‘Decade break’ in global warming - May 01, 2008
A paper in this week’s Nature predicts that, rather than warming, North Atlantic sea surface temperatures may actually decrease slightly in the next decade. What’s more, the paper suggests global surface temperatures may not actually increase either.
Has global warming stopped? Is this a nail in Al Gore’s coffin?
Well, no.
Despite headlines such as ‘Doubt is cast over global warming’ and ‘Global warming could stop NATURALLY for ten years, say scientists’ that is not what this paper is about.
What this new paper by Noel Keenlyside, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, sets out to do is incorporate data on short term variations in climate into our models of climate change. By doing this they push us into the arena of creating shorter term predictions, in this case of the next decade.
In a “News and Views” commentary on the piece in the same issue of Nature Richard Wood explains:
Keenlyside and colleagues’ model uses a very simple ocean initialization method in which they add heat to or remove it from the ocean surface until sea surface temperatures across the globe are close to observed values. They use their model to produce a set of retrospective ‘forecasts’ starting from earlier states, which they test against what actually happened. Their system produces refined temperature predictions a decade ahead for large parts of Europe and North America.
As Woods points out, colleagues of his at the Hadley Centre in the UK published a similar sort of prediction research of a similar sort, though rather different in approach and with significantly different predictions, in Science last year, as we reported at the time. Combining real world data and modelling this way has only recently become possible.
The new model predicts North Atlantic, European and North American sea surface temperatures will cool slightly; tropical Pacific temperatures will likely be almost unchanged and global temperatures will probably be offset by this variation.
This does not mean we don’t need to worry about global warming. “The natural variations change climate on this timescale and policymakers may either think mitigation is working or that there is no global warming at all,” says Keenlyside (Reuters).
As the NY Times’s Anmdrew Revkin notes on his blog:
Whether their prediction of a plateau for warming for a decade in North America and Europe is correct or not, their research may signal a shift that many climate researchers have been calling for for awhile now — toward service-oriented climate science ...
The NY Times wraps up its main piece with a useful quote from Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research: “Too many think global warming means monotonic relentless warming everywhere year after year. It does not happen that way.”
Not everyone is happy though. Here's the always-worth-listening-to Roger Pielke Jr on his Prometheus blog:
I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.
Image: NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC)
Comments
On 1/27/06 Algore said we only had ten years to save the planet from a scorching. According to the doomsday clock that started ticking on that day we only have 7 yrs 8 mo. 26 days left; now these guys are saying that global warming is on a ten year hiatus. You now someone who believes this crap could start to get confused.
Posted by: Louis Ruhl | May 1, 2008 06:41 PM
always-worth-listening-to Roger Pielke Jr
So you always read the ramblings of a scientific crank? His father is even worse.
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | May 2, 2008 04:01 AM
This is the alarmist's attempt to maintain their global warming fantasy in the face of a cooling world. It actually is possible for an oscillation of cold ocean surface water to mask global warming (where an active sun is raising the average temperature of the oceans), and it even happened a mere 60 years ago (between 1940 and 1960), but this is NOT what is happening now.
Instead, we have a very dangerous situation where the cooling effect of a fall off in solar activity is being compounded by cold Pacific and Atlantic oscillations. Warming effects incur negative feedbacks that make them self limiting. Not so with cooling effects, which regularly plunge the world into 100,000 year long ice ages, with the next one due any century now. We should be guarding against this very real danger by pumping out as much greenhouse gas as we can, tailored to patch the infrared “holes” in our greenhouse blanket. My post here.
Posted by: Alec Rawls | May 2, 2008 05:36 AM
There is an old German saying: "No matter how far you have gone down the wrong road, don't be afraid to turn back."
It is time for the AGW crowd to admit they were wrong--very wrong--about "Global Warming". It is time to stop this destruction of the credibility of science for the sake of egos and grants.
Posted by: Jim Watson | May 3, 2008 06:22 AM
I thought Al Gore and friends said that the science of Global Warming was certain, which included their predictions?
Isn't it amusing that every time there prediction turn out to be wrong, they have a whole new theory to account for it!
We had global cooling, global warming, global dimming and now this!
But we're sure it's happening! Lets screw over countries economies now, before it is too late, the world is ending, people are fleeing the rising ocean waters!
I am sorry, but this stinks of government funded scientist supporting a political agenda of radical liberal global wealth redistribution and big global government!
Posted by: Heather | May 3, 2008 01:40 PM
My cacti are loving the CO2 and the global warming. Anyone ever hear of Photosynthesis?
Posted by: David W. Diffenderfer | May 4, 2008 06:45 PM
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
(Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us)
*** http://www.australia.to/story/0,25197,23040466-937,00,00.html
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/04/17/02340.html
(NASA, PLANET X, Global Warming...)
*** Details in the book "Planet Eris and the Global Warming"(can be found at Amazon)
Posted by: cristian negureanu | May 5, 2008 05:18 AM
The headlines were not wrong. Although the paper does not provide any evidence that anthropogenic climate change has ceased to be a problem, the statement 'Global warming could stop naturally for ten years' is an accurate summary of the paper's thesis. Pielke's point that just about any short-term variation can be made to be in agreement with climate change predictions is a good one.
Posted by: Michael Hanlon | May 7, 2008 09:11 AM
Every day we hear the shocking news of melting of ice, vanishing glaciers and increase in the water level in the oceans. But do we make efforts to do save the environment from future turmoil and devastation. It is each one of us who can make the difference. I appreciate your efforts for focusing the world's attention by covering such issues. Even me too is trying to do the same. For more information check out http://discover-planet.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Aparana Chauhan | May 7, 2008 12:45 PM