Global Warming Pause Never Happened, Study

Global warming had never "taken a break" between 1998 and 2013, as some previous studies had suggested, said Stanford University scientists, according to hngn.

Earlier, a study declared that there had been a "global warming hiatus, pause, or slowdown to changes in the wind patterns and changes in the temperature of the Pacific sea surface". Yet, new research from Stanford seems to show that previous research was just wrong due to "faulty statistical methods".

"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," Noah Diffenbaugh, study co-author and a climate scientist in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences said in a university news release.

Researchers from Stanford looked at earlier studies and recalculated information with a new statistical framework that examined "geophysical processes such as global temperature fluctuations". Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had pointed out that the global warming "pause" is incorrect, and that the rate of warming over the past 15 years has actually been rising. Their study too was used by Stanford researchers.

The NOAA scientists had found that the incomplete spatial coverage among ship measurements had made them underestimate the true global temperature change outlined in the 2013 IPCC report.

Stanford researchers have included NOAA's findings and have included some of their own statistical evidence. Bala Rajaratnam, study lead author and an assistant professor of statistics and of Earth system science as well as his colleagues did not only look at the data but also re-examined the statistical methods that were used.

They discovered that the methods used were suitable for medical and biological studies, which were not suitable for geophysical processes.

"When we compared the results from our technique with those calculated using classical methods, we found that the statistical confidence obtained using our framework is 100 times stronger than what was reported by the NOAA group," Joseph Romano, a Stanford statistician, said.

The new findings highlight the right statistical method and data analysis technique that could predict global warming or climate change.

The study was published in the Sept. 17 issue of Climatic Change.