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Oceanography

Leading the hiatus research surge

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 345–346 (2016)Cite this article

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The recent slowdown in global warming challenged our understanding of climate dynamics and anthropogenic forcing. An early study gave insight to the mechanisms behind the warming slowdown and highlighted the ocean's role in regulating global temperature.

The rate at which global mean surface temperature (GMST) was increasing slowed down during 1998–2012 by a factor of 2 compared with the preceding 15-year periods. This was despite a comparable rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The apparent inconsistency between the unabated intensification of anthropogenic forcing and the early-2000s surface-warming hiatus has generated intense scientific and political debates1. Early on, internal variability emerged as a plausible hypothesis — climate models produce decade-long hiatus periods2, albeit usually not at the observed timing.

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Figure 1: Ocean–atmospheric trends during hiatus periods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shang-Ping Xie is at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0206, USA,

    Shang-Ping Xie

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  1. Shang-Ping Xie
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Correspondence to Shang-Ping Xie.

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Xie, SP. Leading the hiatus research surge. Nature Clim Change 6, 345–346 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2973

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2973

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