Justin Gillis for the NYTimes writes definitively on "the lull" in the rate of increase of global temperatures. It's confident writing that coolly savors the ironies of the crisis, even as it depicts the news with jaw-dropping facts. Speaking of the leveling out of global mean temperatures in the last fifteen years, he writes:
What to make of it all?
We certainly cannot conclude, as some people want to, that carbon dioxide is not actually a greenhouse gas. More than a century of research thoroughly disproves that claim.
In fact, scientists can calculate how much extra heat should be accumulating from the human-caused increases in greenhouse gases, and the energies involved are staggering. By a conservative estimate, current concentrations are trapping an extra amount of energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding across the face of the earth every day.
So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean.
Another suspect is medium-sized volcanoes (and this story mentions Asian air pollution). Many climatologists, such as Bill Patzert, would point to the recent shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as a factor that tends to result in dryness and cold, and tends to hold down the rise in the global mean.
Surely the final result will be a mix of these factors.
But what a terrific story by Gillis.
Kit Stolz 