Rutger's English Blogg

 

More and more people are now saying that the climate is not getting varmer as previously thought. The Magazine "The Economist" summarizes this and refers to researchers that earlier warned of global warming and now acknowledge, as James Hansen, that the temperature is on the same level despite that the emissions of carbon dioxide still continue in large scale. Other researchers have published reports that says that climate sensitivity is not so great as we previously thought.

 

From th Economist:

"The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining..........

A recent paper by Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences links temperature changes from 1750 to natural changes (such as sea temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean) and suggests that “the anthropogenic global-warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century.” It is possible, therefore, that both the rise in temperatures in the 1990s and the flattening in the 2000s have been caused in part by natural variability."

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

 

In other words: The human contribution to climate change is smaller than we thought. This also emerged earlier this year in an interview with the researchers working on the next IPCC report. They also talked about natural fluctuations.
See "Picture of the Day" and Blog for January 16.