Pause in Global Warming Never Happened
An update of recent temperature records released by NOAA reveals that the highly advertised hiatus in global warming so far this century never really happened.
NOAA says that more data from a doubling of reliable weather stations on land and fine-tuning of how ship observations at sea are compared with buoy readings reveals that Earth’s average global surface temperature warmed 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit each decade since 1950, without interruption.
The director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre, Thomas Karl, says that with new data and calibrations, “this (warming) hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes.”
Writing in the journal Science, Karl and colleagues point out that the decision by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to use 1998 as the starting point of what was thought to be a warming hiatus skewed the climatological tabulations, since that year marked an extremely warm El Niño event in the tropical Pacific.
They say 2014 was among the warmest years on record worldwide, and the way 2015 has begun, it could turn out to be even hotter.
Graphs show how new data and recalibration of archive weather data affect the plotting of global warming.
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