Photo Gallery Global Warming on Hiatus
Global warming seems to be taking a break. The average global temperature hasn't risen in 15 years, a deviation from climatologists' computer-simulated predictions. Here, the melting ice face of an iceberg in Spitsbergen Island, Norway.
For the past several years, environmentalists have warned about the rise of droughts and other natural disasters -- like this fire in Camarillo, California -- as a result of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its next assessment report on global warming on Friday, Sept. 27.
The conference of the IPCC -- which is led by Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, shown here -- will negotiate the creation of a 30-page summary for policymakers from the 1,000-page full report.
"In climate research, changes don't count until they've been observed on a timescale of 30 years," claims one delegate participating in the negotiations on behalf of German Research Minister Johanna Wanka, shown here, of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Despite resistance from many researchers, the German ministries insist that it is important not to detract from the effectiveness of climate change warnings by discussing the past 15 years' lack of global warming. Doing so, they say, would result in a loss of the support necessary for pursuing rigorous climate policies. Here, an activist with British charity Oxfam protests at a 2011 climate conference in Durban.
One explanation for the warming hiatus involves the Pacific Ocean, which, calculations indicate, has absorbed an unusually large amount of heat from the Earth's atmosphere in recent years. Here, a woman sits in the sea in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which is currently threatened by rising sea levels.
Another possible explanation is that the large quantity of soot emitted into the atmosphere by cars and smokestacks -- like these in Changchun -- has had a cooling effect on the atmosphere.
Some 60 percent of those polled in a survey conducted by SPIEGEL said they were not afraid of climate change.
This chart shows that temperature change predictions have been more pessimistic than the actual data measured.
