Pause for thought

Possibly inspired by this blog (it’s always good to dream big), it seems that some of the world’s most preeminent climate scientists have been doing some fact checking of their own. This week, a paper was released in Science Advances adding support to the argument that there has not actually been a ‘hiatus’ in warming at all.

You may have seen this reported in the news. It has received quite a lot of attention as it refutes one of the most popular arguments of climate change ‘sceptics’ (see my first mythbusting post).

The paper corroborates an earlier study by the NOAA that the apparent slow down in warming is in fact an artefact of the way measurements are made. Changes in the way sea surface temperature measurements are taken, for example a move towards using buoys rather than ships, have resulted in measurement biases. This distorted the true trend in temperature changes.

Figure 1: From the BBC website, showing the NOAAs new dataset (red), which corrected the biases from older, less accurate instruments (blue).

This week’s paper presented a climate dataset which fully corrected for the different methods of collecting temperature observations. Both this and the NOAA data found rates of warming over the past decade to be comparable to earlier rates, in contrast to previous reports of a ‘hiatus’ which even made it into the 5^th IPCC report.

This paper highlights the importance of critically evaluating science. However, it also reinforces the message from the extreme weather report is discussed in my earlier blog about the difficulty of communicating science. People with more experience science understand the concepts of instrumental bias, error, and uncertainty. However, to most people these words suggest something entirely different.

In some ways it is understandable why so many people are suspicious of claims about climate change when climate scientists themselves can’t seem to decide what’s going on. The scientific community as a whole needs to work on making science communication more accessible. In climate science especially this is of the upmost importance. I think a good start would to spend more time focussing on what we know, and less on what we don’t.