evidence: Put another way, the warmth in 2024 is something climatologists saw coming, as El Nino is a reliable driver of global temperature increases. One paper, published in February 2024 in Nature’s Scientific Reports, put the odds at 90% that global surface air temperatures would beat historical records over the year spanning July 2023 to June 2024. Climate models are again meeting expectations. [...] Environmental events can indeed cancel each other out. For example, the El Niño pattern that persisted into 1992 should have led to higher global temperatures. But it was preceded by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which sent out sulfate aerosols that cooled the earth. In effect, the events neutralized one another and 1992 was not a record warm year, according to the May 2024 paper in Nature. [...] With the most recent El Niño pattern arising in mid-2023 and dissipating in 2024, 2024 is the year where El Niño should be affecting global temperatures. And 2024 does indeed have the potential to surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record, according to climatologists. But that doesn’t explain what happened in 2023.