Heartland Update: Warming and Cooling in the North Pacific
Nicolas Loris /
Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability. Primarily found in the North Pacific, PDO moves through warm phases and cool phases that last from ten years to forty years at a time.
George Taylor’s talk, The Pacific Decadal Oscillation: A Dominant Mode of Climate Variability, stresses that the PDO appears to be a permanent feature of the earth’s climate system, and PDO changes correlate well with the variation in temperature over the last century.
There are two radiative ways to cause global warming: An increase in solar radiation being absorbed and decreasing infrared radiation (IR) being lost to space. The IPCC is focused on the latter. Dr. Willie Soon, who presented earlier today, focuses on the former. Roy Spencer, a professor at the University of Alabama, focuses on the effects of the feedback and PDO.