Global Warming Temperatures May Not be Rising as Quickly as Previously Thought

Global warming may not be occurring quite as quickly as previously thought. A new study based on 1,000 years of temperature records suggests that warming is not progressing as fast as it would under the most severe emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The researchers examined whether climate models, such as those used by the IPCC, accurately accounted for the natural chaotic variability that can occur in the rate of global warming as the result of interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere. They created a new statistical model based on reconstructed empirical records of surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years.

"By comparing our model against theirs, we found that climate models largely get the 'big picture' right but seem to underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate wiggles," said Patrick T. Brown, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013."

Further analysis actually revealed something interesting about the 11-year hiatus in warming that began at the start of this century.

"Statistically, it's pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections," said Brown. "Hiatus periods of 11 years or longer are more likely to occur under a middle-of-the-road scenario."

In fact, under the IPCC's middle-of-the-road scenario, there was a 70 percent chance that at least one hiatus lasting 11 years or longer would occur between 1993 and 2050. This matches up with what the researchers believe: we're in the middle of a less extreme type of global warming.

That said, there's no guarantee that the rate of warming will remain steady in coming years. For now, though, it appears as if extreme temperatures and conditions will remain at bay for a while longer.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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