Monday, July 1, 2013

Yeah, so global warming is still a thing...

Wait.  Really?  I have a blog?

On with the blogging!

There's long been this meme floating about that says "global warming stopped in 1998."  Now, 1998 was a huge recordbreaker of a year, so the meme is clearly stacking the deck.  But since about 2001, the surface temperature record seems to have plateaued.  That's not unusual.  Within the long-term rise, there are plenty of areas in the record that can be interpreted as "pauses" (observe).

But there are a lot of short-term variables that can hide (or exaggerate, as in 1998) the long-term trend.  The three largest ones are the el Nino / la Nina phenomenon, solar variability, and volcanic eruptions.  Despite being bad at math, I was curious to know what the temperature record might look like if those factors were subtracted out.

Fortunately, two dudes already did the math for me, and published a paper (which I found via this blog post, which is written by someone smarter and goes into greater depth).  So, what does it look like when we remove the short-term noise from the global warming signal?

So no, global warming hasn't "stopped."  It's just gotten sneakier.