No Pause In Global Warming According To New Study

Previous indications that there was a pause in global warming have been disproven in a new study published by the journal Science.

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made a statement that global warming “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years.”

According to the new data, collected by National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists, those claims on warming are no longer valid.

The study that disproves the pause in global warming used more data to fill in the blanks of the previous study and found there was no pause.

“Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of … the global warming ‘hiatus.’ Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

NOAA researchers were able to use new data, on global warming, released last year from the International Surface Temperature Initiative databank. They were also able to collect valuable data from ocean buoys and found a discrepancy in the ship collecting procedures.

Both ships and buoys are used to calculate the sea surface temperature (SST).

Previous to World War II, ships dropped a bucket over the side and used a thermometer. Currently, ships get their warming measurements from the engine intake, but some stick to the older method.

Buoys, however, are growing in number and covering more of the oceans. In the Science paper, scientists noted that “surface-drifting and moored buoys have increased the overall global coverage by up to 15 percent.” They are much more effective in retrieving global warming data.

There are still gaps in the data necessary to track warming temperatures. The arctic is warming nearly twice as fast than the rest of the world, but coverage there remains poor.

Norman Loeb, of NASA’s Langley Research Center, always remained skeptical that there was a pause in global warming. He explained in a 2014 talk.

“You can’t just look at short periods of time…. You have to look at the record over a long period of time to see the pattern. There will be natural fluctuations at shorter time scales, but we really shouldn’t conclude that that’s a change and global warming is going away.”

[ Image courtesy of Torsten Blackwood – Pool/Getty Images ]