Is seems as though the pause in global warming may have not taken place after all, a new study reveals.
A lot of scientists believed that there was some sort of global warming hiatus after year 1998 or the so-called El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The sudden global warming slowdown baffled the scientists and for a long period of time they tried to explain the reason why this was happening. In a recent study, the researchers checked the data once again in order to see whether this hiatus in global warming truly took place.
In the study, researchers examined the period of time between 1998 and 2013, a time frame when scientists believed that global warming had stopped. To do so, they used a statistical framework that was created in order to observe geophysical processes such as the long-term temperature fluctuations of the Earth.
The results showed that there was in fact no pause in the process of global warming. Over the past couple of decades the ocean buoys that were used in order to track the water surface temperature apparently gave cooler measurements than those found on ships, researchers found. The alleged pause in global warming actually disappeared after the researchers corrected the faulty measurements.
Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor and senior fellow at Stanford University in Stanford, California, as well as co-author of the new study, said that the new results regarding the long-term temperature data clearly showed that there was never a slowdown, a pause or a hiatus in global warming.
“Global warming is like other noisy systems that fluctuate wildly but still follow a trend. 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 analysing the long-term data in a 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,” explained Diffenbaugh.
In the new study, researchers used newer, more accurate measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as opposed to the old, and inaccurate measurements that were used in previous studies. It is a possibility that the hiatus ‘occurred’ only because of faulty data.
Image Source: watchdog
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