Global warming 'hiatus' may be just statistical error

A team of scientists has suggested that global warming "hiatus" never happened.

An apparent lull in the recent rate of global warming that has been widely accepted as fact is actually an artifact arising from faulty statistical methods, Stanford scientists say.

The researchers translated the various scientific claims and assertions that have been made about the hiatus and tested to see whether they stand up to rigorous statistical scrutiny, said study lead author Bala Rajaratnam.

The finding calls into question the idea that global warming "stalled" or "paused" during the period between 1998 and 2013. Reconciling the hiatus was a major focus of the 2013 climate change assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Using a novel statistical framework that was developed specifically for studying geophysical processes such as global temperature fluctuations, Rajaratnam and his team of Stanford collaborators have shown that the hiatus never happened.

The 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, said co-author Noah Diffenbaugh.

The study is published online in the journal Climatic Change.