New PCIC Science Brief: Possible Artifacts of Data Biases in the Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus

PCIC is pleased to announce the release of our next Science Brief. PCIC Science Briefs are a regular series of brief reports on recent climate science literature, relevant to stakeholders in the Pacific and Yukon Region of Canada. PCIC has developed these briefs because we recognize the need for a bridge between the cutting edge of climate science research and the various stakeholders who need access to this knowledge, in plain-language reports, filtered for regional relevance, and suitable for consideration in planning and adaptation. The PCIC Science Briefs contextualize and explain the results and implications of important scientific findings.

The new Science Brief is on a paper by Karl and coauthors (2015) that considers the so-called "hiatus" in global surface temperature trends. Their work, published in the journal Science, examines recent surface temperature trends in an updated NOAA data set. They find that, with an enlarged data set that has corrections for bias between drifting buoy data and data taken from ship intakes, as well as extended corrections for water cooling in buckets in the time between being drawn from the sea and being measured, there is a statistically significant warming trend of 0.086 °C per decade over the 1998-2012 period. This trend is just over double the trend found in the previous version of their data set and the authors note that their results “do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

Read this Science Brief.

Karl, T.R. et al., 2015: Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus. Science, 26, 348, 6242,1469-1472, doi: 10.1126/science.aaa5632.