A new climate model developed by Yale scientists puts the "global warming hiatus" into a broader historical context and offers a new method for predicting global mean temperature.
Research by professor Alexey Fedorov and graduate student Shineng Hu indicates that weak El Niño activity from 1998 until 2013, rather than a pause in long-term global warming, was the root cause for slower rates of increased surface temperature. The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, also finds that volcanic activity played only a minor role.
"Our main conclusion is that global warming never went away, as one might imply from the term 'global warming hiatus,'" said Fedorov, who has conducted extensive research on the oceans' role in climate. "The warming can be masked by inter-annual and decadal natural climate variability, but then it comes back with a vengeance."
El Niño events contribute to year-to-year variations in global mean temperature by modulating the heat that is released from tropical oceans into the atmosphere, the researchers noted. That is, El Niño warms the atmosphere, while the cold phase of the phenomenon, La Niña, cools the atmosphere.
Multiple strong El Niño events occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. This was followed by much weaker El Niño activity, which lasted until 2014.
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