Will we get a break from global warming?

Increasingly, in recent decades the world has been setting new temperature records.

According to a new study released on 1 May in the international journal “Nature”, temperatures may stop increasing for the next decade.

This is a natural climate fluctuation in the expected long-term warming trend over the coming decade.

This is what climate researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany now believe.

Previous papers on global climate change, such as in the last report of the UN Climate Council in 2007, predicted future atmospheric greenhouse gas developments that would continue to increase temperatures.

This global warming was expected to worsen up until the end of the present century.

The new research suggests the short-term development in the coming few years sees natural climate variability, especially on the fluctuations in ocean currents.

The previous absence of such measurements had prevented scientists from predicting shorter term fluctuations.

Scientists at the IFM GEOMAR and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology have now developed a method of measuring ocean currents and combining that with the sea surface temperatures, which have been documented for the last 50 years.

When this additional current information is integrated with the climate models the short-term natural climate variability can be predicted.

Therefore refined forecasts suggest that the global warming trends for the next few years, slows down considerably.

Emmy Noether and fellow author Dr. Noel Keenlyside, IFM GEOMAR explained further that they used a climate model, in addition to the greenhouse gas concentrations, observed sea surface temperature, and an approach that they had been successful in the seasonal forecast of the El Niño effect, to calculate their predictions.

The sea temperatures affect the winds and the heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere, and both factors in turn affect the ocean currents.

The results are very encouraging and show that in addition to the global mean temperature for at least some regions of the world possible, natural climate variability can be predicted.