news story (Jeff Tollefson): http://www.nature.com/news/tropical-ocean-key-to-global-warming-hiatus-1.13620
A new study adds to mounting evidence that cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean is the cause of the global warming hiatus, a slow-down in the rise of average temperatures that began around 1998.
The eastern equatorial Pacific is well known to have an outsize influence on global weather. Years-long ocean trends such as El Niño and La Niña cause alternate warming and cooling of the sea surface there, with effects on monsoons and temperatures around the world. Now a modelling study by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, indicates that a decadal La Niña-like cooling trend affecting as little as 8% of Earth’s surface can explain the slower rise in global temperatures.
“The equatorial Pacific cooling turns out to be strong enough to offset the general rise in temperature induced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate modeller at Scripps and co-author of the study, which is published today inNature1. Just as importantly, he says, the model helps to explain regional trends that seem to defy the global warming hiatus, including record-breaking heat in the United States last year, and the continued decline of Arctic sea ice.
New Kosaka and Xie paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12534 (link is not live yet as I write)
related paper in press: http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/users/xie/long-slow-jc14.pdf
related and consistent work by Rahmstorf :
Chris Mooney’s “explainer”:
There’s more in the pipeline; P3 will update as it becomes available.
Australian Science Media Centre: http://www.smc.org.au/2013/08/round-up-why-global-warming-has-paused-nature-experts-respond/
Here’s John Abraham’s post about his paper.
And here’s Fiona Harvey’s article about the Nature paper for the Guardian.
The confuse-o-sphere weighs in:
Judith Curry whose “mind has been blown”: