As at today — 8 May — rainfall in Waikanae since the beginning of the year has been 86% up on what it was for the same period in 2022 — specifically 552 mm versus 297 mm.
It’s been fantastic for Climatists — “look how much the climate is changing because of you selfish people who keep driving internal combustion vehicles and don’t walk, cycle or catch the bus” they claim.
But there is a big factor they and the MSM don’t mention — the impact of the eruption of underwater volcano Hunga Tonga.
Let veteran journalist Karl du Fresne explain in a post on his blog last Friday:-
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the underwater volcano that erupted near Tonga in January last year. I wrote about it here.
To recap a couple of key points from that blog post, Hunga Tonga was the most powerful eruption so far this century. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than 100 years, measuring nearly 6 on the volcanic explosivity index – roughly equivalent to that of Krakatoa. The eruption created a volcanic plume that reached 58km into the mesosphere.
An article in the scientific journal Communications Earth and Environment – one of many devoted to the event – noted that major volcanic eruptions are well-known drivers of climate change and said the magnitude of the Hunga Tonga explosion ranked it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era. Researchers calculated that it resulted in a 13% increase in global stratospheric water mass and a fivefold increase in stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in three decades.
One study estimated the amount of water displaced as 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the entire water content of the stratosphere. That’s a helluva lot of water and it has to go somewhere. Communications Earth and Environment said the eruption had “potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate”.
Similarly, Atmosphere magazine devoted a special issue to the eruption, calling it an epic event that would have a continuing effect on the climate, both locally [that probably includes us] and globally.
It seems reasonable to conclude that an eruption of that scale might at the very least be a factor in the freakish weather patterns of the past few months. Yet I can’t help suspecting that the eruption of Hunga Tonga is the climate event none of the New Zealand experts want to talk about, possibly because it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change.