We have new published research that shows in detail why the earth’s temperature remains stable when it is not pushed by outside forcings. Below is a summary in plain english. For a more technical discussion see here.

• The study is all about what climate does when it is not pushed by what we call external drivers
  • External drivers (or forcings) are things like changes in the amount of energy coming in from the sun or changes in the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
• You might expect (and many people simply assume) that the climate should be stable when it is not pushed by these external drivers
  • What our study did was investigate this assumption in a lot of detail and it turns out its not quite so simple
• Why is it not so simple? Many locations on earth experience positive feedbacks between temperature and absorbed energy. For example, if you have some natural warming where there is sea ice, you will melt some of the sea ice, melting the sea ice will cause more solar energy to be absorbed which will cause more warming and more melting. It turns out these types of positive feedbacks are working all over the surface of the planet.
• So the question then becomes: If the Earth gets warmer naturally due to something like an El-Nino event, what’s stopping it from just continuing to warm? Can it cool itself back down? If so, how?
• The study looks at this in detail and finds that some very interesting things are going on that allow that Earth to cool itself down after one of these unforced natural warming events:
  • It turns out that the earth naturally transports energy away from locations where there are positive feedbacks to locations where there are negative feedbacks.
  • Also the atmosphere rearranges clouds and water vapor in a way that allow much more energy to escape than we would expect otherwise.
• These things are scientifically interesting but the bottom line that the general public should understand is that the earth is able to cool itself down after an unforced natural warming event like an el-Niño and thus in order for the earth to have sustained warming over multiple decades to a century, you need these external drivers (or forcings) like the increase in greenhouse gasses. This undermines the popular skeptic idea that the climate just drifts randomly from warm to cold and back again over many decades to centuries in an unpredictable manner.