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Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming

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Abstract

Since the end of the twentieth century, global mean surface temperature has not risen as rapidly as predicted by global climate models1,2,3 (GCMs). This discrepancy has become known as the global warming ‘hiatus’ and a variety of mechanisms1,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17 have been proposed to explain the observed slowdown in warming. Focusing on internally generated variability, we use pre-industrial control simulations from an observationally constrained ensemble of GCMs and a statistical approach to evaluate the expected frequency and characteristics of variability-driven hiatus periods and their likelihood of future continuation. Given an expected forced warming trend of 0.2 K per decade, our constrained ensemble of GCMs implies that the probability of a variability-driven 10-year hiatus is 10%, but less than 1% for a 20-year hiatus. Although the absolute probability of a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%). Therefore, given the recognized contribution of internal climate variability to the reduced rate of global warming during the past 15 years, we should not be surprised if the current hiatus continues until the end of the decade. Following the termination of a variability-driven hiatus, we also show that there is an increased likelihood of accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in the Pacific Ocean.

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Figure 1: Observed and simulated GMST.
Figure 2: Probability of GMST trends due to internal variability.
Figure 4: Characteristics of hiatus and post-hiatus periods
Figure 3: Trends in GMST and Niño 3.4 index.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We thank I. Edmond and J. Kettleborough for helping download and archive CMIP5 climate model data and E. Hawkins for useful discussions. This work was supported by the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101) and represents a Met Office contribution to the Natural Environment Research Council DEEP-C project NE/K005480/1.

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Contributions

C.D.R., M.C. and M.D.P. conceived the study. C.D.R. and D.M. analysed the data and conducted statistical analyses. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and the preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to C. D. Roberts.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Roberts, C., Palmer, M., McNeall, D. et al. Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming. Nature Clim Change 5, 337–342 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2531

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