Water, water, everywhere….
New Zealand's summer of 2023 saw catastrophic flooding. In late January, an atmospheric river—a concentrated flowing band of tropical moisture—parked itself over Auckland and a record 261mm fell in just 18 hours. Four people died. Over 19,000 properties were damaged. The economic cost reached NZ$2.2 billion.
In February, ex-cyclone Gabrielle brought 11 deaths and devastated crops across the country. In September, the South recorded its wettest days in decades.
That was the start, but it hasn’t improved much in the following years.
In 2024 and 2025, atmospheric rivers repeatedly drenched the West Coast and Tasman areas. They brought torrential downpours to the East Coast and Bay of Plenty in 2025. The Lower North Island was hit in 2026, while the North received another dose.
Between 1980 and 2020, extreme atmospheric rivers caused $1.4 billion in total insurance damages. Since 2022, a handful of catastrophic events have dwarfed that multi-decade history, triggering billions of dollars of damage in a fraction of the time.
Was all this mere meteorological misfortune… or something more?
A meteorological mystery
In 2023, something extraordinary happened. Global temperatures spiked to record levels— not gradually, not as predicted by climate models, but abruptly. By mid-2023, global temperatures reached record highs and then remained at historic peaks through 2024 and 2025.
The timing was peculiar. The 2023-24 El Niño didn't begin until mid-2023—well after the warming had commenced —and was only moderate in strength. Greenhouse gas concentrations, which increase steadily year after year, provided no explanation for such an abrupt shift. Something else was happening.
In 2024, Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described the “unprecedented knowledge gap” worrying leading climate scientists:
”It's humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists' predictive capabilities more than 2023 has."
In a later Guardian interview, Schmidt was even more direct about the failure of CMIP6 climate modelling:
“We should have better answers by now…We don't have a quantitative explanation for even half of it. That is pretty humbling."
The planet warmed 0.2°C more in 2023 than climate scientists expected. The IPCC models calculated the odds of that much change were 6,000-to-one against.
Worldwide, climate records tumbled
Dr Javier Vinós, another leading climate scientist, has compiled a series of anomalous events accompanying the warming spike.
2022-23 climate anomalies were global and diverse. Antarctic sea ice reached record lows. Lake Eyre filled in Australia. Water levels in the Amazon were at their lowest in 120 years. California recorded unprecedented numbers of atmospheric rivers. Cyclone Freddy set a duration record in the Indian Ocean, and the Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted more than two degrees north, bringing record rainfall to the Sahara.
In 2023, 42% of the Earth's recorded temperatures were two deviations above the values expected by climate models, and 2024 provided further surprises. 2023-24 saw three Southern Hemisphere stratospheric warming events, a frequency that the models expect only once every 250 years.
Dr Vińos believes that his chorus of unimagined events combined to represent the greatest climate event in 80 years.
Only one plausible explanation is on offer
On 15 January 2022, the Hunga-Tonga–Hunga-Ha’apai submarine volcano erupted with record force, producing a plume more than 30 km tall. The energy release was comparable to Krakatoa in 1883. It was the most explosive volcanic eruption of the 21st century.
Crucially, it injected 150 million tons of water vapour directly into the stratosphere—a 10-15% increase in global stratospheric water vapour, unprecedented in the observational record.
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas. When it enters the troposphere, it warms.
The Hunga-Tonga water vapour took about a year to descend into the troposphere, where weather is made. It therefore appears to have driven the contemporaneous temperature spike with its intensified atmospheric dynamics—including conditions that produced the atmospheric rivers that have battered New Zealand over the last three years.
Dr Vinós has spent many years studying natural climate variability. He is confident that Hunga Tonga is the cause of the global temperature spike.
He is not surprised that the water vapour in the stratosphere took 12-months to descend to the top of the atmosphere. He compares this to Mount Tambora (1815), where the most severe climate impacts occurred more than a year after the eruption.
Vinós notes that there are no efficient sinks of water vapour in the stratosphere. The additional water vapour is decaying steadily with a current e-folding time (exponential rate of decay) of 3 years and will reach the pre-Hunga range of variability around 2030.
It is still actively influencing atmospheric dynamics as of mid 2026—four years after the eruption.
But this doesn’t fit the narrative
Many alarmist scientists have been reluctant to assign blame for record-high temperatures to the eruption in Tonga, instead attributing them to climate change.
Neither the scientists nor their models can yet explain the abrupt 2023 spike. Instead, they repeat the simplistic refrain: “We predicted record temperatures, and here they are!” They suggest vaguely that El Niño must have caused the spike. Compliant media were not asking any hard questions.
Importantly, these scientists cannot explain why the volcano’s prodigious water vapour is not causing major warming. The main peer-reviewed journal paper that attempted to tackle this issue was by Dr Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M in July 2024. His central claim: that the eruption’s water-vapour warming was exactly matched by cooling from the eruption’s sulphur aerosols.
While Hunga-Tonga ejected a total of 0.06 Tg of SO2 aerosols, Vinós finds this quantity to be relatively insignificant. It was one-fiftieth of Mt Pinatubo’s output.
As the water vapour ejection was 150 Tg, the ratio of the two forcing agents was 250:1.This massive disparity makes “exact set-off” seem highly implausible.
There are known uncertainties in SO2 plume altitudes, which are often biased upwards. Dessler used standard assumptions without reference to this common bias – although the paper briefly acknowledges unexpectedly low levels of sulphur dioxide. It also admits that the observed persistence of water vapour in the stratosphere exceeded what Dessler’s model predicted – although lower persistence is a key driver of the paper’s modelled calculation.
In a complex set of calculations, the sheer coincidence of an “exact set-off” automatically raises eyebrows. Then, when all the factors mentioned above are considered, its credibility is strained well beyond the breaking point.
Occam’s razor
William of Ockham, a 14th-century English Franciscan friar and logician, came up with the ‘principle of parsimony’, which states that when presented with competing explanations, you should prefer the simplest one – ie the one that makes the fewest assumptions.
When the scientific method was developed in succeeding centuries, it adopted the principle of parsimony under the name of “Occam’s Razor”.
Vinós offers the parsimonious explanation: unprecedented Hunga-Tonga water vapour caused the spike; secondary effects persist as that water descends and disperses. All backed by data and well-known atmospheric mechanisms. This requires no implausible coincidences, no unreliable models, no hand-waving about "exact offsets”.
Dessler’s hypothesis requires many assumptions. It relies heavily upon an apparently wrong assumption about the tonnage of sulphur. It leaves the impression of a complex explanation that is tailor-made to fit a preordained outcome.
Further, Dessler simply ignores Schmidt’s humble admission that the official climate models could not cope with the 2023-24 heat spike. He offers no explanation at all for this major anomaly and its consequent extreme atmospheric rivers.
I prefer the Vinós explanation.
The BIG question
When NASA scientists cannot explain half of the observed warming, something fundamental has gone wrong with our understanding. The inexplicable 2023 spike calls into question the reliability of all climate forecasts offered by IPCC models.
Are the devastating floods of 2023–26 evidence of a permanent climate shift? Or are they instead evidence of a prolonged volcanic forcing signal—one that will continue declining until the Hunga Tonga water vapour finally reaches pre-eruption levels around 2030?
This distinction matters profoundly. If flooding is driven by transient volcanic forcing that peaks in 2023 and decays through 2030, New Zealand can expect atmospheric river frequency to gradually subside.
If warming is driven by relentless increases in greenhouse gases, the current nightmare is merely the opening act of endless pain. National infrastructure must be built to stronger and more expensive standards. ‘Managed retreat’ will be the solution in many areas. Greater efforts will be made to reach Net Zero by 2050.
One explanation suggests increasing relief over 3-4 years. The other suggests this is forever.
Our Minister for Climate Change has never publicly mentioned Hunga-Tonga. Can we be sure that he is focussing on this dilemma – or even aware of it?
Sources:
Gavin Schmidt — "Climate Models Can't Explain 2023's Huge Heat Anomaly", Nature, March 19, 2024. The primary source for his "unprecedented knowledge gap" and "humbling" admissions.
Javier Vinós — "The Extraordinary Climate Events of 2022–24", Climate Etc. (Judith Curry's blog), March 2024. His core analysis linked Hunga-Tonga to the spike.
Javier Vinós — "The 2023 Climate Event Revealed the Greatest Failure of Climate Science", Climate Etc., December 2025. His most recent and definitive statement.
Clintel/Vinós lecture — "Hunga Tonga Eruption and its Extraordinary Climate Effects", March 2026.
Tallbloke's Talkshop — "New Study Disputes Hunga Tonga's Role", July 2024. Covers the Dessler paper and the Vinós rebuttal.
Barry Brill OBE JP LL.M(Hons) M.ComLaw is a former MP and Minister of Energy, Petrocorp director, and chair of the Gas Council, Power NZ, ESANZ, and EMCO. He is presently the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
10 comments:
An excellent, totally plausible explanation of what has been happening, however, it doesn't fit the climate alarmist narrative, and our media and the general public with its short term memory won't even investigate further.
Makes sense.
An interesting and honest analysis of this unusual change in our weather system. The impact of the Hunga Tonga explosion raises inconvenient questions for the govt and media’s approved explanation. Thank you Barry.
This explanation makes perfect sense with water vapour as a greenhouse gas long accepted. The only problem for nay-sayers is how to find ways to halt the effects. There is no research money for an anti-water vaccine, and the rain and oceans are an inconvenient truth. Add the evaporative effects of the sun's energy and the cycling (sinking and rising) of water at different densities over the planet's surface and many, if not all views on anthropogenic climate change have been squashed. What will self-appointed 'climate scientists' and main stream media do then, poor things?
“If warming is driven by relentless increases in greenhouse gases, the current nightmare is merely the opening act of endless pain.” But not just “National infrastructure must be built to stronger and more expensive standards. ‘Managed retreat’ will be the solution in many areas. “ but that cripplingly expensive and economically destructive due to “Greater efforts will be made to reach Net Zero by 2050” despite this (net zero) being self-evidently impossible as it is beyond anything modelled including anything humans can ever do to have an impact.
At the time of Hunga-Tonga's eruption, Australian meteorologists warned that there'd be increased rainfall on the east coast of Australia. And so it proved. And of course much of that weather eventually affects NZ. When I was younger, we here used to experience what were then called "tropical rain depressions", or something like that. They're now called "atmospheric rivers", but look to be the same. We just didn't get as many of them as there have been here recently.
Anent the amount of rainfall over the past couple of years, I've pointed out the medium-term effects of that volcano, but people don't want to hear it. And of course the msm is silent on it: the thinking involved is just too hard for them, evidently. I've given up on hearing anything pointful from the scientists in NZ: these people have bought right into matauranga Maori, after all.
I must say, I hadn't considered that the warming spike in Europe would have been as a result of Hunga-Tonga, but it makes sense. We have family in Europe, and we know that in any event, they periodically get summer heat waves in that part of the world. We've experienced them! So I'd just assumed that there was a spike for some reason.
Given how very long it takes to do anything by way of infrastructure in NZ, I'm guessing that the rain activity we've been experiencing here will have diminished away before any big decisions have to be made. At least, I do hope so. The notion of "managed retreat" is by far the dumbest idea I've heard. Retreat to where, exactly?
Carbon dioxide from human sources is less than five per cent of all atmospheric CO2.
Yet climate alarmists claim it is the primary driver of global warming. They infer the other 95 per cent doesn’t count.
The after-effects of the Hunga-Tonga eruption are conclusive proof that they do.
An interesting article in CNN recently in which they discuss the possible 330,000 tons of methane released.
Here is the article :
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/30/climate/hunga-tonga-volcano-eruption-methane
We should also consider the tons of sodium chloride present in the seawater that was suddenly ejected into our atmosphere.
Face it, volcanoes have been erupting since Day One, have and always will shape the plates and atmosphere.
Stop panicking !
D'Esterre touched on it above, but didn't take it to the logical conclusion. Given all their reputed in-depth knowledge and experience of our islands and their environment, why haven't Maori opined (or been consulted) on the 'cause' of these 'effects'? If anyone knows, surely Matauranga can give us a pathway forward?
Correlation does not equate to causation without at least some related evidence. Anyone can speculate on blog sites. If you’re serious or want to be taken seriously, do what a real scientist would do and write a paper with your methodology, data, hypothesis and conclusions, and put it in front of qualified critics for critique.
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