Word: climatologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...might think that, knowing what causes greenhouse warming, it would be an easy matter to predict how hot the world will be in the next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...very efficiently, the same task could be performed by swarms of independent thunderstorms. It takes a certain amount of magic, in other words, to set a hurricane in motion. First, you have to make the thunderstorms, and then "you have to get the thunderstorms dancing," as Florida State University climatologist James O'Brien puts it. "You have to get them dancing in a big circle dance...
...prognosis? Right now, a fading El Nino and a burgeoning La Nina appear to be locked in a struggle for dominance. As Kevin Trenberth, an NCAR climatologist, put it last week, "It's a war out there." But even if La Nina wins the battle, as many scientists now expect, she'll have a hard time overshadowing her more famous brother. In June, owing in part to El Nino and in part to some longer-term warming trends, global mean temperatures reached an all-time high. The first six months of 1998 have already entered the record books...
...bunched in the 1990s. Does this reflect a long-term warming of the globe by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as many atmospheric scientists have contended? Or was the hot spell just a random, unexceptional fluctuation in the weather? A study published last week in Nature magazine by climatologist Michael Mann and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, may help melt away any lingering doubt about global warming. The scientists developed what amounts to a time-traveling thermometer. Applying innovative statistical tools to reams of evidence gathered from ancient ice samples, tree rings and coral fragments, they effectively...
...prime suspect is something known as the Pacific decadal oscillation. Since 1977, say researchers from the University of Washington, it has been locked into a mode that has made winters in the Pacific Northwest warm and dry, just as El Nino tends to do. But according to climatologist Nathan Mantua, the Pacific oscillation was in a different phase between 1947 and 1976, and as a result winters in Washington State were cold and rainy...