Other Drivers of Climate Change

The rising greenhouse gas concentrations have been the main drivers of the overall rise of Earth’s temperature, especially during the recent decades, but year-to-year fluctuations of temperature have even more causes. It takes time for Earth to reach new equilibriums of warming for the atmosphere and ocean, so that means that even with the high concentrations of greenhouse gases that we have today, there would be a gradual warming to catch up with greenhouse effect. There are notable periods during which greenhouse gases were rising, but temperature did not see very much, like 1940-1960. Aerosols from industrial air pollution or volcanoes can mask some of the warming that would be caused by emissions. Other hypothesized effects include the roughly 11-year cycle of solar irradiance, called the sunspot cycle, that is correlated with the intensity of solar radiation and is not human-induced in any way. There are inter annual fluctuations of the Earth’s temperature that affect the Pacific Ocean, known as ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which causes changes in climate and weather patterns globally. It is therefore difficult to project year to year, or even decade to decade changes, because we need to understand so many processes, both human-induced and natural. This video is part of the module The Basics of Climate Change Science.

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