Well.... I wonder what our denialist have to say about this...........
Climate change ‘hiatus’ is a myth after all
Rumours of global warming’s death have been greatly exaggerated, scientists have claimed.
A re-analysis of global temperature records has found that the so-called “hiatus”, in which the climate had not appeared to have significantly warmed since the beginning of the century, is nothing of the sort.
After correcting for changes in the way data had been collected in the past, and expanding the number of measurements used, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that global temperatures had been systematically underestimated over the past 15 years.
Although the correction was small,
the study, published in the journal Science, showed that
the temperature trend since 2000 almost precisely matched that in previous decades.
Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA, said: “Our analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.”
In past years, climate scientists have struggled to explain an apparently flat global temperature, which contradicted the predictions made in some of their models.
Climate sceptics have used this as an argument that global warming had been exaggerated.
For the new study, the scientists took account of a change in the way sea temperatures were collected. Before the 1970s measurements were taken from ships, while after that buoys were used.
The scientists said ship measurements were consistently warmer and this needed to be accounted for, meaning past estimates of temperature were revised down. When this was added to updated data, the “hiatus” disappeared.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environme ... 462281.ece