From the article (sort of reminds me when people confuse weather with climate): Dr Mark England, who led the study while at the University of Exeter, said: “It is surprising, when there is a current debate about whether global warming is accelerating, that we’re talking about a slowdown. “The good news is that 10 to 15 years ago when sea ice loss was accelerating, some people were talking about an ice-free Arctic before 2020. But now the [natural] variability has switched to largely cancelling out sea ice loss. It has bought us a bit more time but it is a temporary reprieve – when it ends, it isn’t good news.” The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used two different datasets of Arctic sea ice levels from 1979 to the present day. The scientists analysed the sea ice area for every month of the year and the slowdown was seen in all cases.
reading comprehension is fundamental 3.2 Comprehensive Climate Models Suggest 20-Year Pauses Are Not Rare To understand whether comprehensive climate models can simulate a multi-decadal pause of Arctic sea ice loss, we search through the CMIP5 and CMIP6 large ensemble archive to identify members which exhibit ice loss pauses. Consistent with previous studies (Kay et al., 2011; Lee & Liu, 2023; Swart et al., 2015), we find that nearly all models can simulate reductions in September Arctic sea ice area smaller than observed during the period 2005–2024. The two models which do not feature any such trends, UKESM1-0-LL and CanESM5-1, are both models with large climate sensitivities (Meehl et al., 2020), for which overly strong anthropogenically-forced sea ice loss does not allow for pauses such as the observed one. Figure 2a shows the percentage of members with less sea ice loss than observed. The main result here is that the multi-model average suggests a nearly 20% chance of this pause in Arctic sea ice loss (Figure 2a, column 1). However, we note a large spread across the CMIP5 and CMIP6 models, with the probability of a smaller-than-observed 2005–2024 trend varying from 0% and approximately 40%.
