Climate and Atmospheric Science (ICAS) PhD Projects

Why hasn’t the world warmed over the last decade?

Supervisors: Professor Piers Forster

Climate change remains one of the most pressing problems of our age. Despite improvements in our understanding of climate change over the last two decades our ability to make accurate climate projections on the regional scale remains poor. Much of this uncertainty is due to inherent variability in the Earth’s climate system. For example see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group One 2007 Report on Climate change (www.ipcc.ch). 

One of the warmest years on record was 1998. Over the last 12 years carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise but the Earth’s globally averaged surface temperature hasn’t increased at the same rate that it did during the 1990s. The 2000s average temperature remains higher than in earlier decades though. Nevertheless, these observations have sparked much interest and debate in the media, e.g.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527-climate-myths-global-warming-stopped-in-1998.html

The PhD will research possible reasons for the slow down – and will examine decadal warming trends in more detail than ever before. We will look at ocean heat uptake, radiative forcings and the Earth’s top of atmosphere energy balance. Employing detective work to find out exactly what governs the decadal variability in observed warming trend. We will likely concentrate on the present decade, but results will be applicable to making short term climate projections and the understanding of trends during earlier decades.