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Climate science

Uncertain temperature trend

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 83–84 (2014)Cite this article

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Global mean surface temperatures have not risen much over the past 15 years, despite continuing greenhouse gas emissions. An attempt to explain the warming slow-down with Arctic data gaps is only a small step towards reconciling observed and expected warming.

One of the most intriguing issues in climate science is an apparent pause in global surface warming. For example, according to the UK Met Office record of global mean surface temperatures HadCRUT4 (ref. 1), there has been no statistically significant warming trend2 since 1998. In addition, the observed mean surface temperatures fall below the 5–95% envelope of climate model simulations, as reported in the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see Fig. 11.25 in ref. 3). Writing in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way4 suggest that at least some of the discrepancy can be explained by incomplete spatial coverage of the observations, notably in the fast-warming Arctic region.

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Figure 1: Aerial view of the Arctic.

© ACCENT ALASKA.COM / ALAMY

References

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  1. Judith Curry is at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0340, USA,

    Judith Curry

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  1. Judith Curry
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Correspondence to Judith Curry.

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Curry, J. Uncertain temperature trend. Nature Geosci 7, 83–84 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2078

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2078

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