Missing Heat' Discovery Prompts New Estimate of Global Warming: Arctic Warming Fast

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131113092217.htm

Nov. 13, 2013 — An interdisciplinary team of researchers say they have found 'missing heat' in the climate system, casting doubt on suggestions that global warming has slowed or stopped over the past decade.

Observational data on which climate records are based cover only 84 per cent of the planet -- with Polar regions and parts of Africa largely excluded.

Now Dr Kevin Cowtan, a computational scientist at the University of York, and Robert Way, a cryosphere specialist and PhD student at the University of Ottawa, have reconstructed the 'missing' global temperatures using a combination of observations from satellites and surface data from weather stations and ships on the peripheries of the unsampled regions.

The new research published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet.

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He says: "There's a perception that global warming has stopped but, in fact, our data suggests otherwise. But the reality is that 16 years is too short a period to draw a reliable conclusion. We find only weak evidence of any change in the rate of global warming."

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