With the winter storm getting ready to sweep through the south, you know the usual suspects will be saying it proves climate change is a hoax. Never mind that snow happens in winter. Never mind that climate change isn’t just about temperatures. Never mind that historic weather patterns are breaking down and extreme weather seems to be on the rise. Denial is denial and they won’t be convinced.
Perhaps you heard about the global “pause” in warming in the first years of this century? There’s more evidence that the pause was an artifact from a change in the way data was being gathered. Matt McGrath at the BBC has the story.
The idea of a pause had gained support in recent years with even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reporting in 2013 that the global surface temperature "has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years".
But that consensus was brought into question by a number of studies, of which a report by the the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) published in Science last year was the most significant.
Researchers from Noaa suggested that the temperatures of the oceans were being consistently underestimated by the main global climate models.
The authors showed that the ocean buoys used to measure sea temperatures tend to report slightly cooler temperatures than the older ship-based systems.
Back in the 1990s, ship measurements made up the vast majority of the data, whereas now the more accurate and consistent buoys account for 85% of measurements.
When the researchers corrected the data to take this "cold bias" into account, they concluded that the oceans had warmed 0.12C per decade since 2000, nearly twice as fast as previous estimates of 0.07 degrees.
As a result, the authors said that the warming experienced in the first 15 years of the 21st Century was "virtually indistinguishable" from the rate of warming between 1950-99, a time generally acknowledged to have seen significant rates of warming from human emissions of CO2.
The NOAA report has been backed up by a new analysis of the data. You can find the details here.
Too bad they couldn’t fit it into a tweet. That’s what really makes headlines these days.