Top scientists defend the idea of Global Warming Hiatus

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a definitive 2013 report that there had been an actual slowdown of global warming during the last 15 years. The report noted that the warming rate during the period from 1998 through 2012 was less than the rate noted since 1951, but the body has also warned that because of natural unpredictability, trends based on short records were quite sensitive to the starting and end dates and generally don’t reflect long-term climate trends.

The thought about a global warming slowdown or ‘pause’ was continually cited by climate change skeptics and deniers after 2013 but the notion has been challenged by some of the recent scientific reports.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s dataset update, aiming at removing biases in the data, cleared the ‘pause’ to quite fanfare and controversy.

The study discovered that recently corrected and updated global surface temperature data hasn’t supported the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus’.

Meanwhile, other recent studies have suggested that the notion of a hiatus could represent a bias among scientists themselves, and has been described in strangely inconsistent ways by researchers.

In a paper published in journal Nature Climate Change, group of top scientists has robustly spoken in support of the idea, saying, “The observed rate of global surface warming since the turn of this century has been considerably less than the average simulated rate produced by climate change models”.

The authors have also argued that there is a need for research into what’s behind the evident slowdown, which tended to focus on natural fluctuations, mainly the Pacific Ocean’s behavior, has represented valuable work, increasing their understanding of a general science question studied for at least two decades.