A new study predicts that global warming will increase far faster over the next five years than previous predictions due to increased solar activity and the El Nino southern hemisphere oscillation cycle:

The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study. [...]

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years. [...] The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind’s research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

Of course, the sub-headline to this report in the Guardian also says:

New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics
I hate to disagree with whoever wrote that, but no one who receives funding from an industry that has a stake in denouncing global warming as a myth and a hoax (i.e., Big Oil) is going to change their public opinion on this matter regardless of how high the temperatures get. We saw the same thing from the “scientists” and spokespersons for the Tobacco Industry who denied for decades that there was any link between smoking and cancer and heart and lung diseases. We will continue to see the same folks from the same conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute, AEI and the Competitive Enterprise Institute writing the same denunciations of humanity’s influence on climate change no matter how much evidence supports the scientific consensus that CO2 emissions are a significant contributor to global warming. Senator James Inhofe will continue to rail against respected and published climatological scientists as part of a grand conspiracy by the environmental movement and leftists in general to destroy our economy. In short, Big Oil and its conservative allies will continue to fiddle while the planet burns.

Why? Because there’s money to be made now from burning oil and coal, and in fifty years all of the senior managers and directors of these companies will be dead and the effect on the world’s climate from the continued use of fossil fuels will be someone else’s problem. They’ll have made their profits and passed them on to their heirs. And the rest of the world’s populace will be paying, many with their lives, for the selfish short sighted attitudes of those who are literally obstructing any possibility of reducing the effects of our continued use of their products.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/#141607

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