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Robust warming projections despite the recent hiatus

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 394–396 (2015)Cite this article

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The hiatus in warming has led to questions about the reliability of long-term projections, yet here we show they are statistically unchanged when considering only ensemble members that capture the recent hiatus. This demonstrates the robust nature of twenty-first century warming projections.

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Figure 1: Global average SAT anomalies relative to 1880–1900 in individual and multi-model mean CMIP5 simulations.
Figure 2: Trend in SAT during early twenty-first-century hiatuses in models and observations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) including the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. 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 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 the development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The analysis in Figure 1 was inspired by work completed as part of the Australian Academy of Science Climate Change Q&A Report, led by the late Professor Michael Raupach. It is to his memory that this paper is dedicated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales, 2052, New South Wales, Australia

    Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher

  2. Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 2052, New South Wales, Australia

    Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher

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  1. Matthew H. England
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  2. Jules B. Kajtar
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  3. Nicola Maher
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Contributions

M.H.E. conceived the analyses and wrote the first draft of the paper, J.K. analysed the CMIP5 simulations and undertook the statistical calculations, and N.M. analysed the observations and CMIP5 model trends. All authors contributed to interpreting the results and refinement of the paper.

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Correspondence to Matthew H. England.

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England, M., Kajtar, J. & Maher, N. Robust warming projections despite the recent hiatus. Nature Clim Change 5, 394–396 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2575

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