Abstract

Evidence has been mounting that the trade winds over the tropical Pacific Ocean have intensified for the past several decades. Although attention has been focused on the last 20-year trend and its role in causing the "hiatus" in global warming in the 21st century, the trade-wind intensification actually started decades earlier, spanning both periods of global-warming acceleration and slowdown, and also both positive and negative phases of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). We suggest that the trade-wind intensification is one of the many manifestations of the anthropogenic warming, which it does pause or slow. And it may not be related to the IPO. In general, the Pacific lacks a mechanism for sequestering heat below 300m of the ocean and thus contributes little to the multidecadal variations of the global mean temperature, but has important contribution in inter-annual timescales through ENSO.