May 25, 2023

Global warming completely stopped in 2018.  Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030.  A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely.  I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.

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NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023.  The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”  Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this.  Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”

Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.

Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature.  The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO).  The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels.  Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.

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Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976.  The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram.  It looks complicated, but it’s really not.  It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude.  The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism.  Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.

Notice how the colors fade from left to right?  That’s the sun’s magnetic field getting weaker with time.  As the sun’s magnetic field weakened, the Earth warmed.  Why?  Well, I can’t answer that — nobody can — but with weaker magnetic fields, there’s more interaction between the atmosphere and galactic cosmic rays (CGRs).  There are several, complicated, and often competing theories on how these interactions affect climate.  As we tend to associate lower solar activity with cooling, not warming, as shown here, the sun’s total solar irradiance (TSI) likely plays a significant longer-term role in global temperatures.  TSI hasn’t changed much over the short amount of time we’ve been able to reliably measure it, so TSI is not included in either model.

Using only the data shown in the butterfly diagram, it’s possible to predict temperature with a simple 11-year moving average to smooth out the 11-year cycles.  The averaged data is then negated to account for weaker magnetic fields causing rising temperatures, shifted forward by 2.8 years to account for the Earth’s delayed global response to the sun, and finally scaled to convert from units of Tesla to degrees.  Since we know what the sun is doing now, we can predict how the Earth will respond 2.8 years from now.  That’s it!  A little data-smoothing and a minus sign.  It’s not a very complicated model.

Note how closely the average global temperature tracks the predicted temperature.  We’ll see this same two-step temperature change shape again with the longer sunspot-based model.  Without the minus sign, one might conclude that the sun doesn’t cause global warming. 

Here’s what the sun can tell us about the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  NOAA’s ENSO index shows two strong El Niño events starting in 1997 and 2015 (El Niño events are positive values and La Niña events negative).  As predicted by the model, prior to both events, global temperatures rose dramatically.  This is a key point.  Rapid sun-induced warming triggers strong El Niños.  El Niños don’t cause global warming, and they most certainly don’t affect the sun’s magnetic fields.  The correct order of causality is sun → global temperatures → strong climate oscillations.

The magnetic field model predicts stable temperatures until 2025, so while there could be an El Niño event later this year, as predicted by NOAA, solar history suggests that the event would likely be mild-to-moderate.  In particular, the small ENSO around 2009 seems to be more in keeping with the steady temperatures we’re currently experiencing.  This type of El Niño will affect local climates but will likely cause only a small ripple in global temperatures.