A WaPo article based on this research https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EA001223
Sunspots and El Nino?
GeoEnergy Math
The Mathematics of GeoEnergy
A WaPo article based on this research https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EA001223
GeoEnergy Math 
Based upon entirely what I read as part of the CWG reporting at WaPo and related article, and purely on what Leamon is saying, my assessment is they have nothing. There’s no substantial evidence for their claims of anything. There is interesting speculation, but it lacks a physical mechanism.
There must be places where the triggering fails to manifest and the explanation of those failures in the context of this hypothesis will go a long way to ascertain how seriously the proposal should be taken. There will be failures because sometimes by chain other phenomena will overpower this driving mechanism, masking it, and sometimes the transition will happen without the forcing.
Those cases will bound how strong the causal link is, and even if there is one. For the sunspot transition needs to couple into the atmosphere in some manner, and THAT is the place where inhibition or amplification or neutrality matters, not the sunspots.
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I recall talking to Leamon at an AGU meeting a few years ago and asked him why he only goes back to 1960 to find a correlation — the sunspots apparently don’t correlate to El Nino episodes prior to that.
IMO, the only reason that the paper exists is because there is a big hole in modeling ENSO, in that no one can do it effectively.
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concise tweet response
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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