Researchers at Stanford University released a new evidence debunking previous reports that global warming had "taken a break" between 1998 and 2013.
As HNGN previously reported, some studies have linked the global warming hiatus, pause, or slowdown to changes in the wind patterns and changes in the temperature of the Pacific sea surface. But a new research from Stanford is implying that these previous studies got it all wrong due to faulty statistical methods.
"Our results clearly show that, in terms of the statistics of the long-term global temperature data, there never was a hiatus, a pause or a slowdown in global warming," Noah Diffenbaugh, study co-author and a climate scientist in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, said in a university news release.
The Stanford researchers reviewed earlier studies and recalculated the data using a new statistical framework that is often used to study geophysical processes such as global temperature fluctuations. They also factored in the corrected data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) previously suggested that the global warming pause is a myth.
As HNGN previously reported, the NOAA researchers found that the incomplete spatial coverage among ship measurements led to underestimates of the true global temperature change outlined in the 2013 IPCC report. The study highlighted that the rate of warming over the past 15 years has actually been accelerating.
The latest study agrees with NOAA's findings and is backing their own findings with sound statistical evidence. Bala Rajaratnam, study lead author and an assistant professor of statistics and of Earth system science, and his colleagues did not only examined the data but also revisited the statistical methods used. They found out that most of the methods used were for medical and biological studies, which are not applicable for geophysical processes.
"When we compared the results from our technique with those calculated using classical methods, we found that the statistical confidence obtained using our framework is 100 times stronger than what was reported by the NOAA group," Joseph Romano, a Stanford statistician, said.
The findings highlight the importance of using the right statistical method and data analysis technique in forecasting global warming or climate change.
The study was published in the Sept. 17 issue of Climatic Change.
