Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

Walking back talk of the end of warming Previous analyses of global temperature trends during the first decade of the 21st century seemed to indicate that warming had stalled. This allowed critics of the idea of global warming to claim that concern about climate change was misplaced. Karl et al. now show that temperatures did not plateau as thought and that the supposed warming “hiatus” is just an artifact of earlier analyses. Warming has continued at a pace similar to that of the last half of the 20th century, and the slowdown was just an illusion. Science, this issue p. 1469 Updated global surface temperature data do not support the notion of a global warming “hiatus.” Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the global warming “hiatus.” Here, we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 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.

[1]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  NOAA's Merged Land-Ocean Surface Temperature Analysis , 2012 .

[2]  N. Gillett,et al.  Recent observed and simulated warming , 2014 .

[3]  Karl E. Taylor,et al.  An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design , 2012 .

[4]  Gavin A. Schmidt,et al.  Reconciling warming trends , 2014 .

[5]  Masson-Delmotte,et al.  The Physical Science Basis , 2007 .

[6]  G. Meehl,et al.  Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming , 2014 .

[7]  W. Briggs.  Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences , 2007 .

[8]  Corinne Le Quéré,et al.  Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis , 2013 .

[9]  Hyun‐cheol Kim.  Oceans from Space , 2010 .

[10]  Makiko Sato,et al.  Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus , 2013 .

[11]  J. Christy,et al.  Differential trends in tropical sea surface and atmospheric temperatures since 1979 , 2001 .

[12]  A. Arguez,et al.  Uncertainty in annual rankings from NOAA's global temperature time series , 2013 .

[13]  John Kennedy,et al.  Reassessing biases and other uncertainties in sea surface temperature observations measured in situ since 1850: 2. Biases and homogenization , 2011 .

[14]  D. Nychka,et al.  Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere , 2008 .

[15]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4). Part I: Upgrades and Intercomparisons , 2014 .

[16]  J. Tollefson.  Climate change: The case of the missing heat , 2014, Nature.

[17]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  An Improved In Situ and Satellite SST Analysis for Climate , 2002 .

[18]  Claude N. Williams,et al.  Homogenization of Temperature Series via Pairwise Comparisons , 2009 .

[19]  Dudley B. Chelton,et al.  Comparisons of Daily Sea Surface Temperature Analyses for 2007–08 , 2010 .

[20]  G. Meehl,et al.  Externally forced and internally generated decadal climate variability associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation , 2013 .

[21]  P. Steerenberg,et al.  Targeting pathophysiological rhythms: prednisone chronotherapy shows sustained efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis. , 2010, Annals of the rheumatic diseases.

[22]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  Improvements to NOAA’s Historical Merged Land–Ocean Surface Temperature Analysis (1880–2006) , 2008 .

[23]  F. Zwiers,et al.  Observed and simulated temperature extremes during the recent warming hiatus , 2014 .

[24]  P. Thorne,et al.  Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States , 2012 .

[25]  Jared Rennie,et al.  The international surface temperature initiative global land surface databank: monthly temperature data release description and methods , 2014 .

[26]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  A Global Merged Land–Air–Sea Surface Temperature Reconstruction Based on Historical Observations (1880–1997) , 2005 .

[27]  Douglas W. Nychka,et al.  Statistical significance of trends and trend differences in layer-average atmospheric temperature time series , 2000 .

[28]  Carl A. Mears,et al.  Volcanic contribution to decadal changes in tropospheric temperature , 2014 .

[29]  Yu Kosaka,et al.  Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling , 2013, Nature.

[30]  M. Boykoff,et al.  Media discourse on the climate slowdown , 2014 .

[31]  Elizabeth C. Kent,et al.  ICOADS Release 2.5: extensions and enhancements to the surface marine meteorological archive , 2011 .

[32]  Francis W. Zwiers,et al.  Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years , 2013 .

[33]  M. Latif,et al.  Hindcast of the 1976/77 and 1998/99 Climate Shifts in the Pacific , 2013 .

[34]  Jared Rennie,et al.  An overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network monthly mean temperature data set, version 3 , 2011 .

[35]  K. Tung,et al.  Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration , 2014, Science.

[36]  R. Vose,et al.  An Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database , 2012 .

[37]  Peter W. Thorne,et al.  Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States , 2012 .

[38]  T. Wilbanks,et al.  Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , 2007 .

[39]  W. Collins,et al.  Evaluation of climate models , 2013 .

[40]  Elizabeth C. Kent,et al.  Effects of instrumentation changes on sea surface temperature measured in situ , 2010, WIREs Climate Change.

[41]  J. Rennie,et al.  Responding to the Need for Better Global Temperature Data , 2013 .

[42]  Robert E. Davis,et al.  Statistics for the evaluation and comparison of models , 1985 .

[43]  Agus Santoso,et al.  Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus , 2014 .

[44]  K. Cowtan,et al.  Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends , 2014 .

[45]  Kevin E. Trenberth,et al.  Earth’s Energy Imbalance , 2014 .

[46]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  Extended Reconstruction of Global Sea Surface Temperatures Based on COADS Data (1854–1997) , 2003 .

[47]  N. Rayner,et al.  An Investigation into the Impact of using Various Techniques to Estimate Arctic Surface Air Temperature Anomalies , 2015 .