Short Period Climate Variability

One of my frustrations with the climate science community has been a certain dodginess about the sources of short term climate variability - stuff like the more or less static behavior of global temperature over the past dozen years. So it was a big relief for me when Real Climate succeeded that stupid and defensive The IPCC is not infallible (shock!) headline with a new article on the recent paper by Solomon et. al. (I'm not so impressed by their headline for it either, but...).

Susan Solomon is a chemist and no newcomer to making important discoveries in atmospheric science. She was one of the first to unravel the connection between clorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole.

Her teams discovery this time is revealing the role that stratospheric water plays in regulating the atmospheric temperature. Water doesn't get to the stratosphere easily - it condenses out at lower levels - but the tiny amount that does get there keeps a significant amount of heat in. The stratosphere has been dry for the past decade, and that has played a role in slowing the temperature increase.

There is little reason to believe that this is likely to continue, though. The water in the stratosphere seems to be driven by a couple of processes - one of which is oxidation of methane, a green house gas likely to increase, and the other is lofting by very powerful tropical thunderstorms, which are likely to vary unpredictably.

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