Indonesian Fires

Typically During El Nino years we see forest fires that will raise the CO2 concentration levels in the atmosphere.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/15/how-indonesias-staggering-fires-are-making-global-warming-worse/

These Indonesian fires will contribute towards this effect although the causes of the fires are not completely natural as explained in the post above.

Contrarians in the past and undoubtedly in the future will use the data (CO2 concentrations increased due to these CO2 pulses) to arrive at false conclusions.

These fires cause atmospheric CO2 concentrations to rise more than would be expected from emissions alone. It is this extra rise in CO2 that LAGs variations in SST that have led Humlum, here and led Spencer, here, in the past to wrongly assume that SST are the cause of CO2 rise in the overall trend of CO2 rise. The overall trend in CO2 rise is of course caused by human emissions.

It was to be expected that something similar would happen during an El Nino as discussed, here, It is also likely that we will see more events globally in the short term(over the next few months) that will further contribute to short term variations in this upward direction.

Inevitably these anomalous upward variations in SST will decline, La Nina will return, global rainfall over land will increase, plant growth will increase and the trend in CO2 concentrations will rise less steeply. (This offset due to this reduction of CO2, however, will not fully compensate for the rise in CO2 during El Nino in the case of these Indonesian fires as explained in the news article at the top of this page). Again the variations in CO2 will lag the SST to be misinterpreted by climate contrarians.