Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri
The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle
A new study published in the journal Nature incorporates temperature changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean into an advanced climate model, and finds that the model can reproduce observed global surface temperature changes remarkably well.
Importantly, as authors Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography explain, accounting for the changes in the Pacific Ocean allows the model to reproduce the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years. It also accurately reproduces the regional and seasonal changes in surface temperatures, which adds confidence that their results are meaningful.
"Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to La-Niña-like decadal cooling … For the recent decade, the decrease in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature has lowered the global temperature by about 0.15 degrees Celsius compared to the 1990s".
Despite only covering 8.2 percent of the Earth's surface, these results suggest that the tropical Pacific Ocean plays a major role in short-term changes in the average global surface temperature. And over the past 15 years, it's offset most of the global surface warming from the increased greenhouse effect.
These results are broadly consistent with several other important recent papers investigating the role of the oceans in global warming. For example, the model used in this study finds that the overall heating of the planet has not slowed when the warming of the oceans are taken into account, as studies led by John Abraham, myself, and several others have also concluded.
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The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | theguardian.com
