It's a heatwave?

"It's like a heat wave

It's burning in my heart

I can't keep from burning

It's tearing me apart"

~ Martha and the Vandellas

TERMINOLOGY IS CHANGING. WHAT USED to be called "swamps" are now wetlands. Heavy rain is now an "atmospheric river." A violent storm is now a "weather bomb" And extreme and large-scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed "marine heatwaves."

It's said that recent flooding in New Zealand—a "glimpse into the future of climate change"—is due to our present La Niña summer and an increase in these "marine heatwaves." First arriving in the summer of 2017/18, they are now said to be "commonplace."

One of these "new" marine heatwaves helped cause the warm summer of 2018/19. Rainfall that summer "was below normal (50-79% of the summer normal) to well below normal (<50 % of the summer normal) in Northland, Taranaki, Nelson, Tasman and the West Coast as well as parts of Marlborough, Manawatu-Whanganui, Otago and Southland. Above normal rainfall (>120% of the normal) was observed around Hawke’s Bay and parts of Gisborne. Rainfall was near normal elsewhere (80-120% of the summer normal rainfall)."

The new arrival combined with La Niña conditions to get the blame for the unseasonably hot 2017/18 summer. Rainfall that summer was "highly variable from month to month and heavily impacted by two ex-tropical cyclones during February. Summer rainfall in the South Island was above normal (120-149%) or well above normal (>149%) over Canterbury, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman, and near normal (80-119%) to below normal (50-79%) around Otago, Southland, and the West Coast. North Island summer rainfall was above or well-above normal around Wellington and much of the upper North Island, and near normal or below normal over remaining North Island locations including Taranaki, Manawatu-Wanganui, Hawke’s Bay, and Gisborne."

2022/23's summer was "a summer of floods and droughts, and very warm," with "a protracted marine heatwave that peaked during January." Cyclone Gabrielle of course arrived a month later when the Antarctic Oscillation "dipped negative."

Summer of 2023/24 was warm, with another marine heatwave and, for most regions, drier. The narrative of causation is already breaking down.

As it did nearly a century ago in 1934/35 when New Zealand experienced its hottest summer because of a massive warming events in the ocean. Or 1938. But this time the floods came in winter. 

SURROUNDED BY OCEAN AND WITH warm air and occasional cyclones brought down from the tropics, flooding is this country's most frequent form of natural disaster—and always has been.

Māori legend includes a story of a great flood. Tāwhaki, god of thunder and lightning, was almost murdered by his brothers-in-law. When he had recovered, Tāwhaki took his warriors and their families and built a fortified village on top of a mountain. Then he called to his ancestors – the gods – for revenge, and they let the floods of heaven descend. The earth was overwhelmed by the waters and the entire population perished. This was known as Te hurihanga i Mataaho (the overwhelming of Mataaho – one of the places that were destroyed). ...

Māori history tells of a pre-European flood in the Tūtaekurī area of Hawke’s Bay in which a party of 50 men, women and children were drowned when two streams rose. 

The early European settlers failed to realise the intensity of rainfall in New Zealand and how rapidly rivers could rise.  The New Zealand Company's very first settlers were dumped on the Hutt Riverside in Petone to begin building Britannia, their new town. It was only a matter of weeks before they discovered what a stupid idea this was, relocating after a few months of regular flooding to Thorndon.

The South Island’s broad gravel-bed rivers were particularly deceptive: they were usually shallow enough to wade across, but when in flood their currents were powerful. By 1870, just three decades after European settlers began arriving in large numbers, rivers had been responsible for 1,115 recorded drownings. Drowning became known as ‘the New Zealand death’.

The greatest flood ever observed on the Clutha River Mata-Au, New Zealand’s largest river in catchment area and volume of flow, occurred in 1878. It was the result of a succession of weather systems bringing in warm wind and rain, which melted the winter snow cover. At the height of this flood, more than 5,700 cubic metres of water poured down the lower reaches of the river every second. ... A 1938 account described the Clutha in flood:
[i]ts angry surface [was] strewed with dead horses and cattle, houses, bridges, furniture, timber and farmstacks. Some days the spring sun shone with a ghastly pleasantry on the devastated towns, while 100 miles away more heavy rain on the mountains was preparing still greater strength for the flood. ...

Twenty-one people were killed in the Kōpuawhara flood of 1938 – the largest number of fatalities from a 20th-century New Zealand flood. It is a sobering reminder of the dangers of building on low-lying land close to rivers.

A reminder we're still receiving.

And those tropical cyclones just keep arriving, as they did long before CO2 levels were rising. The fifty-four people who died in the 1968 Wahine disaster, for example, are one tragic reminder of that. That was Sub-Tropical Cyclone Giselle. And we've been through several alphabet's worth of cyclones since then, everything from Bola to Hola, and worse, to come around again to Gabrielle's letter 'G.'

And there have been many worse cyclones in the South Pacific over the centuries before human industry began. But they either didn't hit these islands, thank goodness, or there was no-one here to record them.

WHILE THE NARRATIVE WAS breaking down on the ground in 2023, it was nonetheless ramping up in the world of climate modelling. A worldwide study (above) published in 2025 claimed '2023 Marine Heatwaves [Were] Unprecedented and Potentially Signal a Climate Tipping Point.' It's that study generally referenced by warmists here. Its "breathless tone is familiar," says Anthony Watts ("new records"! "unprecedented in intensity, persistence, and scale"! "may portend an emerging climate tipping point"!) but its "underlying logic is seriously flawed."

But as Watts argues, "context matters. Particularly in climate, which has cycles that span millennia, not just decades."

The foundational flaw in this study is its timescale. The research relies on satellite data beginning in 1982. That gives us about 40 years of observational history, which is virtually nothing in terms of Earth’s climate system. Prior to satellite coverage, comprehensive, high-resolution global measurements of sea surface temperatures simply didn’t exist. Claims of “unprecedented” events must be framed within that very limited context. As I’ve said before, declaring a “record” based on such a short window is like calling a coin flip streak a “trend” after four tosses.

Ocean temperatures fluctuate naturally over decadal, centennial, and even millennial scales. Our current observational capacity doesn’t cover even half of one oceanic oscillation cycle, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which paleoclimatology suggests runs as long as 50-70 years. To suggest a climate “tipping point” based on this short dataset is not just premature—it’s scientifically irresponsible.

Yet here we are. The marine heatwave cycle in the Southwest Pacific Ocean (our area) has an estimated return period of 141 years. Yet the longest-running evidence for this, says the study, is the coastal station in Leigh, whose records go back just 57 years.

Not just short on temporal context, but also on geographic. The climatic change is said to be global, due to increased global CO2, yet "the authors cite “region-specific drivers” for each major marine heatwave." 

In the North Atlantic, enhanced shortwave radiation and a shallower mixed layer were culprits. [Down here] in the Southwest Pacific, the heat was attributed to reduced cloud cover and increased advection. The Tropical Eastern Pacific was influenced by oceanic advection.

Notice anything? These aren’t unified, global changes due to increased CO2. They are local, meteorological, and oceanographic phenomena—exactly the kinds of natural variability we should expect in a dynamic system. The fact that these local causes are acknowledged undercuts the paper’s own argument for a singular, global cause rooted in greenhouse gas emissions.

Bad science and an unjustified extrapolation is the gist of this study and press release. Perhaps the most egregious leap comes in the suggestion that the 2023 marine heatwaves might represent a “tipping point” in the Earth’s climate system. The term “tipping point” implies a sudden, irreversible shift—a planetary point of no return. But what evidence is there for this? The authors provide none beyond the temperature anomalies themselves and vague references to mixed-layer dynamics.

No historical precedent is given. No paleoclimatic comparisons are offered. No quantitative thresholds are defined. It’s all speculation dressed up in technical language.

Meanwhile, as carbon emissions have been rising over this last century, rainfall has been going down, not up.

The highest frequency of global-scale extreme rainfall events occurred from 1960-1980 − when there were concerns about cooling. 

Since then, the frequency and intensity of rainfall events have “decreased remarkably” (Koutsoyiannis, 2020).

ALSO DECREASING—AND DECREASING REMARKABLY—is the world's s number of climate-related deaths.

One reason it's worth remarking is that severe weather events globally are themselves generally either decreasing or showing no particular trend. And that's not just me and climate scientists like Roger Pielke Jr saying that. It's the IPCC, who find no trends in flooding globally; no long-term trends in meteorological or hydrological drought; no upward trend either in so-called atmospheric rivers, and no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes or tornadoes either in the US or globally. 

None. 

And the US Govt, whose official metric records a general decrease in heatwaves since the 1930s -- or the international insurance industry, who record a decline in both US and European disaster-related losses. And the World Bank agrees. 

Meanwhile, even as alarmists talk about sea level rise inundating coastlines in the near future, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that ongoing sea level rise since 1880 amounts to only 240mm, i.e., just 17mm per decade -- measurable, but steady, and not accelerating -- and recent research shows many coastlines worldwide to be prograding rather than retrograding (i.e., shifting seaward) and at a globally-averaged rate of 260mm per year, reducing even this slow but steady threat. And the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU records that cyclone frequency in the South Pacific (the very reason we're here talking about this stuff) has, since 1980, been declining. (Which is welcoming considering so many more people are living and building in these otherwise threatening places, in part because governments have foolishly absorbed so much of the financial risk.)

But the other main reason for climate-related deaths to fall so remarkably is the very thing warmists decry so loudly and so monotonously, i.e.,human industry, which is the very thing that keeps folk safer from the dangerous weather events that do occur. 

It was the Netherlands' rising wealth, for example, that allowed them to build the dikes and dams that protected their sub-sea level provinces from flooding. And mortality from extreme heat in the US for example, as heat waves have recently kicked up and more and more people have moved to live in desert regions, has fallen pretty much all over the country over the past 50 years. In this case, it's because of things like air conditioning and better medicine that more and more people can afford.

And in the general case, as Bjorn Lomborg explains is succinctly, it's "because richer and more resilient societies are much better able to protect their citizens." 

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this [points out energy advocate Alex Epstein] because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place that we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it liveablethrough development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate liveable for 7 billion people.
As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fuelled machines to build a durable civilisation highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.

It's not just that GDP is correlated with fewer climate-related deaths and disasters, although it is; it's that the whole relationship between economic progress and human flourishing itself is actually causal. The richer and wealthier a society is, the better able it is to train the engineers and to raise the capital and to devise and build the infrastructure that allows human beings in all the many places on this fragile planet to master all the many things that nature is ready to throw at us.

And that's one phenomenon that really is global.

Here's Martha: