Global Warming Has Slowed: Is This Good News?

This falls under the “This is not good news, but at least it’s not really bad news” category. Some of the latest research finds that global warming has slowed in the last ten years or so. Apparently the ever increasing temperatures of the nineties have leveled off, at least for a while. No one knows the cause of this slow down. The sun’s activity may have changed, or a lot of that heat may have gone into the ocean. It could very well be a combination of factors.

            This seems to be giving us a bit more breathing room to mitigate carbon emissions and make adaptations to warmer weather and higher sea levels. On the other hand, this leveling off could be temporary, and warming could resume to that rate that we experienced in the nineties. Or, in a worse case scenario, the earth could experience a “rubber band” effect, in which the present period of relatively slow warming gives way to accelerated warming as the atmosphere catches up to what has been predicted.

             The link where I found this news is from Scientific American, a publication that understands that science is complex and often comes to conclusions and observations that cannot fit into a simplistic model. It will be interesting to see how this discovery might play out in the popular press and the “think tanks” that do the PR work for energy companies and big business. I imagine that the narratives that these folks will give to this scientific work may vary from “Scientists Find That Global Warming Has Stopped” to “Climate Scientists Still Confused As Ever.”

            And that could be considered part of the “Bad News” of this story.

OK, Temperatures are rising more slowly. It's still hard to argue with the science. graph from NOAA