For years, the world has been bombarded with numbers and predictions to support the idea of global warming.
However, in a report printed in The New York Times on Wednesday, world leaders who met at the United Nations on Sept. 22 are having difficulty building a worldwide climate treaty when “global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”
According to climate scientists, the average global temperature has only risen .13 degrees Farhenheit since 1999. This would lead the average person to believe that global warming is not as immediate a threat as we have been led to believe for the past decade or more.
Scientists say that the pattern for global temperatures in the last decade is merely “a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.”
Because of the plateau of temperatures worldwide during the past decade, and even global cooling trends in places like Antarctica, climate experts fear that their endeavors to reduce harmful air pollutants will be wasted.
Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Keil in Germany recently published a paper discussing the fact that “the cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continues to increase.”
However, there are many climate scientists that do not agree with Latif’s position. While many agree that a global cooling trend is inevitable sooner or later, they also are continuing to advocate the harmful effects of greenhouse gases.
While most climate scientists, according to the article, do stand by their projections for rising sea levels and other disruptive effects of global warming, they also agree that there is a one in eight chance of having a decade-long pause in global warming like we are currently experiencing.
So, will global warming continue to be a trendy subject in both political circles and the scientific community? I suppose the next few years will tell.
*Courtesy of The George-Anne
