, can indeed strongly influence hemispheric weather for a few years, our observations of eruptions such as Agung (1963), El Chichón (1982), and Pinatubo (1991) suggest that their effects dissipate within 3-4 years.

The idea that the Little Ice Age (LIA) was caused by increased volcanic activity is popular. However, the data suggest otherwise. Volcanic activity during the LIA was not unusually high, but rather lower than the Holocene average (although volcanic activity was exceptionally high in the early 19^th century, towards the end of the LIA). The primary unusual climate forcing factor during the LIA was exceptionally low solar activity.

Volcanic eruptions that penetrate the stratosphere trigger significant radiative, chemical, and dynamical changes, with sulfur playing a key role. Volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO2) oxidates, combines, and aggregates forming sulfate aerosols. These aerosols scatter incoming shortwave radiation, resulting in reduced surface insolation and consequent surface cooling. They also absorb both incoming and outgoing infrared radiation, contributing to stratospheric warming.

The effect of the Hunga Tonga eruption, however, is quite the opposite. While there was some sulfur dioxide associated with Hunga Tonga, the main impact was from water vapor. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas, so the sudden 10% increase in stratospheric water vapor in a single day increased stratospheric opacity to outgoing infrared radiation. Unlike the lower troposphere, where the greenhouse effect is relatively saturated, the stratosphere, well above the Earth’s average emission altitude (about 6 km), experiences a much more pronounced effect from the addition of water vapor. Also, the increased stratospheric water vapor content enhances infrared emissions from the stratosphere, thereby cooling it significantly.

Figure 2. Stratospheric water vapor in ppm by latitude over time at 31.6 hPa altitude. The evolution of the Hunga Tonga water vapor is clearly seen from its tropical injection toward the poles.

The unlikely inverse volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga is currently cooling the stratosphere while warming the surface. However, this effect will gradually diminish over time as the excess water vapor exits the stratosphere over the next 2-4 years. Figure 2 illustrates the movement of volcanic water from the tropical regions, where the dehydrated air from the troposphere enters, to the mid and high latitudes, where it will gradually leave the stratosphere in the coming years.

The question arises: why did it take more than a year to detect the effects of stratospheric changes on surface temperature after the explosion? Typically, radiative effects are expected to be instantaneous once water vapor or sulfate aerosols are placed in the stratosphere. However, our understanding of how volcanoes affect weather remains incomplete, and climate models struggle to accurately reproduce these phenomena.

Transport within the stratosphere is rapid in the longitudinal direction, but very slow with respect to latitude and altitude, with significant seasonal variations. Depending on factors such as the latitude of the eruption and the time of year, the effects of a volcanic eruption on weather can vary widely. The eruption of Tambora provides a precedent: it occurred in April 1815, but its effects on weather, which led to the “year without a summer,” were not detected until June 1816, a span of 15 months after the eruption. This historical example underscores the possibility that events occurring more than a year after an eruption could indeed be attributed to it.

2. 2023, the hottest year on record

Beginning in June 2023, the last seven months of the year marked the warmest period on record, significantly exceeding previous records. Such an event is quite remarkable, given the considerable temperature variability observed from month to month. But how unlikely is it?

Using the HadCRUT5 dataset, we find that there have been 17 record-breaking warmest years since 1870. Any year in HadCRUT5 that beats all previous years becomes a record year, and the record increase is measured as the temperature difference above the prior record year (highest mark until then).  For example, 2009 was the warmest year, but it was only 0.005ºC warmer than 2007, the previous record year. 2023 was the warmest year and was 0.17ºC warmer than 2016. It is the biggest difference from one record year to the previous record year in the entire series.

Figure 3 shows that in 2023, the temperature increase from the previous record was the largest in 153 years, at +0.17°C. This level of increase from previous records is remarkable, even for a year that has been recorded as the warmest on record.

Figure 3. The warmest years in the HadCRUT5 dataset from 1870 with the temperature increase from the previous record. 2023 constitutes the biggest jump.

In the warmest years, several months often stand out as the warmest (Figure 4, blue bars). In 2023, there were seven such months, trailing only 2016 and tying 2015. Notably, these seven warmest months were consecutive, spanning from June to December. The red bars in Figure 4 illustrate the number of consecutive record months for each record year. It’s clear from the figure that years in the data set with five or more consecutive warmest months coincide with very strong El Niño years: 1877-78, 1997-98, and 2015-2016.

Figure 4. The number of record months in the record years is shown in blue. In red is the number of those record months that were consecutive.

In 2023, the temperature statistics reflect conditions similar to the strongest El Niño years in over a century. But was this really the case? Determining whether El Niño was the catalyst for the record warming in 2023 is challenging. Relying solely on the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean as the criterion for El Niño would lead to circular reasoning. El Niño is a complex phenomenon involving both the atmosphere and the ocean. The Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI v2) uses five variables – sea level pressure, sea surface temperature, surface zonal winds, surface meridional winds, and outgoing longwave radiation – to create a time series of ENSO conditions from 1979 to the present.

This index, when averaged over the entire year, shows that of all the record years since 1980, only 1997-98 and 2015-16 were the result of a very strong El Niño. 2023 was actually a weak El Niño year, despite very high sea surface temperatures.

Figure 5. Yearly average Multivariate ENSO Index values for the warmest record years.

We can conclude that 2023 stood out as an exceptionally unusual record-warm year. While it rivaled very strong El Niño years in terms of exceeding previous temperature records, it did not actually fall into that category. Remarkably, despite the lack of a strong El Niño, it managed to set the highest temperature record by the largest margin in the data set spanning a century and a half.

In an article entitled “State of the climate – summer 2023“, Judith Curry showed how unusual 2023 was in terms of the global radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere, the components of the surface energy balance, and the internal modes of climate variability driven by atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns.

The magnitude of the anomalies displayed in 2023 across a wide range of variables has never before been recorded. It is an unprecedented climate event in our records.

3. January-March 2024, the collapse of the polar vortex

The polar vortex is a circular wind pattern that develops on rotating planets with an atmosphere. It results from the conservation of potential vorticity, a property depending on the Coriolis force and the potential temperature gradient. The potential temperature refers to the portion of the temperature of an air parcel that is not affected by its potential energy, and is often defined as the temperature the parcel would have if it were brought to the surface (1,000 hPa).

In the Northern Hemisphere, toward the end of summer, the Arctic experiences a sharp drop in temperature as the days shorten. To maintain potential vorticity, the wind around the polar regions intensifies in a west-to-east direction (known as the westerlies). The formation of the polar vortex in the stratosphere occurs when the prevailing easterly winds shift to westerly winds. This shift is evident in the zonal wind speed, which changes from negative to positive around September (see Figure 6). Finally, the vortex dissipates around April.

Winds in the stratospheric polar vortex can reach 180 km/h (110 mph) and form a formidable barrier to heat transport from the tropics. As a result, the atmosphere and surface inside the vortex become very cold and dry, reducing the energy loss to the planet, as cold surfaces radiate less.

In the atmosphere, as in any fluid, waves occur, the largest of which are planetary waves. These planetary waves originate in the troposphere as a result of large mountain ranges and temperature differences between oceans and land. They are most prevalent and pronounced during winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Under favorable conditions, these waves travel rapidly, similar to tsunamis, colliding with the boundaries of the polar vortex and imparting an easterly momentum. As a result, the winds that form the polar vortex reduce their speed, weakening it and allowing warmer air to enter, pushing cold air outward. This exchange causes colder winter conditions in the mid-latitudes.

When the winds slow enough to reverse direction, the polar vortex breaks into two or three smaller, displaced vortices. Stratospheric air entering the area previously occupied by the vortex descends, warming significantly in the process. This phenomenon, known as a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event, can raise temperatures in the polar stratosphere by up to 40°C in a matter of days. SSWs are relatively common in the Northern Hemisphere, typically occurring about once every two years. They often lead to harsher winter conditions in certain regions, especially eastern North America and eastern Eurasia, in the following weeks.

El Niño years typically promote SSW events and polar vortex breakdowns. This could be due to the increased ocean temperature contrasts during El Niño, which generate larger-amplitude planetary waves. Occasionally, about once every 10-20 years, two SSW events occur in the same winter. However, this winter’s extended period (November to March) marks the first time since records began in the 1950s that three SSW events have been observed. The breakdown of the polar vortex occurred in January, February, and March, as shown in Figure 6 from NOAA’s SSW monitoring. Each time, the red line representing the westerly wind speed dropped to the zero line. At this time of year, it is possible that the stratospheric polar vortex may not reform.

Figure 6. Westerly (positive) stratospheric zonal winds at 60°N (red line) reached the zero-speed line three times this year, indicating a sudden stratospheric warming event and polar vortex break down each time.

According to Adam Scaife of the UK Met Office, this event isn’t just unprecedented – it could be a once-in-250-year event. This finding comes from a recent statistical study of SSW events conducted using a seasonal forecasting system within a climate model. However, it’s important to note a caveat: climate models still struggle to accurately represent the stratosphere and fail to reproduce the observed phenomenon that La Niña years also increase the likelihood of SSW events.

The impact of three SSW events this winter isn’t particularly dramatic. While normal weather patterns may shift, leading to unusual temperatures and precipitation in some areas, the effects are temporary. However, these events do affect Arctic temperatures and therefore the amount of energy leaving the planet. The weakening of the polar vortex, as shown in Figure 6, results in increased heat transport to the Arctic this winter, leading to higher temperatures in the region.

Figure 7 illustrates this trend, with an orange line representing Arctic temperatures in 2023 according to the Danish Meteorological Institute, and a green line representing temperatures this year. Since the greenhouse effect is relatively weak during the Arctic winter due to limited water vapor in the atmosphere, the result is that more energy escapes from the planet due to the weakened vortex. This serves to mitigate and reduce the unusual warming observed in the second half of 2023, which contributed to it being the warmest year on record.

Figure 7. Arctic surface temperature for the year 2023 (orange) and 2024 (green), compared to the 1958-2002 average (blue).

Despite the additional heat being transported to the Arctic, leading to increased temperatures, there hasn’t been a corresponding decrease in Arctic sea ice extent. In fact, this winter’s sea ice extent exceeds the 2010-2020 average. It appears that, contrary to widespread fears of its disappearance, Arctic ice remains resilient and stable.

Figure 8. Arctic sea ice extent in 2024 compared to the 2001-10 and 2011-20 decadal averages from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

4. What can we expect in the near future?

The unlikely volcanic eruption is the likely cause of the extraordinary warming, which in turn led to the occurrence of the unprecedented three SSW events. Our understanding of the effects of these events supports this interpretation.

Historical data on the warmest years suggests a high probability that 2024 will again break the temperature record, similar to what happened in 1877-78, 1980-81, 1997-98, and 2015-16. However, if we have correctly identified a major cause of the warming as the Hunga Tonga eruption, we can expect that as the excess water vapor exits the stratosphere, it will induce a cooling effect at the surface, potentially lowering temperatures for the next 3-4 years. Studies such as Solomon et al. (2010) have already shown the negative impact on global warming of stratospheric drying. We should see the reversing of all the warming caused by the Hunga Tonga volcano.

In addition, other factors affecting temperatures, such as the decline in solar activity after the maximum of Solar Cycle 25 and a future shift of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to its cold phase, could contribute to a large pause in global warming. Using the 2023-24 temperature as a reference point, we could even see some cooling in the coming years. These are indeed interesting times in terms of climate dynamics.

SHOCKER: ‘Gender-affirming therapy’ is not beneficial, pediatrics group concludes.

ORIGIN STORY: SUPERHERO, OR SUPERVILLAIN? Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins Into Human Cells. Here’s What Happened.

“Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades,” says molecular biologist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, from the University of Wyoming.

“When you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades’ abilities to the human cells.” . . .

“When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism,” says University of Wyoming molecular biologist Thomas Boothby.

What shall we call that character? “Tardiman?” That just sounds like someone who’s always late.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S BECAUSE HE’S A TOOL:

Before the 2020 election Stephen Colbert was doing skits encouraging people to be skeptical of Big Pharma and its motives.

After the election he was dancing like a fool while surrounded by people dressed as syringes. pic.twitter.com/9IXtxKRi7M

— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 29, 2024

THERE’S A REASON WHY A MAJORITY OF AMERICANS THINK OF THE FBI AS BIDEN’S GESTAPO, YOU KNOW: Woman Records Very Creepy Visit by the FBI.

"Climate The Movie: The Cold Truth" interviews scientists who say, but challenging the dominant narrative on climate change, they've faced professional repercussions.

Man, whenever I think I've explained just how much you should hate journalists, new info comes out that just makes you need to hate them more.

Meet Craazyman:

“Craazyman is the fake name for a Racket subscriber who is a nobody by standards of public life. Just like you, dear reader! But we both like Enlightenment values, that's for sure. We'll tolerate experts, but we love honest seekers of any kind. Cute fluffy kittens are OK too. So are seals.”

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THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boeing, NASA target May 1 for first crewed flight of Starliner to the space station.

Because this is a test flight, Wilmore and Williams, both astronauts with military test pilot experience, will perform some manual maneuvers during the trip to the ISS as well as on the return to Earth. Most of these actions won’t be needed during routine ferry flights to the station outside of emergency situations.

“What’s really kind of cool about Starliner is that it’s very much a pilot’s spacecraft. It’s really maneuverable,” Lammers said. “There’s close to 50 reaction-control and orbital maneuvering jets on it and there’s a stick. And what’s really cool about it is, when you have astronauts that are pilots, they really gravitate towards using it.”

Godspeed…

 

THIS IS THE WAY TO BET ON “HATE CRIMES:” Palestinian ‘hate-crime’ hoax: Statistics show that antisemitism is on the rampage, while Islamophobia is minuscule. And that’s bad for the Palestinian cause.

NEXT UP ON COMPANIES THAT HATE THEIR CONSUMERS:  Hasbro Just Ended Dungeons & Dragons Forever [VIDEO]

THE ISSUE IS NEVER THE ISSUE. THE ISSUE IS ALWAYS THE REVOLUTION. Proof eco-extremists don’t want to fix the problem, they want to tear down society.

This week, Harvard University has shut down a Bill Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. The controversial Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, run by professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch, aimed to study the potential future implementation of geoengineering by crop dusting sulphuric acid into our stratosphere. Nice.

Even if you put aside the almost instant validity such an experiment would give to conspiracy theories like chemtrails and HAARP, it still sounds a bit too much, playing with our thin air like that — in an unprecedented, and potentially catastrophic, manner, too.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The plug wasn’t pulled over fears of playing fast and loose with the venusformation of Earth’s atmosphere.

Nor was it due to the Harvard faculty’s occasional (yet frequent) dalliance with plagiarism or concerns over the lack of diversity within the ivory tower.

No, according to the MIT Technology Review, it was something else entirely: “Even studying the possibility of solar geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” it clarified.

Not only are you not supposed to solve the problem. You’re not supposed to think about solving the problem. Because the problem is the source of their power.

AND NOW FOR SOME GOOD EDUCATION NEWS: Classical ed — seen as ‘a white child’s education’ — is thriving in the Bronx.

Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.”

Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems,” she writes.

Reading lists aren’t trendy. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante,” writes Green. “In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.”

At Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, the middle school is calm and phone free, she writes.

“Classical education is often seen as a white child’s education,” says Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who co-founded Brilla using the slogan: “This is what the elite get.”

Yet Brilla, located in the poorest neighborhood of the Bronx, is filled with English Learners from Central America and West Africa, writes Green. Nearly 90 percent of students come from lower-income black and Hispanic families.

Brilla students attend a daily character class, “where they talk about how to live out the different virtues reflected in the texts they read,” she writes. Most classical schools emphasize ethics, not just academics.

More like this, please:

By January, with no response from the Biden administration – and their numbers growing to over 5,000 dealerships – a second letter was sent urging the president to “slam the brakes.”

THAT ISN’T SUSTAINABLE: Most Carmakers Lose An Average Of $6,000 On Every Electric Vehicle They Sell. “We estimate that most OEMs currently lose around $6,000 on each EV they effectively sell for $50,000, after accounting for customer tax credits. We also estimate that OEMs will only be able to close half of this cost gap by making the right technology choices; economies of scale as automakers ramp up production will help, too, but they won’t make up the difference. Then there is the impact of looming Chinese imports to consider; market prices will likely contract further, exacerbating the profitability challenge. At some point, it will become untenable for OEMs to lose money on every vehicle they sell.”

Sounds like a bloodbath in the making but Biden is all-in, regardless: The EPA Is About to Outlaw Your Car.

DUMBEST MANAGEMENT MOVE SINCE DYLAN MULVANEY: Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent. “Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users’ consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: California teen dies from brain injuries from high school fight, mom claims. “Juarez, a single mom of two, claimed Mejia often returned home covered in bruises after she enrolled at the public school in south LA eight months ago. The distraught mother allegedly took pictures and documented her daughter’s injuries to report them to school officials and campus police, but her pleas for help reportedly went unheard, according to KTLA. . . . The grieving mother blamed the tragedy on the school after she reported the videos to the officials and claimed nothing was done with the bullies.”

Well, it’s not as if they’d misgendered her.

In 1966, American sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven outlined a strategy for toppling the United States, and it's gone viral this last week. See if you can spot why.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: $1.8B Sony movie studio backed by Mark Wahlberg approved for Summerlin.

The German people are famous for putting everything in print, even things they shouldn’t, and in this instance at least, American playwright and author CJ Hopkins is glad. “The irony,” he says, laughing. “The Germans, always documenting everything.”

In a letter from the Berlin Prosecutor’s file on Hopkins, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, analogous to our FBI) acknowledges receipt of a document from a government office describing an effort to have tweets deleted. “The Hessen Gegen Hetze reporting office,” the highlighted portion reads, “has already initiated measures to delete the relevant post on the social network”:

Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech. No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.

Hopkins also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.

CJ’s unique insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or worse ways all around the globe.

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Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June, he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities. The offending image:

Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.”

Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were “ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.

After acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over, because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will [re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”

Bzzt! Wrong. The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime, essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters, are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be too high to see over:

MT: You got charged again?

CJ Hopkins: No… I got acquitted. I went to trial on the 23rd of January, and I wrote this up and I’ll send it to you so you can just look at the whole account. But at the trial I made a big aggressive statement that people republished all over the place. The judge acquitted me, and then called me all kinds of names and then put on her covid mask and stalked out of the courtroom. She called me a Schwurbler, which in German is kind of an idiot, I guess a babbler or someone.

Anyway, I read that statement, which pissed them all off, but she said, “Okay, you’re an idiot, but that’s not against the law, so you’re acquitted.” So I thought, “Great. This is over. I’m acquitted.” The prosecutor had no case whatsoever, and it was really embarrassing, and I figured it was all done, but my attorney reminded me: oh no, the prosecutor can appeal. Which he did. So now I’m facing another trial in appeals court. It’s not new charges, it’s the same charge, but the prosecutor’s appeal of my acquittal.

MT: The double jeopardy thing isn’t big in Germany, I take it?

CJ Hopkins: No.

MT: Are they going to make a different argument?

CJ Hopkins: I have no idea what they’re going to do. They have no argument… I mean, they put my tweets up on an overhead projector, like we were back in high school, and interrogated me about whether the Swastika was on top of the mask or behind the mask, that sort of thing. The prosecutor’s argument was basically, “We don’t believe that Mr. Hopkins is a Nazi, or pro-Nazi, we don’t believe he was trying to spread Nazi propaganda, but he nonetheless spread Nazi propaganda. because his tweet” – and this is a great part of their argument – “because if people saw his tweets, they would have to stop and think for a minute to figure out what they meant.”

MT: Essentially you can’t have satire, because that requires a person to have at least one thought.

CJ Hopkins: You can’t make people think. You’ve got to have beat-you-over-the-head messaging. I think the whole point of this… I’m sure it’s like the plea-bargain thing in the States. They figure if they hit you with a 3,600 Euro fine, you’re going to pay three times that much to fight it in court, so you’re just going to pay the fine and go away. I don’t think they ever expected to end up in court, and I have no idea what the prosecutor is doing with this appeal. The judge a few weeks later submitted a written verdict, which is strongly in my favor. She pretty much reiterated my attorney’s arguments and made it absolutely clear that what I did falls under the exceptions to the statute, and there’s nothing here to prosecute. Nonetheless, the prosecution’s going ahead.

MT: Did you have much Western news coverage?

CJ Hopkins: Right before the trial I had you, then Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which is the big paper of record in Switzerland, and James Kirchick at The Atlantic, who was a big help. I think it put a lot of pressure on the judge. My lawyer made her aware that Germany was being portrayed as a laughingstock in the international press. Aside from The Atlantic, it was all independent alternative media.

MT: In the Murthy Supreme Court case in the States Monday, there was an issue with what they call “traceability.” I see you don’t have a traceability issue, with this document from your case file?

CJ Hopkins: Exactly. That’s why I sent it to you. Unquestionably, this is a government office, directly involved with removing the tweets. The other thing that I was going to say, is that I’m looking at things like the Supreme Court case from a non-U.S. perspective. I’m outside of it. I’m watching the legislation that’s getting rolled out in Ireland and the UK and what’s happening to me here and what’s going on in the States, and it’s so obviously much broader than just a red-blue political story in the US. This is happening throughout the Western democratic countries.

I’m just desperate to get that across to people. I think it’s so easy for people to get locked into what’s going on in their own country and not see the bigger picture.

MT: What’s an example?  

CJ Hopkins: There was just a piece in The Herald, in Scotland. The police were being trained there on how to crack down on abusive hate speech. According to this new legislation that’s rolling out and in the training manual, they were saying this could take place in comic performances or stage plays. People are being arrested in the UK for protest signs.

If I can just put one little bug in your head, Matt, to whatever degree you can tweak people and let them know: “Hey, it’s not just Trump and the Democrats and the liberals and the woke people and all that.” This is happening all over the West, in all these different countries. I think that’s one thing that my case does, it provides folks with an opportunity to remind them that this is happening all over. The old rules don’t apply.

MT: Good luck with your case.

CJ Hopkins: Take care.

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HMM: Keto diet found to slow early stages of Alzheimer’s disease in mice.