Climate change is the major driver of this year’s extreme temperatures, not the eruption last year of an underwater volcano near Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, scientists tell The Hill.
While the eruption of the volcano may be an aggravating factor, the scientists say it is not having the impact attributed to it by conservative commentators who have downplayed the role of climate change.
Scientists told The Hill the eruption should not be used to undercut the influence of climate change on this year’s heat waves.
“It’s probably fair to say that the influence of [the volcano] on this year’s extremes is quite small,” said Stuart Jenkins, author of a paper that discussed the eruption.
The paper, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, said the eruption increases the likelihood of temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — a milestone the UN’s climate panel has said the world should avoid to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
Jenkins told The Hill in an interview this week the eruption could cause warming of about 0.04 or 0.05 degrees Celsius, which he described as a relatively small amount.
“This eruption will probably have a small positive influence on global temperatures,” Jenkins said.
“Because of our proximity to this defined 1.5-degree temperature threshold set out in the Paris Agreement, that four-hundredths, five-hundredths of a degree of peak warming actually does get you tangibly closer, temporarily, to that 1.5-degree limit.”
However, he said climate change and El Niño are the main drivers of the extreme heat we’re seeing around the world.
“The first and the most important is the long-term global warming influence of human activity, the second most important probably is the El Niño event that has been building over the last year,” Jenkins said.
Other experts agreed.
“The big story is not the volcano and it’s not really the El Niño … it’s global warming,” said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis.
Holger Vömel, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, meanwhile, said that at this point, it’s too soon to say whether the volcano is a factor in the heat waves.
“It’s probably too soon to say that definitively. It’s certainly possible,” he said.
But he said even if the eruption is playing a role, it should not be used to undercut the role of climate change.
“Hypothetically speaking, if the volcano does warm the surface, it adds to our man-made global warming that we already have,” Vömel said.
But if you spend time listening to some conservative pundits, you would think the eruption was the main cause of the heat — which the scientists who spoke to The Hill said was false.
Radio host Erick Erickson has repeatedly bashed the media for ignoring the volcano and focusing instead on the changing climate.
“The American press corps is willfully misrepresenting the present heatwave as part of their ongoing narrative related to climate change,” he tweeted last week.
He later tweeted out a “theory” that the volcano was the cause of this summer’s extreme heat and claimed it was being used by “climate alarmists to advance their agenda.”
In a Substack post this week, he criticized the media for covering climate change and repeated his claim that the volcano was the cause of the heat waves.
Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator with The Daily Wire, opened a recent episode of his show by discussing the volcano and casting doubt on the influence of climate change.
“They’ve spent months fueling panic over a heat wave, linking it to our SUVs and air conditioning units while saying nothing at all about the volcanic eruption that we know is raising the global temperature,” Walsh said. “The media is lying about the scope of the warming and also lying about the cause of the warming to whatever extent the warming is actually occurring.”
Contacted by The Hill, Walsh said “I’m not going to entertain questions from Volcano Deniers,” in an emailed statement shared by a spokesperson.
Erickson, meanwhile, publicly responded to The Hill’s request for comment in a post on Substack.
He cited press coverage of the paper finding that the warming could temporarily push the planet over the 1.5-degree threshold — even though the paper’s author told The Hill climate change should get the majority of the blame. He also cited other reports discussing the water being sent into the stratosphere.
He also doubled down on his denial of climate change’s influence, writing, “I reject the media’s facile premise that climate change fuels/drives/causes extreme events.”
In addition, Erickson criticized this reporter for fact-checking him and for covering the impacts of climate change — which he labeled as “climate alarmism.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a preeminent climate authority from the United Nations, determined in 2021 based on the body of available evidence that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity.
Burning fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change, though other human activities such as agriculture are also major contributors to the problem.
The UN report warned that each half degree Celsius of planetary warming would cause “clearly discernible” increases in intensity and frequency of hot extremes like heat waves, heavy precipitation and agricultural and ecological droughts.
And, experts say that in this case, climate change is the real culprit.
“The simple fact is that humans are responsible for the warming we’ve caused over the last 150 years and a volcano or an El Niño, or a cold winter or a stiff breeze — none of that changes the fact that humans are reshaping the climate,” said Willis, with NASA.