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The numbers are in and the verdict is that there has been no global warming for 17 years and 11 months, according to satellite data.
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Satellite data prepared by Lord Christopher Monckton shows there has been no warming trend from October of 1996 to August of 2014 — 215 months. To put this in perspective, kids graduating from high school this year have not lived through any global warming in their lifetimes.
According to Monckton — the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a former policy adviser to U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — the rate of warming has been half of what climate scientists initially predicted in the early 1990s.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first predicted in 1990 that global temperatures would rise at a rate of 2.8 degrees Celsius per century. But the temperature rise since the IPCC’s prediction has only been at a rate of 1.4 degrees Celsius per century.
The so-called “pause” in global warming has baffled climate scientists, as many climate models did not predict a prolonged period of little to no warming. While some climate scientists deny the “pause” in global warming even exists, others have looked to places ocean and wind patterns for answers as to why there has been no warming for nearly two decades.
There are now literally dozens of potential explanations for the global warming “pause,” ranging from increasing volcanic activity to Chinese coal-fired power plant emissions.
“The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with ‘substantial confidence’ that the science was settled and the debate over,” Monckton wrote in his climate analysis. “Nature had other ideas.”
“Though more than two dozen more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed,” Monckton added.
Recent articles have claimed that excess heat has been stored in the Earth’s oceans instead of going up into the atmosphere. A new study in the journal Science claims that global warming “slowdown is mainly caused by heat transported to deeper layers in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, initiated by a recurrent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic.”
Pacific and Atlantic oscillation cycles supposedly force warm water deeper and bring up cooler waters to the surface — the reverse of what ocean patterns were doing in the 1990s when global temperatures were rising.
But meteorologists have been predicting a weak el Niño this fall and winter, which would warm ocean waters and potentially put an end to the “pause” in global warming.
“The Great Pause may well come to an end by this winter,” said Monckton. “An el Niño event is underway and would normally peak during the northern-hemisphere winter. There is too little information to say how much temporary warming it will cause, but a new wave of warm water has emerged in recent days, so one should not yet write off this el Niño as a non-event.”
El Niños occur every few years and can cause global temperatures to temporarily spike. Such events caused temperature spikes in 1998, 2007 and 2010, according to Monckton’s data. But these temperature spikes are often succeeded by huge drops in temperatures due to la Niña events.
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