Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

The (continuing?) 21st century hiatus in the rise of global mean temperature has generated political interest and a flood of papers in flagrant disproportion to its puny size. It is telling, however, that the IPCC models failed to warn that such a thing was possible. In this talk I will endorse the explanation that the cause of this pause is to be found in the Pacific Ocean, specifically the surprisingly (?) cool eastern equatorial Pacific. Next, we consider if this hiatus could have been predicted. Then we look at the causes of the Pacific decadal variations. It certainly seems that they can arise from physics internal to the coupled climate system, but this does not eliminate the possibility that they are influenced by forcing external to the earth’s climate system. We explore this within a coupled model simulation of the last millennium.