Some climate skeptics have pointed to a slower rise in global temperature between 1998 and 2012 as evidence that climate change isn’t as dramatic as believed, or that it has stopped altogether, says The Guardian. But a report out in the journal Nature says that the so-called pause in warming is largely the result of research groups using data differently — and not a reason to doubt climate change.
Iselin Medhaug, one of the study’s lead authors at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: “In the beginning there seemed to be some sort of discrepancy and some people concluded we can’t use these models for anything. That isn’t true.”
“The new paper, which takes a retrospective look at data and model predictions covering the early 2000s, suggests that this has been largely a false controversy caused by competing research groups applying different criteria for what a “pause” constitutes — how much leveling off and for how long — to a variety of datasets,” says The Guardian.
Medhaug explains that once you compare “like with like,” lining up time periods, for example, the discrepancy instantly shrinks. And while there may have been years when it seemed like the warming trend had slowed, in fact the heat was being absorbed by the ocean or it may have been that a spate of volcanic eruptions in the early 2000s sent so much debris into the air that it affected solar radiation.