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Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 224–228 (2016)Cite this article

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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.

A large body of scientific evidence — amassed before and since the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5)1 — indicates that the so-called surface warming slowdown, also sometimes referred to in the literature as the hiatus, was due to the combined effects of internal decadal variability and natural forcing (volcanic and solar) superimposed on human-caused warming2. Given the intense political and public scrutiny that global climate change now receives, it has been imperative for scientists to provide a timely explanation of the warming slowdown, and to place it in the context of ongoing anthropogenic warming. Despite recently voiced concerns, we believe this has largely been accomplished.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada, University of Victoria, Victoria, V8W 2Y2, British Columbia, Canada

    John C. Fyfe, Gregory M. Flato, Nathan P. Gillett & Neil C. Swart

  2. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, 80307, Colorado, USA

    Gerald A. Meehl

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

    Matthew H. England

  4. Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Michael E. Mann

  5. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, 94550, California, USA

    Benjamin D. Santer

  6. Department of Meteorology, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading, RG6 6BB, Reading, UK

    Ed Hawkins

  7. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0206, La Jolla, 92093, California, USA

    Shang-Ping Xie

  8. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, 153-8904, Tokyo, Japan

    Yu Kosaka

Authors
  1. John C. Fyfe
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  2. Gerald A. Meehl
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  4. Michael E. Mann
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  6. Gregory M. Flato
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  7. Ed Hawkins
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  8. Nathan P. Gillett
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  9. Shang-Ping Xie
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  10. Yu Kosaka
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  11. Neil C. Swart
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Contributions

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.

Corresponding author

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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