Scientists have gone to the depths of the ocean and buried themselves in history to understand our climate future, says one of the authors of a major new climate report.
Dr Lisa Alexander, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW, was a lead author of the chapter on climate observations in the fifth major assessment of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published on Friday.
She said the climate change signal was becoming clearer thanks to detective work by scientists.
Some had gone back to old ships' logs and old weather records that had never been digitised. Others had sent buoys to trawl the deep ocean to start building a picture of temperature changes below the surface.
"There are more centres around the world independently gathering and assessing temperature," Dr Alexander said. "They all sit on top of each other - the lines of evidence are very coherent - and that gives us strong evidence that what we're seeing is real."
Dr Alexander does not believe there has been a pause in global warming recently - she considers it a "statistical artifact" - but if it does turn out to be partly due to a change in the way oceans absorb heat, as some have suggested, it is vital to have a better understanding of the deep ocean.
It is not just temperature that's relevant to climate change. In Australia, Bureau of Meteorology records show an increase in rainfall in the north-west, and a decrease in the south-east.
"In temperature in Australia we have a coherent signal for the last 100 years of warming, and since the 1950s this has manifest itself in the frequency of heatwaves," she said.
The IPCC report found "medium confidence" of an increase in heatwaves around the world, but Dr Alexander said the caution was largely due to the lack of observations from South America and Africa.
via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFAjgtaHSO2d5wf_NHOeG4c7iN8HQ&url=http://www.smh.com.au/environment/scientists-take-plunge-in-bid-to-help-understand-our-climate-future-20130928-2ula3.html
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