Climate Change Insight: Impact of cooler oceans is only temporary

Researchers at UCLA in San Diego in the United States have just released research that shows that the cooling of eastern Pacific Ocean waters has been counteracting the warming effect of greenhouse gases. The impact from this natural variability in ocean cycles is responsible for the pause or “hiatus” in global warming over the last ten years. This is not a permanent effect and will end leading to a resumption in global warming as before.

The UCLA  study examines the tropical Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a climate cycle that occurs over the course of several decades. Within this large pattern are the El Niño and La Niña  cycles that cause shifts in the distribution of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. While El Niño and La Niña last only a few years, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation lasts several decades. The Oscillation has been in a cooling phase since 1998.

When the climate cycle that governs that ocean cooling reverses and begins warming again, the planet-wide direction toward higher temperatures will resume.

As the researchers have noted, before 2000, global temperatures had risen at a rate of 0.13C per decade since 1950. The hiatus in warming has happened while levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, continue rising steadily. In May 2013, carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in human history. This study does not refute climate change models, but only reinforces the understanding of the various dynamic forces at work in the environment.