Nature Geoscience: Pacific Trade Winds Can Rapidly Move Stored Ocean Heat To Atmosphere

[hatrack]

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A cryptic chemical weather log kept by Tarawa Atoll’s stony coral in the tropical Pacific archipelago has been cracked, helping scientists explain a century of peaks and troughs in global warming — and inflaming fears that a speedup will follow the recent slowdown. Added to a growing body of research, the newly published findings indicate that all it would take to trigger what could be a historically unparalleled period of rising global temperatures would be a shift in the winds. And that type of change in the intensity of Pacific trade winds appears to happen every 20 to 30 years or so.

The coral-based findings, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, provide new historical data supporting previous modeling results and observations that point to the long-term waxing and waning pattern of the trade winds in affecting worldwide temperatures.

For the past few decades, the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, as the influential cycle is known, has been in what’s called a negative phase, meaning trades winds have been strong.
The growing body of scientific evidence indicates that this negative phase has played a heavy role in driving an approximately 15-year old slowdown in worldwide surface warming. It suggests that a speedup in warming may follow the next switch to the oscillation’s positive phase, when trade winds weaken, and the effects of the natural cycle exacerbate those of unnaturally increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Diane Thompson, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who led the study published Monday, said we’re in a surface warming slowdown right now because the Pacific trade winds are strong. But she says that apparent bout of good fortune won’t last forever. “When winds weaken, which they inevitably will, warming will once again accelerate,” Thompson said. “The warming caused by greenhouse gases and the warming associated with this natural cycle will compound one another.”

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http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2014/12/pacific-trade-winds-have-forced-heat.html

[bloomington-lib]

1. Those winds needs to weaken sooner rather than later for all of our sakes.

The general population will keep sleeping until something jolts us awake. I'd rather have that jolt now, than when CO2 gets higher, producing an even hotter and more dangerous jolt.