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NOAA: Global Warming 'Pause' Never Happened

Taco Cowboy writes: The whole global warming debate is as confusing as ever. Researchers from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have published a new study in Science saying there was no "pause" in global warming. Dr. Thomas Karl points out that the warming rate over the past 15 years is "virtually identical" to warming over the last century, and updated observations show temperatures did not plateau.

"The idea of a global warming 'hiatus' arose from questions over why the trend of warming temperatures appeared to be stalling recently compared to the later part of the 20th century. ... The new analysis corrects for ocean observations made using different methods as well as including new data on surface temperatures."

"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average temperatures have increased by around 0.05C per decade in the period between 1998 and 2012. This compares with an average of 0.12 per decade between 1951 and 2012. The new analysis suggests a figure of 0.116 per decade for 2000-2014, compared with 0.113 for 1950-1999."

6 of 639 comments (clear)

  1. Not very confidence-inspiring by Hrrrg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
     

  2. Re:so what you're saying is by thsths · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure. And we could go on emitting CO2 like it is nobodies business, and maybe wreck this earth. That would be evidence, but not proof, that climate change is man made. For proof you would want to wreck at least 3 earth, and have another 3 control earth that are just fine without humans.

  3. Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists by darronb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hell, I'd be happy if these jokers could even manage a partial rebuttal.

    Science reporting is garbage these days. Dave Jones just did a rebuttal to the "Batteriser" that a whole lot of otherwise respected media outlets are running... as he says any competent EE can tell you loads of ways the Batteriser is 99.999% marketing spin. It's still everywhere and loads of people buy that bullshit.

    Explaining global warming is much more complicated than debunking the Batteriser, so if Batteriser demonstrates our current level of competence in reporting something, we've got no F-ing chance at all of getting the real story with global warming to the general public.

    The fact that 95% of competent scientists in that field agree should be good enough. Marketing BS by people whose interests are affected by the results of the science apparently don't even have to try that hard to convince a lot of people the science is somehow contested.

    Put it this way... I'd bet there are plenty of people that would be skeptical if 95% of competent EEs stood up to say Batteriser is trash, claiming conflicts of interest with some "establishment" or "group think".

    A person is smart. People are stupid.

  4. Re:Remember the hole in the ozone layer? by Luxemburg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You have a misconception of what science is. None of the facts you mention result from measurements that you did yourself. Rather you heard it from others, and you trust them. If you did measure them yourself, you would have to rely on the correctness of someone else's measurement device. If you made your own measurement devices, you'd rely on someone else's established theory of the phenomena you're measuring. And so on...

    In the end, nothing in science is beyond doubt. Science does not deal in truth. What does science deal in? Well, there's a whole scientific discipline to answer this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

  5. Re:And 4) by turkeyfish · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "potentially moving fertile crop zones hundreds of miles"

    It is always bemusing to see people think that because global warming will create higher temperatures in previously colder places that food crops can simply be grown in these newly warmed environments. The fact is that much of the reason food crops grow where they do in addition to evolutionary adaptation to specific habitats, is the fact that sufficient moisture and adequate quality soils are also available. Good quality soils can take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. Many high latitude environments have very poor soils, often having been scoured by glaciers for thousands of years. Likewise, flowering and consequently pollination is affected by day/night length as well as by temperature, so simply because high latitude environments may become warm enough for crops to grow doesn't mean that flowering or pollination will be possible in these newly warmed environments.

    The threat from human induced global warming is not simply that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, but rather very much about how fast we are warming the planet. We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally and as a consequence we are disrupting the very ecological relationships upon which humans depend for their survival. Although its probably true that a few humans will survive and linger in the kind of Mad Max world we are creating for current and subsequent generations, but the vast majority of humanity is already on the road to extinction within a few hundred years at the current rate of change.

  6. Re:But dude, there was a snowball by dywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A little understanding goes a long way to dispelling and preventing the spread of myths and misinformation: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

    Even more, playing devil’s advocate, the scientists tried to force their data to show them a hiatus; they redid the calculations starting in 1998, as so many deniers have done. The result? The warming from 1998 – 2014 is 0.106 C per decade. It’s still there.

    The corrections they applied have to do with the way sea surface temperatures were taken; the method has changed over time, and that introduces biases into the data. The good thing though is that new methods, new understanding of the nature of data measurement, allow scientists to go back and re-examine older data and apply corrections to it.

    Different measurement methods have their own inherent biases. They went back through the data AND ITS SOURCES and found that some of the data believed to be from buoys was from engine intakes, and some from intakes was from buoys, and some was from the really old fashioned method of "haul up a bucket of water and measure it".

    All corrections are about canceling out those inherent biases so that everything starts from the same baseline.

    --
    The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.