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EVEN a cloud of pollution has a silver lining. Global warming temporarily ground to a halt over the last 10 years because of increased pollution from countries like China, coupled with trends in the El Ni帽o system.
Although we keep on pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, between 1998 and 2008 global temperatures held steady.
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To try to explain why, Robert Kaufmann at Boston University and colleagues took data collected between 1998 and 2008 on several factors that can affect the climate, including greenhouse gas emissions, sulphur pollution from burning coal, levels of incoming radiation from the sun, and the El Ni帽o Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 鈥� a cyclical change in the behaviour of the Pacific Ocean.
When they plugged the information into a statistical model, they found that it predicted steady global temperatures for the period (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
But ENSO, which has seen the Pacific take heat from the atmosphere for a decade, will soon swing back to warming the air again. And China, a heavy consumer of coal over the decade, is planning to cut pollution from its coal power plants, so the plateau looks to be temporary.
鈥淭he Pacific has taken heat from the atmosphere for a decade, but it will soon swing back the other way鈥�