Has Global Warming Stopped or Slowed?
Recent lulls in global air temperature warming has led people to ask if the rise in temperatures has stopped or slowed down. In this video by
Earth Vision Trust, Jerry Meehl, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explains the data that shows our global temperature is, indeed, increasing.
Earth Vision Trust is a nonprofit founded by National Geographic photographer and grantee James Balog that seeks to educate and inspire the public through innovative visual exploration of the changing environment.
Read more about the "Global Warming Pause" here.The
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Jerry Meehl
Climatologist
National Center for Atmospheric Research
I think it’s interesting about this job, it’s kind of like being a detective. The detective goes through this process of collecting evidence. And they're trying to get data that supports a theory that they may have, and in the end they have to take it into a judge and a jury and try to convince the jury that this is what actually happened. I said this is exactly how science works.
Why is the climate warming up? Interesting question. OK, let’s find evidence for the various reasons why that could be happening. It’s really detective work, and building up evidence, looking at evidence, put it all together and try to make sense out of it at the end.
People have noticed that for the first decade of this century, the warming trend over that decade has been very small. So people say global warming has stopped. And I say, well if only you were right about that. It would be great if global warming stopped, but it hasn’t stopped, the heat has just been going into different places.
So when we have pauses in warming, like what we’ve experienced over the last 10 years or so, what happens is that the ocean circulation takes that heat and puts it in different places. So when we don’t see warming at the surface, it’s warming up in the deeper ocean.
Global warming isn’t just a steady rise in temperature, it’s kind of up and down, and it’s kind of like stair steps. So it will warm up rapidly and then level off for a while. But over a century you’ll see a gradual increase in temperature over time.
Say there was no burning of any coal, oil or natural gas. And you think oh, the problem would stop. Not that simple, because the oceans take a long time to respond to any change. And so even if you stopped today, the oceans would still kind of keep warming up. Say you’re in a car, and you’re driving down the highway. All of a sudden a stop sign appeared in front of you. You step on the brakes, the car does not stop instantaneously. It takes a while to see the change once you’ve decided you’re actually going to stop.
In the end it does make a difference as to what we do. If we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we know that we can stabilize climate. We can get to a level that we can kind of live with. If we don’t do anything it’ll just keep warming up indefinitely.
I tend to be hopeful. There’s still time to do something and go to other energy sources that will actually affect future generations, 100 to 200 years from now. If we do nothing we get a lot of climate change and a lot of really bad things happen and the choices we make now can really make a difference. I really think at some point we’re going to make right choices and stabilize the climate at levels that we can live with.
