Greenhouse gases go up and down in three ways.

First, there is the annual up and down cycle that happens because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere. I won’t explain that to you now because I know you can figure out why that happens.

Second, there is natural variation up and down aside from that annual cycle that has to do with things like volcanoes and such. This includes the rate of forest fires, which increase greenhouse gases by turning some of the Carbon trapped in plant tissue into gas form as CO2. (That was a hint for the answer to the first reason!)

Third, humans.

There was a big spike in CO2 concentration this year, and it was caused by El Nino increasing forest fire output, which in turn, freed up some of that CO2. Also, regional drought in some places simply slowed down plant growth, leaving some Carbon stranded in the atmosphere.

So was that natural? Not at all. ENSO cycles, that cause El Nino and La Nina constitute and oscillation in rainfall patterns, and part of that results in extra forest fires or other effects as mentioned. But these effects are caused directly by weather disruption. Human caused global warming was already doing that. The severe El Nino of 2014-2016 was more severe (and probably longer) than any, or almost any, ever observed, precisely because it was a big dermatological monster sitting on top of a big hill made by anthropogenic global warming.

But there is also another,subtler but very important lesson in this event. At any given time we could have what would normally be a “natural” shift to bad conditions. But under global warming, such a shift can be transformed from a disaster to a much bigger disaster. In this way, think of climate change as the steepening of the drop off alongside the road from a 2 foot ditch to a 10 foot embankment. When we drive off the road due to natural forces (some ice, for example) without global warming,we get bounced around a bit. With global warming we get to rely on our airbags to save us, but the airbag deployment will probably break both our arms and mess up our face.

Anyway, the confirmation of the role of El Nino comes from new research discussed here.