On the Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Global Temperature

The study of dynamic relationships between the atmospheric carbon dioxide and the Earth’s global temperature in the current changing climate supported the notion that the trend in the global temperature followed the trend in the atmospheric CO2 before the climate hiatus that started in the beginning of the 21st century. During the hiatus period, the heat trapped by the atmospheric CO2 is going mostly to the ocean. This conclusion is supported by comparison of the CO2 trend with the trend in the ocean heat content. The phase relationships between the CO2 and temperature are more complicated after the removal of the trends. The phase relationships are chaotic on time scales shorter than the annual time scale. During 1986-2008, the atmospheric CO2 changed in an-ti-phase with the global temperature. The phase relationship reversed in 1979 and after 2010. The atmospheric CO2 was in-phase with the global temperature on the El Nino time scale (2.3 - 7 years) except during very strong El Nino years in 1991-1999 when CO2 led the global temperature.

Climate Patterns: Origin and Forcing

This brief review described spatial-time climate patterns generated by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Earth’s climate system and methods of identifying these patterns. Specifically, it does discuss the following major climate patterns: El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Cold Ocean-Warm Land (COWL) pattern, Northern and Southern Annular Patterns (NAM and SAM), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), Pacific North-American Pattern (PNA) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation Pattern (PDO). In view of an extensive number of publications on some climate patterns, such as the ENSO, which discussed in many hundred of publications, this review is not intended to cover all the details of individual climate patterns but intends only to give a general overview of their structure, mechanisms of their formation and response to external forcing. It is assumed that the climate patterns can be treated as attractors of dynamical systems allowing us to extract and predict some specific features of the patterns such as the origin and evolution of the climate patterns and their role in climate change. Thus the knowledge of patterns allows the climate prediction on long time scales and understanding of how an external forcing affects the frequency of occurrence of climate patterns and their magnitude but not the spatial structure.