Another attempt to dismiss the warming pause falls short

Credit: planetsave.com

‘Reports of the death of the global warming pause have been greatly exaggerated’, says David Whitehouse at The GWPF. If temperatures really were climbing would anyone bother with this sort of ‘science’?

A new paper in Nature Climate Change concludes that the so-called pause in global surface temperatures never happened. The paper has been mentioned in a few media outlets.

It claims that new data from the Arctic makes the pause go away – and so it seems until you look at the paper in a little more detail than news headlines suggest.

Xiangdong Zhang of the International Arctic Research Centre and colleagues produce a new estimate of the trend in global temperature that includes their new data on the Arctic. It is 0.112°C per decade, as opposed to a previous 0.05°C per decade, for the period 1998-2012. Once again one notes the unscholarly accuracy of a thousandth of a degree which is unwarranted by the errors in the data. They therefore conclude that the pause never existed.

For the Arctic they give a warming estimate of 0.659°C per decade making it, as expected, the fastest warming region on Earth.

Consider for a moment what this means if one accepts the most recent analysis. Without the Arctic data the global temperature paused, i.e. only one region is contributing to global warming, and a region where it has been estimated about half is due to natural factors.

The trend calculations of surface temperatures carried out in the recent paper are inadequate. Over and over again it has been pointed out that start and end points must be variable, and errors properly accounted for, to obtain a fair estimate given annual variability.

Their Figure 2 illustrates this point.

Continued here.