Global warming has never stopped in the past hundred years, with maximum rate of change occurring after Second World War II, according to a study.
“Our study suggests that future climate conditions will likely rely on competition between multidecadal cooling and global warming if the multidecadal climate cycle repeats,” said Xingang Dai from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Global warming has been attributed to persistent increases in atmospheric greenhouse gasses (GHGs), especially in CO2, since 1870, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The upward trend in global mean surface temperature (GMST) slowed or even paused during the first decade of the twenty-first century, even though CO2 levels continued to rise and reached nearly 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2013.
This episode has typically been termed the global warming hiatus or slowdown in warming. The hiatus is characterised as a near-zero trend over a period.
Detection found that the hiatus appeared during 2001-2013/2002-2012 with extremely weak inter-annual variability in some GMST sequences, and the slowdown in the others, researchers said.
The hiatus is often attributed to internal climate variability, external forcing, or both, involving an increase in aerosols in the stratosphere during the period 2000-2010, they said.
The phase saw Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) accompanying intensified trade winds, extensive heat uptake by the deep ocean or an extremely low number of sunspots during the latest solar activity cycle.
The new study reveals that the global warming has never stopped in the past hundred years, with maximum rate of change after Second World War II and almost constant rate during the latest three decades. (PTI)
