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4/7/13, "Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade," Nature Climate Change Letter, Nature.com
Virginie Guemas, Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, Isabel Andreu-Burillo & Muhammad Asif
"Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the
Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the
2000–2010 period1. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer2, 3
has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage.
Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar
minimum4, the stratospheric water vapour5, the stratospheric6 and tropospheric aerosols7.
However, a robust attribution of this warming slowdown has not been
achievable up to now. Here we show successful retrospective predictions
of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which
allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in
ocean heat uptake. Sensitivity experiments accounting only for the
external radiative forcings do not reproduce the slowdown. The
top-of-atmosphere net energy input remained in the [0.5–1] W m−2
interval during the past decade, which is successfully captured by our
predictions. Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 m of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65%
of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence
point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming
slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only
strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but
also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal
climate predictions."...via Climate Depot, via Junk Science
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