Floating about the internet recently is a story about some researchers at UWM coming up with a model that they claim to partly explain the recent uptick in temperatures over the last few decades.
Given the disaster known as scientific new reporting and the fact that the paper they are mentioning is almost two years old now: http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/2007GL030288.pdf [warning pdf], what has the impact of this paper had on the climatology community?
I figured this would end up here in GD, but I was wondering what the people who study climate think about this? (I’m an atomic physicist so I will defer a bit to the experts on this).
As an amateur, it appears to me that the scientists referred to in the article are basically advancing a model or hypothesis to explain past climate changes. In my opinion, there are two and only two ways that this model can gain credibility: First, if it’s very simple. Second, if it makes predictions which can be verified and are verified. Until then, it’s just speculation.
So, their big insight is that the atmosphere and oceans are coupled to each other? That doesn’t impress me very much.
Or rather, that’s all that the linked article says about what their insight is. The actual journal paper probably goes into a lot more detail, but I’m not inclined to go hunting it down with nothing more than the name of one author.
The linked WISN article is a poor representation of the paper itself - the second link in the OP goes to a pdf of the actual journal article. They’re proposing an atmospheric response to the degree of coupling between four different ocean oscillations especially when the coupling increases following the synchronization of the four indices.
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about synchronous chaos. I’ve only skimmed the paper, but it looks like something that could be interesting - I’ll be back after I read it more closely. My first impression is that they seem to be talking about shorter time scales than I’d expect, but that’s just an initial reading.
Like Enginerd, my reading of his various publications is that he’s talking about particular, short term effects.
For instance, volcano eruptions tend to cause the global temperature to dip for approximately two years. After that time the global temperature levels out again.
Now take my last sentence, “After that time the global temperature levels out again.” That sounds like I’m saying that global warming has ended, if I present it outside of the context of a limited event. In truth it means that the movement of the global temperature returns to whatever it was doing independent of the event, which might be rising or falling, or whatever.
The guy’s email address is on his page that I linked to above, if you want to ask him what he meant.