Michael Marshall, environment reporter
Global warming temporarily ground to a halt over the last 10 years, thanks to increased pollution from China, the El Niño system in the Pacific, and a slight drop in the energy Earth gets from the sun.
"Global warming stopped in 1998" is one of the most common reasons people offer for not believing in climate change. It certainly looks like a problem for anyone claiming that humanity's greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet: after all, we kept on pumping out carbon dioxide faster than ever, yet nothing happened to the temperature.
But according to the new analysis, various short-term factors can account for the slowdown. Most of those variables are going to change direction soon. So the halt in warming may be only temporary.
To find out if the slowdown could be explained, Robert Kaufmann of Boston University in Massachusetts and colleagues used a statistical model of the climate.
They took data collected between 1998 and 2008 on several factors that can affect the climate, including greenhouse gas emissions, incoming radiation from the sun, and sulphur pollution from burning coal and other industrial activities.
Then they plugged the information into their model, ran it for the 1998-2008 period, and asked: does it replicate what global temperatures actually did?
For full article:
No comments:
Post a Comment