Global warming has paused, and escalate the pace in the near future
Over the past 15 years have seen a strange thing. On the one hand, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to grow rapidly due to the fact that people continue to burn fossil fuels: in May 2013 for the first time in human history, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceed 400 parts per million.
On the other hand, despite the fact that in some areas there is now abnormally warm weather, global average temperature stopped rising. The experts, who deny the phenomenon of climate change, immediately seized upon this fact and stated that, contrary to the findings by leading scientific academies around the world, greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere are causing global warming.
But, as it turns out, the truth is actually much darker. A pair of scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps Instituion of Oceanography) found that the main global warming simply masked the natural variations in the temperature of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, called El Niño cycle. As each cycle ends, the warming of the planet again to continue in the same pace.
Climate scientists have speculated on the possibility that the Southern Oscillation El Niño (El Nino-Southern Oscillatio, ENSO), as it is known in scientific circles, may underlie the apparent pause in warming. As part of its new research Kosaka Yu (Yu Kosaka) and Pin-Shan Hsieh (Shang-Ping Xie) first attempted to quantify the role of the temperature of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean in halting global warming. In their study, the results of which were published Aug.
28 in the journal Nature, scientists have used climate models to show that the abnormally low temperature of surface waters observed in the Pacific since 1998, explain the pause in global warming.
Why in the last 15 years, the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean were anomalously cold? As part of natural cycles wide strip of ocean off the west coast of South America is much warmer in some years (this is called El Niño events) and much colder in others (La Niña events). Scientists still do not fully understand why this happens, but they know that in warmer years indicators of atmospheric pressure over the Indian Ocean and Australia are growing, and over the eastern Pacific - are reduced.
As wind moves from areas of high pressure in the low pressure zone, this leads to the fact that trade winds change its direction of movement is reversed and start blowing from west to east. With them they bring the warm water, thus causing the events of El Niño. In other years, the reverse process occurs, which causes the La Niña event.
As it turned out, since 1998, the lower the water temperature of the Pacific Ocean dominate the overall warming.
According to Kosaka and Hsieh, this is what has caused the suspension of the growth in global average temperatures, which has surprised many. To reach this conclusion, they have developed a climate model, the center of which - in addition to factors such as changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide and natural variations in the solar cycle - is temperature cycle surface waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Usually in the climate models used by the radiation warming - changing the balance between the amount of energy absorbed by the planet, and the amount of energy radiated back into space, that is influenced by emissions of carbon dioxide - as input, but when a pair of researchers have tried to do it, she found that their model predicted a much more significant increase in temperatures over the last 15 years than it was in reality. However, when the researchers took into account the influence of anomalously cold water in the eastern Pacific, the temperatures predicted by the model, in line with the actual temperatures obtained during the observations.
In the presence of these models climatic cold water over large areas (Pacific area is almost 8.2% of the total surface of the earth) leads to the absorption of heat from the atmosphere and thus to slow warming process. If the scientists' predictions are correct, over the last decade the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean caused decline in the average temperature of the planet by about 0.27 degrees, balancing the impact of the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and causing a temporary pause in warming.
This is not the only climatic phenomenon, which affects the process of global warming in general. Last week, another group of scientists came to the conclusion that in 2010 and 2011, severe flooding in Australia has slowed down the rise in sea level, which might be expected, judging from the pace of melting glaciers and thermal expansion of ocean waters. In many cases, it appears that the complex dynamics of the planet's climate systems can mask the basic process of warming caused by human activity.
However, the warming continues, and the main conclusion drawn by a pair of scientists, was quite sad: the temperature of water in the Pacific Ocean, in the end, will come back to normal, and the process of global warming continues. Scientists do not know exactly when it will happen, but according to the observations of the Pacific held its cycle in about 10 years, which means that the period of extremely low temperatures of the Pacific Ocean will soon come to an end.
The sad thing is that, as the results of the study are extremely sharp warming that has been observed in recent years in some areas - including the U.S. - is only part of warming that lies ahead, taking into account the volumes of carbon dioxide, which we threw into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, other areas that have not yet experienced the effects of global warming have every chance to feel the effects of high temperatures in the near future.
in the wake of Why Global Warming Has Paused-And Why It Will Soon Start Up Again, inosmi.ru
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