No Letdown in Global Warming, Warns NOAA Study
Hitting at the heart of climate change skeptics, a new study claims there was no hiatus or slowdown in global warming in recent years as previously thought.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a study in the journal Science suggesting corrections to temperature datasets used previously. Also by accounting improved sea surface and land-surface data, specifically for the last two years, 2013 and 2014, the study claimed that the rate of warming over the last 15 years did not slowdown.
"Our new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century," said Thomas R Karl Director, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fifth assessment concluded that the increasing trend of surface temperature from 1998 - 2012 was lower than 1951-2012.
"Adding in the last two years of global surface temperature data and other improvements in the quality of the observed record provide evidence that contradict the notion of a hiatus in recent global warming trends," he said.
The improved datasets are a result of corrections to data collected before buoys became common in 1970s, when sailors recorded temperature by collecting water in buckets. Climate scientists have been aware about glitches in data collected by sailors for long and several attempts were made to correct biases.
Though the NOAA study showed that there was no decline in warming rates, the rate it calculated, 0.68 degree Celsius per century over the period from 1880 to present, is not different from the current accepted rate of 0.65 degree Celsius per century.
