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Climate science

Pacemakers of warming

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 87–89 (2015)Cite this article

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Earth warmed rapidly. A coral-based climate proxy record of westerly winds over the equatorial Pacific suggests that wind strength and warming rate were linked, as they are today.

Whenever climate takes an unexpected turn, a look at the past is warranted. The slowdown of global warming since around 2000 thus prompts analyses of previous episodes of slow or accelerated warming. Among these phases is the early twentieth-century warming, a poorly understood period of relatively rapid warming of global average temperatures between about 1900 and 1945. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Thompson et al.1 suggest that this early phase of fast warming was closely linked to frequent strong bursts of westerly winds over the equatorial Pacific, a pattern opposite in sign to that diagnosed for the early 2000s when global warming slowed down unexpectedly.

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Figure 1: Variable warming rates.

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  1. Stefan Brönnimann is at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research and Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland

    Stefan Brönnimann

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  1. Stefan Brönnimann
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Correspondence to Stefan Brönnimann.

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Brönnimann, S. Pacemakers of warming. Nature Geosci 8, 87–89 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2330

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