By Michael Hopkin, The Conversation, who interviewed Steve Rintoul from CSIRO, Richard Allan Professor of Climate Science at University of Reading, and Mathew England a Climatologist at University of New South Wales.
The “pause” in global warming since 2001 can be explained by the discovery of unusually strong winds in the Pacific, climatologists have found.
Global surface air temperatures have more or less flatlined since the turn of the century, prompting some observers to claim that the planetary warming trend has stopped. But the new research, published in Nature Climate Change, shows how stronger winds have driven the excess heat down into the ocean.
Researchers led by Matthew England, a professor of climatology at the University of New South Wales, began by looking at the differences between the 1990s, when Earth’s surface was strongly warming, and the 2000s, after the hiatus began.
Previous research has already shown that cooler temperatures over the eastern Pacific are linked to a slowdown in worldwide warming, but researchers wanted to know why.
