Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling

By Y. Kosaka, Shang-Ping Xie. Nature, 2013

1,577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6030631be2b932fa63ed1e5cb5a758d14d9a8462

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Citations in the corpus

The Dependence of Global Cloud and Lapse Rate Feedbacks on the Spatial Structure of Tropical Pacific Warming (2018, background): “…responses in the climate system (e.g., Held et al. 2010; Li et al. 2013), unforced variability on annual to multidecadal time scales (e.g., Kosaka and Xie 2013; Dai et al. 2015), and temporal and spatial variations in anthropogenic forcing (e.g., Booth et al. 2012; Boo et al. 2015; Smith…”
Pantropical climate interactions (2019, background): “Systematic model errors in pantropical interactions may be in part responsible for the inability of models to simulate the recent global warming hiatus (20, 103), in which greenhouse warming was offset by a cooling trend in the tropical Pacific (11, 12).”
Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community (2015, background): “…et al., 2013; Haywood et al., 2014; Hawkins et al., 2014; Held, 2013; Huber and Knutti, 2014; Hunt, 2011; Kamae et al., 2014; Kaufmann et al., 2011; Kosaka and Xie, 2013; Laepple and Huybers, 2014; Lean and Rind, 2009; Lin et al., 2014; Lorentzen, 2014; Lovejoy, 2014; Lu et al., 2014; Macias…”
Global temperature evolution: recent trends and some pitfalls (2017, background): “…forcing data) it is possible to identify specific physical causes of temperature fluctuations, and this is a fruitful topic of ongoing climate research (Foster and Rahmstorf 2011, Kosaka and Xie 2013, England et al 2014, Suckling et al 2016) which helps us to understand natural climate variability.”
Plant phenology and global climate change: Current progresses and challenges (2019, background): “…periods (i.e., since the early 2000s), the slowdown of climate warming has been prevalently observed across most of the globe (Easterling & Wehner, 2009; Kosaka & Xie, 2013), rendering a stall or reversal in SOS trends across the NH (Barichivich et al., 2013; Jeong et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2015).”
Combination Mode Dynamics of the Anomalous Northwest Pacific Anticyclone (2015, methodology): “Because the observed SSTs are partly forcing and partly solution in the coupled system, a number of previous studies (Lau et al. 2005; Lau and Nath 2006; Lee et al. 2008; Kucharski et al. 2007; Lu et al. 2011; Lee et al. 2013; Kosaka et al. 2013; Kosaka and Xie 2013) utilized the PARCP technique, in”
Causes of climate change over the historical record (2019, background): “…and eastern Pacific associated with the transition to a negative Interdecadal PacificOscillation phase (Zhang et al 1997, Power et al 1999) coincident with the early-2000s hiatus (Kosaka and Xie 2013, England et al 2014), and the high-latitude Southern Ocean (Armour et al 2016, Jones et al 2016).”