"A particularly hot autumn and winter could add to the pressure on policy makers to reach a meaningful deal at December's climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen."
7/27/2009, "World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns," UK Guardian, Duncan Clark.
"The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun's activity
increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than
scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.
The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.
The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind's paper suggests. A particularly hot autumn and winter could add to the pressure on policy makers to reach a meaningful deal at December's climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.
Bob Henson, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said: "To claim that global temperatures have cooled since 1998 and therefore that man-made climate change isn't happening is a bit like saying spring has gone away when you have a mild week after a scorching Easter.""...via Tom Nelson
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UK Met Office 5 year citation:
7/22/13, "Global warming 'on pause' but set to resume," UK Telegraph, Nick Collins
"Surface temperatures around the world have not increased on average since the late 1990s, causing some sceptics to suggest that climate change is not happening as quickly as experts predict....
"The Met Office has predicted it could be another five years before surface temperatures begin to rise again, but said the current "pause" would not affect long-term global warming forecasts."...(parag. 5)
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1/18/13, “Climate change: scientists puzzle over halt in global warming,” Der Spiegel, by Axel Bojanowski (translation from German)
Chart by UK Met Office via Der Spiegel
"The exact reasons of the temperature standstill since 1998, are not yet understood, says climate researcher Doug Smith of the Met Office."...
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