Word: climatologists
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Coastal Peru is hardly the only area affected. El Nino alters winds and currents throughout the tropics, producing what climatologist Nicholas Graham of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography calls "a weird kind of sloshing." As the trade winds slacken, he explains, they give rise to slow-moving waves that surge from west to east and exert downward pressure on the thermocline. This is the boundary layer of chilly water that separates the much colder water in the ocean depths from the sun-warmed water near the surface. Normally, the eastern Pacific's thermocline lies at a shallow depth and thus...
...improve the current state of ENSO forecasting, Scripps and Lamont-Doherty have set up an international research institute dedicated to predicting medium-range swings in climate. Already, says climatologist Antonio Moura, the director, he and other scientists have begun to produce experimental forecasts of the probable impact of the ENSO cycle on selected regions. Thus rice, corn and bean farmers in northeast Brazil, say, could, if adequately forewarned, mitigate the effect of El Nino-associated droughts by planting rapidly maturing varieties of seed. The only hitch is that if they switch and a drought does not occur, their crop yields...
Scientists have assumed that any change caused by humans would occur over many decades. They are no longer so sure. As climatologist Peter deMenocal put it, "When I began my Ph.D. in 1986, the conventional wisdom was that it took 1,000 years to end an ice age; in '91 that figure was lowered to 100 years, and then just two years later, Richard Alley at Penn State published a paper about climate changing in two to five years...
...important factor affecting global temperatures: aerosols, the tiny droplets of chemicals like sulfur dioxide that are produced along with CO2 when fossil fuels are burned in cars and power plants. Aerosols actually cool the planet by blocking sunlight and mask the effects of global warming. Says Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a member of the international panel: "We were looking for the needle in the wrong haystack...
...effects of the tiny droplets of sulfuric acid that gather in the atmosphere wherever fossil fuels are burned. These droplets help reflect sunlight, counteracting the effects of greenhouse gases. But the cooling may not be concentrated in exactly the same place as the heating, says Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford. He notes that unlike greenhouse gases, which disperse rapidly around the globe, the sulfate droplets tend to concentrate over industrialized regions -- the U.S., Europe, the former Soviet Union. The result, he says, may be a localized skewing of the weather similar to that caused by El Nino. "Not only...