SO MUCH FOR THE PAUSE Eugene Linden : endangered animals, rapid climate change, global deforestation, fragging

SO MUCH FOR THE PAUSE

Friday November 15, 2013

That didn’t take long. Recall that just a few weeks ago climate change deniers were crowing about the "missing" global warming because the latest draft IPCC report on the state of the climate noted that in the years since 1997 the rate of warming seemed to have dropped. Part of the answer -- ignored by the denier crowd -- was that trends had been distored by the super El Nino of 1998. Now it seems that even with that skew there was no pause in warming.

From the climate modelers’ go-to site, realclimate.org, comes news of a study of global temperatures that argues that between 1997 and 2012 the world warmed at twice the rate reported in the latest draft IPCC report. According to Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate, the findings weren’t used by the IPCC because the researchers, Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way, responsibly waited until their report was published by the Royal Meteorological Society before going public. Basically, the scientists found that there were big gaps in temperature data from the Arctic (which has undergone extraordinary warming) because of the paucity of weather stations, and they figured out how to fill in those gaps using satellite data. Once adjusted, the global trend rose from 0.05 degrees C per decade to 0.12 degrees C per decade, which is in line with previous warming.

Presto! No more pause. No doubt the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and the hundreds of other media outlets that made a big deal out of the “missing” global warming will now issue retractions and updates.

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SO MUCH FOR THE PAUSE

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