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Cause of Global Warming 'Hiatus' Found Deep In the Atlantic
vinces99 writes with news about a study that may account for a slowdown in air temperature rises. Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published in Science. Subsurface ocean warming explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth's surface. "Every week there's a new explanation of the hiatus," said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. "Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause." What they found is that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.
Debunk this latest what? Latest gloss over to cover up horrible weather models. I seriously wish my full time job was debunking Anthropomorphic global climate change piggybackers
This is a common tactic I see on Slashdot: "How can Slashdot be praising x when they usually say y?"
The folks claiming that the "hiatus" is a denier hoax are not necessarily the same folks who published this paper.
Furthermore, the argument is not that "hiatus" is a denier hoax - any fool can see temperature readings have been flat in most measured areas. The counter-argument is typically that the Earth is really big and that surface measurements alone do not necessarily represent the amount of heat absorbed by the atmosphere. Where all of that heat has been going was where the speculation has been, with the usual supposition being "the ocean" or "the poles".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yet the climate buffoons ignore the oceans in their models.
OK, I am down on climate models, because they have poor accuracy, but come on, they don't ignore the oceans in their models. Check it out on Wikipedia at least before writing something.
You might be able to say that their handling of the oceans is incorrect, and if you have a good reason, such a post would be interesting, but scientists definitely aren't ignoring the oceans in their models, I don't even know why you would think that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
please link to an example of "sketchy science" that has been proved wrong by more solid, peer-reviewed science.
I know you're just smacking down a troll, but climate models have been over-estimating warming for years, as demonstrated by this science.
That's not to say that climate models are bad science, they are good science investigating the nature of the earth; but people who put too much faith in them without evidence were performing bad science.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sweet, I can't wait for next week's alternate explanation!
Go ahead "consensus" troll mods - do your worst to bury every skeptic questioning sketchy science on this story. Then go look in the mirror and call yourself a rational scientist.
Science is about skepticism. Even climatologists that support the theory of man influenced climate change are constantly questioning the data, and looking at alternate conjectures. The very article referenced explicitly states that many of the theories that were presented to explain why global surface temperatures in the last decade did not track the apparent heat load global warming induced were inadequate, and the subject of further inquiry like the research cited. That's how Science works. But Science doesn't discover all the facts instantly and doesn't advance in convenient textbook chapters. It isn't skepticism that tries to characterize Science as just a bunch of random guesses, one after the other. That's just ignorance of Science. Science works by incremental and sometimes studdering progress forward. There are lots of things we know with certainty. We know carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth's lower atmosphere. We know human activities have dramatically increased the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The net result is an increased amount of heat absorbed by the Earth. What precisely happens to that heat in all of the complex thermal systems on Earth is still not well understood. But that doesn't mean the core principles are just random guesses. We're still discovering how 19th century chemistry works, but no one thinks that new chemistry discoveries mean chemistry is left-wing conspiracy.
The history of scientific progress looks no different for any other subject than it looks for 21st century climatology. Our understanding of gravity, of the germ theory of infectious disease, of quantum mechanics all followed similar discovery and learning curves. The only difference is that general relativity and Schroedinger's equation aren't subjects politicians can effectively argue about.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy. When a scientist is skeptical of prevailing theories and conducts intellectually honest research aimed at probing that skepticism, that's always valuable. Science isn't a poll: if a scientific theory is correct, it will survive skeptical research. If its wrong, it will eventually be contradicted by the evidence. But when someone with no understanding of the facts or the research misinterprets the natural skepticism that is at the heart of scientific discovery by filtering it through their own "common sense" then they don't understand why science is successful overall, and really ought to shut up about it.
The "hiatus" isn't what people think - " this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface"
Note that the average temp is still rising even if more slowly than expected. But the entire planet doesn't warm or cool all at once.
During that "hiatus" the loss of ice cover, especially in the Arctic has been tremendous and that's noteworthy for 2 reasons.
The first is that the number of temperature monitoring stations in the Arctic is very poor. The other is that it takes a LOT of heat to melt ice - turning it to water at zero deg requires as much as raising room temp water to the boiling point.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
>Scientists in general and especially climate scientists and the IPCC, need to stay out of the public/political debate
yeah, let's leave the important decissions to lawyers and economists, and not to scientists and engineers. Now THAT would lead to a great society !
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years.
We don't have enough observations to ever begin to know what is "usual" in the first place.
Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record.
Even the longest records we have may well be a few orders of magnitude too short to be of much use here. That's before even considering issues of accuracy, when can even apply to records being currently collected.