May 1, 2008...5:48 pm
No global warming before 2015, German scientists predict, just as Wellington’s winter arrives
Breaking news
Just when I was getting used to the bad news that there has been no global warming since the big El Nino of 1998, German scientists say there won’t be any until 2015, after which temperatures will finally rise.
This predicted lull is because of natural variations in climate cancelling out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, say scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, in a paper published in Nature magazine and reported today in London’s Daily Telegraph.
Their study says the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions for a 0.3ºC temperature rise for the next decade may not happen. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: “The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.”
He stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades, and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.
According to the Telegraph, the IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.
According to the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, there has been no global warming since 1998.
The paper published in Nature tries to simulate the variability of these Gulf Stream and El Nino events and of longer cycles, such as the giant ocean “conveyor belt” known as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), which brings warm water north into the North East Atlantic.
“This has a 70 to 80-year cycle and when the circulation is strong, it creates warmer temperatures in Europe. When it is weak, as it will be over the next decade, temperatures fall. Scientists think that variations of this kind could partly explain the cooling of global average temperatures between the 1940s and 1970s after which temperatures rose again,” the Telegraph says.
Oh dear. And just when Wellington’s winter has arrived.
10 Comments
May 1, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Pft. Germans. What do they know?
May 1, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Hmmm, it’s an interesting paper (if you’d like a copy, let me know), but it states its conclusions very cautiously, and the reception to it is similarly tentative. Compare the reporting in the article with its breathless and misleading headline with the CSM’s in-depth reporting.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p25s01-wogi.html
And now for my response.
If there’s a break on warming for 10 years, we’re probably going to see less action to reduce emissions. We’ll continue to pile bricks on the accelerator while the handbrake is on.
May 1, 2008 at 8:21 pm
“According to the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, there has been no global warming since 1998.”
What does that mean? Where were the thermometers?
May 1, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Indeed, winter seems to be arriving early after our glorious summer.
I see snow is forecast for parts of the south island.
I certainly hope Dear Leader can keep the lights on.
The omens don’t seem good.
I wonder if it will ever snow in Auckland.
I heard tales it did around 1950 on the volcano tops.
May 1, 2008 at 10:55 pm
An important reminder that science is tentative. Only religion is certain.
May 2, 2008 at 8:12 am
“According to the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, there has been no global warming since 1998.”
Poneke, I look forward to reading your blog every morning, but statements on climate change, like the above, annoy the hell out of me. If you go to the Met Office Hadley Centre website you will find the following:
“A simple mathematical calculation of the temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1 °C per decade.”
and
“1998 saw an exceptional El Niño event which contributed strongly to that record-breaking year. Research shows that an exceptional El Niño can warm global temperatures by about 0.2 °C in a single year, affecting both the ocean surface and air temperatures over land.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/2.html
May 2, 2008 at 9:06 am
Perhaps coincidentally, NASA also reported:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-066
“The image also shows that this La Niña is occurring within the context of a larger climate event, the early stages of a cool phase of the basin-wide Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a long-term fluctuation of the Pacific Ocean that waxes and wanes between cool and warm phases approximately every five to 20 years. In the cool phase, higher than normal sea-surface heights caused by warm water form a horseshoe pattern that connects the north, west and southern Pacific, with cool water in the middle. During most of the 1980s and 1990s, the Pacific was locked in the oscillation’s warm phase, during which these warm and cool regions are reversed. For an explanation of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and its present state, see: http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/ and http://www.esr.org/pdo_index.html .”
So I think we have reached the third stage of any climate debate down the ages.. “The Buttered Cat Syndrome” (BCS)
Stage one was when it cooled in the 1970s and we were approaching an ice age. Then it warmed and we were going to fry.
Now with the BCS we are in mid air, spinning furiously.
JC
May 2, 2008 at 9:17 am
Malcolm,
True as long as its tentative as in “not fixed”, not tentative as in “speculative or sketchy, iffy”!
Tentative has a range of meanings that differ to a scientist, at least… Have to defend my patch…
So, with that excuse…
Initial publications in science are a proposed argument, that has yet to have the full review of scientists elsewhere. The point of publishing it is to allow others to explore the argument presented. And if necessary, bang it on the head and throw it in the rubbish bin.
The authors of a paper argue their case, but until its cross-examined by the scientific community, which can take time, it won’t be an “established” thing. (Another difference between science and (most) religions is that science welcomes improvements and revision. Hence the inverted quotes on ‘established’: its not an absolute thing in science.)
Returning to Malcom’s post, the things that are tentative (as in “unconfirmed, explorative, not established”) are the initial publications; confirmed science is much less so
One issue, for scientists at least, is that non-science literate media tends to present initial publications as the end of a line of study, i.e. as definitive findings, rather than a start of a line of enquiry, i.e. as an initial argument which might yet be rejected (or might be accepted, too).
It would be nice to see more use of specialist reporters with professional backgrounds in science who have a better idea of where a research paper stands… any takers for a “card carrying” scientist with interests in science communication?
(I’m not a climate scientist, so I’ll leave off-the-cuff commentary on this paper to those that are.)
May 2, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Yeah I’m one of those people who finds statements of the form “no year since 1998 has been as warm as 1998″ accurate but entirely inconclusive (if you look at the graph it is a model of unsteadiness). But
“no global warming since the big El Nino of 1998″ is basically meaningless. Global warming or otherwise is a matter of climate, measured over many years.
AFAIK the German research doesn’t say anything about the underlying trends one way or the other, really.
May 3, 2008 at 3:04 pm
As postulated by other notable scientific authorities and apparently due to natural variations in climate, the 0.3 deg C average global temperature predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not now eventuate, but rather in 2015 - precisely - will the warming once again start to be on the rise while all this time ever increasing man-made greenhouse gases theorized, as precisely as night follows day, to be the cause of global warming are being emitted. Simultaneously with this precise prediction, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre has tellingly told us that “…climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain…” There certainly appears to be a diverse opinion, as apposed to “the argument is over” from so many experts these days that seem to challenge the certainty that the earth is about to tip over into a climate disaster
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