Unfortunately for people desperate to see a return to a warming world (for instance at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, dependent on global warming for its raison d’être) there’s a third powerful mechanism in play: the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, which varies up and down on long timescales. A natural phenomenon called El Nino is set to combine with the effects of greenhouse gases to push temperatures to record levels. The new findings marks an end of more than a decade, in which the pace of warming worldwide appeared to slow down, the report said.
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El Nino is the warming of the Pacific Ocean, which increases the world’s temperature and causes dramatic weather events. “If this continues, 2015 will likely be warmer than any other year in the observational record”, the report updates on Monday read.
Data shows 2015 is set to be warmer than 2014, which was already the warmest year on record.
The Met Office’s Professor Adam Scaife said the Earth’s climate system is at a “turning point”, with several global changes occurring at once.
That’s the bold claim of the Met Office, which said that El Nino could be responsible for heating the world overall.
The report came over two months before a meeting in Paris, where representatives and negotiators from nearly 200 countries will gather to hammer out a United Nations deal in an effort to curb global climate change. Now, according to the Met Office report, all the signs are that the pause in rising air temperatures is over and the rate of global warming will accelerate fast in coming years. “With the potential that next year could be similarly warm, it’s clear that our climate continues to change”. In its place, as a result of natural climate cycles, more of the captured heat was stored in the oceans. “So, when the El Nino comes and raises the global temperature, that is the icing on the cake, that is the extra bit that creates a record”.
“A lot of these things can happen without the control of human beings”.
The natural weather deviations were just the “icing on the cake”, according to Prof Scaife, which aggravate the issues of human activities which deposits greenhouse gasses in the environment. A rapid AMO decline could therefore maintain the current slowdown in global warming…
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So the researchers can say that changes in the Atlantic mean Europe is likely to get slightly cooler and drier summers for a decade – but only if the Atlantic signal is not overridden by the Pacific signal.
