Global warming will speed up in the next decade and at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year on record, reported a UK team of scientists in their climate predictions.
The next-decade prediction results by scientists at Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the UK is published Thursday in the U.S. academic journal Science.
The team has improved the forecasting skill of a global climate model by incorporating information about the actual state of the ocean and the atmosphere, rather than the approximate ones most models use.
The new model predicts that warming will slow during the next few years but then speed up again, and that at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998.
A common criticism of global climate models, particularly for predicting the coming decade, has been that they only include factors, such as solar radiation, atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases, which are affected by changes from outside the climate system.
Likewise, they neglect internal climate variability that arises from natural changes within the system, like El Nino, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in ocean heat content.
These phenomena could lead to short-term changes, especially regionally, that are quite different from the mean warming expected over the next century resulting from human activities.
Doug Smith and colleagues at Hadley Center used a modeling system that predicts both internal variability and externally forced changes.
A series of hindcasts of previous decades indicated that this model provides more accurate predictions of global surface temperature on this timescale.
Source: Xinhua
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