The cause of the pause

Abstract

A global climate model that factors in the observed temperature of the surface ocean in the eastern equatorial Pacific offers an explanation for the recent hiatus in global warming. See Letter p.403 Global warming has largely stalled since the late 1990s, raising concerns regarding our understanding of climate sensitivity, the underlying mechanisms influencing climate variability and the ability of climate models to represent decadal variability. Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie show that the warming hiatus, including most of its seasonal and spatial aspects, can be resolved when observations of recently observed cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific are directly incorporated into a climate model. The results suggest that the current hiatus is a normal instance of internal climate variability, and that long-term warming is likely to resume as greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase.