This is one of the best mainstream articles I have seen trying to make sense of the point: Why are we not warming? It is rare to see work that tries to cover this much detail and nuance. The great global warming debate might finally be beginning?
GWPF has a translation. Axel Bojanowski has managed to capture a concept that even if global warming has just stalled temporarily — the debate about why it has stalled is revealing in its own right. As I said in the Skeptics Handbook, “something out there affects our climate more than CO2 and none of the computer models knows what it is”.
Researchers Puzzled About Global Warming Standstill
- Date: 18/01/13 Axel Bojanowski, Spiegel Online
How dramatically is global warming really? NASA researchers have shown that the temperature rise has taken a break for 15 years. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why global warming has stalled. However, the number of guesses also shows how little the climate is understood.
Bojanowski calls “NASA scientists” on their predictions:
…it has become common knowledge for some time that the climate has recently developed differently than predicted. The warming has stalled for 15 years; the upward trend in the average global temperature has not continued since 1998 (sic). “The standstill has led to the suggestion that global warming has stopped,” NASA admit.
IPCC meeting
Scientists previously thought 14 years without further warming could be brought into line with their forecasts – but not “15 years or more,” as NASA scientists stated four years ago in the journal “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society”. In an email to colleagues a renowned scientist wrote on 7 May 2009, at a time when the warming standstill had already lasted for eleven years: “the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.”
Now, 15 years without warming has happened. The warming standstill of the global surface temperature shows that the uncertainties of climate predictions are surprisingly large. The interested public anxiously awaits whether the IPCC’s new Assessment Report, which is due in September, will address the warming pause – the discussions are ongoing in Australia’s Hobart. The researchers are discussing several cogent reasons that might have slowed the upward trend of temperatures.
Bojanowski does an impressive job: was it the oceans absorbing the heat? Was it the stratosphere; the aerosols over Asia, or the currents in the Pacific? Could it be the influence of solar radiation on clouds, or the influence of water vapor.
Researchers Puzzled About Global Warming Standstill
H/t To Brigid. 🙂