Waning Warming Puzzles Proponents

Global warming appears to have stalled, according to scientists interviewed in the November 19 issue of Spiegel Online. “Climatologists are baffled by Global Warming Time-out” is the headline.

Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research calculated that there has been no rise in global temperature this decade. “Warming is taking a break,” according to meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Scientists in Kiel, Germany.

While temperatures warmed considerably in the Arctic, they declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific, and the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Hadley Center and a NASA team from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies have arrived at a flat temperature curve for at least 5 years.

A lack of sunspots and ocean currents are considered two possible answers to this puzzle, though the predictive value of climate models is also being called into question. “We don’t really know why the stagnation is taking place at this point,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.