(February 1, 2016) By
examining how Earth cools itself back down after a period of natural warming, a
study by scientists at Duke University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
confirms that global temperature does not rise or fall chaotically in the long
run. Unless pushed by outside forces, temperature should remain stable.
The new evidence may finally help put the chill on skeptics’
belief that long-term global warming occurs in an unpredictable manner,
independently of external drivers such as human impacts.
“This underscores that large, sustained changes in global
temperature like those observed over the last century require drivers such as
increased greenhouse gas concentrations,” said lead author Patrick Brown, a PhD
student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
Natural climate cycles alone are insufficient to explain
such changes, he said.
Brown and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed
research Feb. 1 in the Journal of Climate.
Using global climate models and NASA satellite observations
of Earth’s energy budget from the last 15 years, the study finds that a warming
Earth is able to restore its temperature equilibrium through complex and
seemingly paradoxical changes in the atmosphere and the way radiative heat is
transported.
Scientists have long attributed this stabilization to a
phenomenon known as the Planck Response, a large increase in infrared energy
that Earth emits as it warms. Acting as a safety valve of sorts, this response
creates a negative radiative feedback that allows more of the accumulating heat
to be released into space through the top of the atmosphere.