Scientists arrived to the conclusion that global warming did not take any break during the last decade, but rather it was the result of inaccurate statistical methods.
The majority of scientists claimed that ever since the year 1998 global warming was in some kind of hiatus. The break confused scientists all over the world, who have long tried to explain why it happened. But it turns out that there was no such thing, according to a new study. A group of skeptical researchers re-analyzed the statistical data gathered throughout the last decade in order to find out whether this break actually happened in the first place.
The team of researchers used an advanced statistical framework that was recently conceived to examine geophysical processes like fluctuations of temperatures. They have analyzed the period between 1998 and 2012, in which global warming appeared to be on hiatus. Surprisingly, they have found that there was no such thing as a hiatus. Researchers observed that the temperature readings gathered by ships gave different measures than those sent by the ocean buoys. When the team corrected all the measurements, they found that any indications of a hiatus disappeared.
Noah Diffenbaugh, one of the study’s leaders, declared for a news release “Our results clearly show that, in terms of the statistics of the long-term global temperature data, there never was a hiatus, a pause or a slowdown in global warming.”
One essential observation is that the team which conducted the study, in order to synthetize their findings, used the miscalculated temperature measurements side by side with the new measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The study demonstrated that the global warming slowdown was nothing else than just the result of misinterpreted data.
Diffenbaugh said that he was always skeptical regarding the global warming pause, and that he found it strange that the indicators showed so heavily fluctuating data only outside of the 1998-2012 time period. He also adds that even if there was some kind of slowdown, it would not have changed anything, for global temperatures are definitely increasing over the years.
And that is exactly what the study made clear: even though temperatures vary from year to year, global warming is slowly increasing on the long term.
Photo Credits geograph.org
