As we approach the end of 2025, with another year of headlines screaming about unprecedented heat and the urgent need to slash CO2 emissions, a hefty new international report has landed on the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption.
This 382-page volume from the Atmospheric Processes and their Role in Climate (APARC) project, involving over 100 scientists worldwide, dissects the atmospheric aftermath of this massive submarine blast. I’ve tackled Hunga before in my article “The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcanic Eruption and the Stochastic Nature of Climate Variability,” where I explained how this event – a relatively common geologic occurrence – pumped an astonishing ~146 Tg (teragrams, or millions of metric tons) of water vapor into the stratosphere. That’s equivalent to a sudden 10% increase in the stratosphere’s total water content. Water vapor is Earth’s most powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), trapping far more heat than CO2 ever could.
In that piece, I highlighted how such natural events underscore the chaotic, unpredictable side of our climate system – the “stochastic” nature, meaning random and hard-to-model fluctuations that can override human influences overnight. I also critiqued global mean temperature (GMT) as a metric in “The Absurdity of Global Mean Temperature and Mean Sea Level Metrics,” noting it’s a statistically contrived number based on extrapolating from tiny fractions of actual measurements (just 0.01% of Earth’s surface is directly gauged), masking huge regional differences and uncertainties.
Now, this fresh APARC report claims Hunga’s effects were mostly “minor” on surface climate, despite that massive water injection. But here’s the kicker: If a instantaneous 10% spike in the strongest GHG has negligible warming impact, why the hysteria over CO2’s slow creep upward at about 0.5% per year? Are we witnessing scientific contortions to keep CO2 as the villain, even if it undermines the very case for GHG sensitivity? After all, when careers and funding depend on seeing CO2 everywhere, that’s exactly what you’ll find – ignoring how natural variability like Hunga could explain recent warming spikes without any CO2 surge. And let’s not forget: For years, the climate community has downplayed water vapor as merely a “feedback” to CO2-driven warming, but Hunga injected it independently – exposing that as an oversimplification that inflates CO2’s role.
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