The Earth’s atmosphere won’t warm up as fast in the next few decades as climate scientists have been claiming because global warming has hit an unexplained standstill.
Since 1998, the atmosphere hasn’t heated up much as climate researchers had predicted which has caused a group of researchers to modify their predictions for the next few decades.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that the short-term temperature from 2000-2009 would most likely rise by 1.8-5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, but a new group of researchers are reporting that the rise was probably only by 1.62-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, according a report in Nature Geoscience.
In comparison, the 1990s saw a probable rise of between 1.62-5.58 degrees Fahrenheit.
The reason the measurements are given in ranges is because they are made based on what would happen to the Earth’s average temperature if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled.
Because the 2000s didn’t heat up as much as expected, the scientists writing in Nature Geoscience are predicting that global average temperature will rise 20% slower than had been expected over the next few decades.
“The hottest of the models in the medium-term, they are actually looking less likely or inconsistent with the data from the last decade alone,” said Dr Alexander Otto from the University of Oxford.
Even though the short and medium term are looking less bleak than had been predicted, the climate change projections over the long term have not been affected by the most recent “standstill.”
“We would expect a single decade to jump around a bit but the overall trend is independent of it, and people should be exactly as concerned as before about what climate change is doing,” said Dr Otto.