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Global Warming Myths: Is This 'Pause' Real or Fake?
A global warming pause, also known as a global warming stagnation or deceleration, is a period of time when global mean surface temperatures change relatively little. In the current global warming event, there appear to be multiple 15-year short-term periods of change, but at the same time, the long-term warming trend remains evident. Among these topics revisited by the government and the media, the moratorium on global warming between 1998 and 2013 is particularly prominent, triggering widespread attention and controversy.
Some studies have pointed out that although the entire climate system is still accumulating energy, the temperature of the earth's surface is increasing more slowly than in the previous decade.
1998 was an abnormal year because the El Niño phenomenon that year caused the temperature to rise abnormally, which caused the temperature in the following years to appear to have paused. The "pause" discussion that emerged a few years later made some scholars believe that global warming seems to have stopped. A 2011 study shed light on this problem, finding that warming trends persisted once known variability was taken into account.
In the discussion about this phenomenon, the IPCC report also mentioned that the temperature changes from 1998 to 2012 were insignificant compared to the long-term trend during the 60-year period.
With the brief slowdown that occurred between 1998 and 2012, many scholars tended to explain it as natural variability in the climate system. During this time, Earth's overall climate system is still absorbing energy, which should further increase temperatures. A July 2015 study analyzing an updated NOAA data set showed there was no pause in global warming, and early data showed no signs of slowing down.
Even if subsequent research found that the warming between 2001 and 2010 was indeed lower than climate model predictions, this still did not support the pause.
As for the climate pause, some scholars have suggested that one of the possible reasons is that the "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" (PDO) showed negative values during this period, which affected the heat transfer of the ocean and thus affected the overall climate trend. Relevant studies emphasize that the overall global warming trend has not been significantly interrupted since the 1970s, and the short-term slowdown will not affect the overall long-term warming trend.
Some climate scientists question the lack of sufficient evidence for the so-called "pause" and stress that the pause will still exist even if the data is revised.
As temperatures reached another peak in 2015 and 2016, many voices began to fade away. A January 2017 study further dismissed the recent moratorium and pointed to an underestimation of ocean temperatures. As new data continues to emerge, it seems that the scientific community has a new understanding of the "pause" phenomenon in global warming.
Climatologists note that the pause in surface temperatures has not affected sea level rise and Arctic sea ice loss, which are still changing. The repeated record-setting of extreme temperatures is also confirmed by this change.
Thinking about the future
The pause in global warming is not only a hot topic in the scientific community, but also one of the focuses of public discussion. In this series of research and data updates, can we truly understand the complexity of global warming and find effective ways to deal with climate change?
