Global Warming 'Hiatus' is a Myth: What Went Wrong with the Data

It turns out that the global warming "hiatus" may not have actually occurred. Scientists have found that the recent rate of global warming is the result of faulty statistical methods rather than any kind of pause.

Many scientists have long claimed there was a type of "hiatus" after the late 1990s. This pause in global warming confused scientists, and they've long tried to explain the reason. In this latest study, though, the researchers took another look at the data in order to see if this pause in warming actually happened in the first place.

The researchers used a novel statistical framework that was developed to study geophysical processes such as global temperature fluctuations. More specifically, they examined the period between 1998 and 2013, where global warming apparently "stalled"

So what did they find? It appears that there actually wasn't a hiatus. More specifically, the researchers discovered that many of the ocean buoys used to measure sea surface temperatures during the past couple of decades gave cooler readings than measurements gathered from ships. When these measurements were corrected, the hiatus signal actually disappeared.

"Our results clearly show that, in terms of the statistics of the long-term global temperature data, there never was a hiatus, a pause or a slowdown in global warming," said Noah Diffenbaugh, co-author of the new study, in a news release.

It's important to note that the researchers used old, uncorrected temperature measurements in addition to the newer, corrected measurements from the NOAA in order to make their findings. This, in particular, shows that the hiatus may have just been the result of bad data.

"global warming is like other noisy systems that fluctuate wildly but still follow a trend," said Diffenbaugh. "Think of the U.S. stock market: There have been bull markets and bear markets, but overall it has grown a lot over the past century. What is clear from analyzing the long-term data in rigorous statistical framework is that, even though climate varies from year-to-year and decade-to-decade, global temperature has increased in the long term, and the recent period does not stand out as being abnormal."

The findings are published in the journal Climatic Change.

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