Global warming 'hiatus' never happened, Stanford scientists say

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/ssoe-gw091015.php

Public Release: 17-Sep-2015
Global warming 'hiatus' never happened, Stanford scientists say
Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

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 study, titled "Debunking the climate hiatus" and published online this week in the journal Climatic Change, is a comprehensive assessment of the purported slowdown, or hiatus, of global warming. "We 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, an assistant professor of statistics and of Earth system science.

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).

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