Pacific hot spot adding to global warming

An international team of scientists has discovered a hot spot in the Pacific Ocean is partly responsible for global warming in the Arctic.

The area, east of Papua New Guinea, is an unusually warm part of the ocean and is causing atmospheric changes, researchers say.

Professor John Wallace from the University of Washington says the climate pattern is similar to that of El Nino.

“What it’s doing is producing a very large scale wave pattern in the atmosphere, with warming in some places and a little bit of cooling in other places,” he told the ABC’s Pacific Beat.

“But that region of warming happens to be sitting over northern Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, that’s a region we’re seeing a lot of effects from global warming anyway.

“This pattern is exacerbating it, making the warming larger than it would otherwise be.”

The scientists say while carbon dioxide emissions are still the major cause of global warming, their discovery shows that natural climate variations can still play a significant role.

“I think when we talk about climate change at a particular place on earth there are always confounding factors, it’s not just a simple picture of the globe warming and the same warming taking place,” Professor Wallace said.

“Some places are warming faster than the earth as a whole, others are warming more slowly.

“It is a complicated picture and this is just one example of it.”

Ailie Gallant from Monash University, part of the research team, said the findings shows the Pacific hot spot is affecting the Arctic significantly.

“What we found was, in fact, about half of that observed warming over Greenland since 1979 can be attributed to natural variations actually stemming from the Pacific Ocean.”