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Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown

It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.

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Figure 1: Annual mean and global mean surface temperature anomalies.
Figure 2: Overlapping trend in annual mean temperature.
Figure 3: Anomalies in the ratio of trends in annual mean and global mean surface temperature, to trends in anthropogenic radiative forcing.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Thomas Karl, Susan Solomon, Jochem Marotzke, Stefan Rahmstorf, Steve Lewandowsky, James Risbey and Naomi Oreskes for their comments on earlier drafts. We acknowledge the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling for their roles in making the WCRP CMIP multi-model datasets available. Portions of this study were supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the US Department of Energy's Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) Cooperative Agreement # DE-FC02-97ER62402, and the National Science Foundation.

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J.C.F. and G.A.M. conceived the study. J.C.F. undertook the calculations and wrote the initial draft of the paper. All the authors helped with the analysis and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to John C. Fyfe.

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Fyfe, J., Meehl, G., England, M. et al. Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown. Nature Clim Change 6, 224–228 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2938

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