In a recent CFACT article, climate expert Joe Bastardi says super El Niños have caused all the atmospheric warming since satellite measurements began in 1978. I suggested this two years ago in a CFACT article titled “No CO2 warming for the last 40 years?” Now Joe has confirmed it.

The focus of Joe’s long article is that these super El Niños are natural.

Most importantly, here is Joe’s picture of the 1998-2000 super El Niño step up in global temperatures, with nothing but 15 to 20 year pauses on either side:

My description of this big step up, posted two years ago, is here.

There is little to no CO2 warming in the entire satellite record! Just a step up warming due to the super El Niño 20 years ago. I told you so. We may now have a second super El Niño step warming but it is too soon to tell. In any case there will still be no evidence of any CO2 induced warming. The gradual increase in atmospheric CO2 has nothing to do with super El Niños. Joe explains this in great detail.

Regarding the supposed surface and ocean warming, while it may be real, to my knowledge it cannot be due to the CO2 increase. (I say may be real because I have serious doubts about the validity of the convoluted statistical methods used to estimate this warming.)

I know of no mechanism whereby steadily increasing CO2 in the atmosphere can cause steady surface warming without first causing steady atmospheric warming, which the satellite data say has not happened. The surface and ocean warming would require increased back radiation from the airborne CO2 molecules, which requires increased atmospheric temperature, which we do not see.

If the surface and ocean are in fact warming, then “why?” is a very big question, which ought to be the focus of research. A solar effect seems most likely. But whatever caused it, this warming is not evidence of AGW. Unfortunately the climate science community is so wedded to AGW that this research is still waiting to happen. Why the predicted CO2 warming has not occurred is another good question, a huge one.

The elegant thing about science, at least in principle, is that a single observation can falsify a popular hypothesis. But as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his groundbreaking book — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions– this may not be true in practice when the hypothesis is deeply entrenched, due to what I call paradigm protection. The community of believers will resist what observation clearly says. So we get the argument that the data must be wrong. However, the satellite data is accurate enough to falsify AGW.

The great philosopher of science Karl Popper said that science was a process of elegant conjectures, followed by refutation by observation. The conjecture of AGW is largely refuted by observation. CFACT reported it first.