No more pause: Warming will be non-stop from now on
by Michael Slezak
Enjoy the pause in global warming while it lasts, because it's probably the last one we will get this century. Once temperatures start rising again, it looks like they will keep going up without a break for the rest of the century, unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
The slowdown in global warming since 1997 seems to be driven by unusually powerful winds over the Pacific Ocean, which are burying heat in the water. But even if that happens again, or a volcanic eruption spews cooling particles into the air, we are unlikely to see a similar hiatus, according to two independent studies.
Masahiro Watanabe of the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues have found that, over the past three decades, the natural ups and downs in temperature have had less influence on the planet's overall warmth. In the 1980s, natural variability accounted for almost half of the temperature changes seen. That fell to 38 per cent in the 1990s and just 27 per cent in the 2000s.
Instead, human-induced warming is accounting for more and more of the changes from year to year, says Watanabe. With ever-faster warming, small natural variations have less impact and are unlikely to override the human-induced warming.
more
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26122-no-more-pause-warming-will-be-nonstop-from-now-on.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Emissions may keep rising for a while, but they seem to suggest that hiatuses will likely suddenly stop existing at all(or at least become much shorter) if we hit a certain threshold by 2030. Here's the problem: this seems to assume a rather linear warming scenario.....which hasn't exactly panned out in real life, as we've all seen, for those of us who've actually looked at the data.
So I think it's safe to say that the jury's still out on this for now. 
The article says that AGW will increase enough to supersede natural variations. The "hiatus" took advantage of the fact that 1998 was an unusually hot year in the atmosphere. Beware of all climate studies that begin with 1998.
Jury went home already. 
--imm
Yes, I do realize that natural variations will be superseded at some point; just so we're clear, I wasn't arguing against that at all.
But, TBH, this is the first time I've ever heard it claimed that hiatuses will just suddenly become much smaller or stop altogether once we hit a certain threshold. I suppose it may be theoretically possible, but it's also clear that much more research is needed to support this particular hypothesis.
To be sure, the heat has to go somewhere. 
--imm
Just thought I'd point that out. Not often we dip down in the 70s for daily highs, in late July of all times of the year. But I guess it does give a little credence to the idea of "global weirding".
Response to rickyhall (Reply #3)
But there's definitely been some weirding as well; this July was one of the mildest, overall, that I can remember, here in D/FW. Sure as heck beats what we had to put up with in 2011, IMO.
