Is It Getting Warmer?

American Geophysical Union - July 12, 2007

Well I guess the discussion is not closed and the science is not all that conclusive.  Sorry Mr. Gore.

This paper has gone over the last 100 years of climate changes and was able to map the various changes to natural phenomena and not human induced carbon dioxide output.  The paper is only available for a charge so I do not feel right in reproducing the text here but rather encourage you to invest $9 in downloading the paper.  I think you will find it to be quite interesting and very compelling.

I am not going to attest that the paper has closed the book on the global warming conversation. To me this is simply another data point that tells us we need more data points before we make trillion dollar investments. I repeat my call for more research to truly understand the causality of our current climate changes.

To give you an idea of the subject covered I have freely reprinted the editor’s highlights below.

In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the Northern hemisphere. After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ni�os and rising global temperatures began. Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.

To simplify this, Tsonis et al. (2007) investigated the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Ni�o?Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation. By studying the past 100 years of these cycles? patterns, they found that the systems synchronized several times.

Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Ni�o?Southern Oscillation variability.

The authors showed that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Ni�o variability in the twentieth century.

You can download the entire paper here.

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Filed under: Getting warmer, Natural, Weather science

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