Global warming ‘pause’ may last for 20 more years and Arctic sea ice has already started to recover
- Study says warmer temperatures are largely due to natural 300-year cycles
- Actual increase in last 17 years lower than almost every prediction
- Scientists likened continuing pause to a Mexican wave in a stadium
By David Rose
The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research.
A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy.
Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases.
Pause: How the Earth’s average temperature defied scientists’ predictions by remaining almost the same
The research comes amid mounting evidence that the computer models on which the IPCC based the gloomy forecasts of a rapidly warming planet in its latest report, published in September, are diverging widely from reality.
The graph shown above, based on a version published by Dr Ed Hawkins of Reading University on his blog, Climate Lab Book, reveals that actual temperatures are now below the predictions made by almost all the 138 models on which the IPCC relies.
