Global warming carrying on at catastrophic levels
There was never any ‘pause’ in global warming, new data showed, and the world is warming at a pace that scientists warn will be catastrophic.
Gaps in the data about the world temperature led people to believe that climate wasn’t heating as much as suggested. But that was wrong and global warming is progressing far faster than would be expected, the new research suggested, independent.co.uk wrote.
That’s according to scientists who returned to calculate global temperatures in the years 19982012. It’s those years that many people claim were subject to a ‘global warming hiatus’, where the pace of climate change appeared to slow.
But that idea was based on a mistake in the data used to calculate the temperature of the planet, the new research suggested. It builds on a range of research that shows that despite repeated claims global warming had stopped, it is actually continuing at a catastrophic pace.
The idea of a hiatus had been helpful to climate change deniers and confounding to scientists, who couldn’t understand why the world would stop warming even despite increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.
The solution is that the warming never happened, according to the new research carried out by Xiangdong Zhang, an atmospheric scientist with UAF’S International Arctic Research Center, who collaborated with colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Chinese agencies.
“We recalculated the average global temperatures from 19982012 and found that the rate of global warming had continued to rise at 0.112°C per decade instead of slowing down to 0.05°C per decade as previously thought,” said Zhang who is also a professor with UAF’S College of Natural Science and Mathematics.