desert dude
Well-Known Member
One of the great puzzles of climate science is the fact that global average temperature have been largely flat for the past 15 or more years. This hiatus in the rate of warming due to increasing greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere was unpredicted by the computer climate models. Lots of scientific effort has gone into trying to explain (explain away?) the hiatus. The result has been numerous papers that variously blame ocean currents in the Pacific, the North Atlantic, or both; changes in water vapor in the stratosphere; and the lack of sunspot activity.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/05/no-global-warming-hiatus-after-all
Some experts hailed the Science article for using better quality data than the figures used to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2013 report, which found some evidence of a pause in global warming in recent years.
But others, like Piers Forster, professor of climate change at the University of Leeds, pointed out that the IPCC report relies on numerous sets of data, not just NOAA's.
"Even with the corrections in this study, the observed warming has not been as large as predicted by models. Other global datasets, even when corrected for missing Arctic data, still show a decreased trend since 1998," he said.
"I still don't think this study will be the last word on this complex subject."
