OF BOATS AND BUOYS--OCEAN WARMING "HIATUS" MYSTERY SOLVED

Climate-change deniers were thrilled to report about an apparent slow-down in ocean warming noted in a 2013 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. For once, it appeared that they had some actual data on their side. They will now have to switch back to denying the data, demeaning the researchers (or following Trump and blaming China for making up the whole concept of climate change), since first NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and now an independent consortium of researchers from the US and the UK have shown that the slowdown didn't happen.

It turns out that the slowdown or "hiatus" was largely the result of inappropriately combining temperature readings from satellites, ships and buoys. Buoys tend to give cooler readings than measurements made aboard ships, so as more buoys came on line in recent years, they produced a false cooling signal.

An ARGO float at work--one way scientists measure ocean temperatures/Credit: UCSD

When the three data sets--from ships, buoys and satellites--are analyzed separately, each shows continuous warming of the oceans averaging 0.12 degrees C (0.22 degrees F) per decade over the past 75 years.

"Our results mean that essentially NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books," said Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group and the lead author of the new study, published today in the open-access journal Science Advances.

Note, 1/11/17: It didn't take long for the denial to kick in. A story in the conservative UK Spectator argues that "their case rests on the El Nino temperature increase and will be destroyed when the El Nino subsides, as it is currently doing. A temporary victory over the ‘pause’."

Environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli promptly destroys that argument by pointing out that if the El Nino years are analyzed separately, they show warming of 0.18 degrees C (0.32 degrees F) per decade over the past fifty years, as do the La Nina years taken separately, with neutral years averaging 0.16 degrees C (0.29 degrees f) per decade.

If you wonder why climate change denial persists in the face of basic physics, decades of research, and a now visibly destabilized climate, please read Naomi Klein's 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein makes the case that conservatives, representatives of the neoliberal market-fundamentalist consensus realized long ago that acceptance of the reality of human-caused climate change would threaten the foundations of the current global economic system. To preserve the system, they have no choice but to deny the reality as long as they can.