Seeing the environmental forest

That is the conclusion of a new study published in Science yesterday.  Tom Karl and his co-authors used a newly available database of weather station data that combined the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) used by NOAA and NASA with over 40 other historical data sources, effectively doubling the size of the available land temperature data set.  They applied the same corrections for changes in location, urban heat island effect, etc as with the GHCN-only data set and used the same algorithms to calculate the global average over land.  To get a global average, they used the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature dataset version 4 (ERSST4), which better integrates ship-based temperature data and buoy-based temperature data, and merged it with their new land data.  Karl et al. then created a third global temperature average that also fills in the gaps between weather stations in the polar regions. Their new data set shows much higher trends than th...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am skeptical of claims that global warming in atmospheric temperatures have paused since 1998, having written several posts questioning the existence of such a pause.  In this edition, I'll run down the main evidence that, in my opinion, show that the pause is a figment of the denialsphere's imagination.

Like a movie vampire, this one keeps coming back no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart.  I've covered this one ( here , here , and here ).  Bluntly: There is absolutely no evidence that global warming has stopped.  For global warming to stop, the Earth's energy balance must be either zero or negative.  The most recent estimates for the energy imbalance are generally between +0.5 W/m 2 and +1.0 W/m 2 .  The only way the Earth is not going to warm while it is gaining energy is if the laws of thermodynamics magically do not apply.  If the Earth is gaining energy, some part of it, somewhere, must be getting warmer.  The heat must go into either melting ice, warming the oceans, warming the land, or warming the atmosphere (or some combination thereof).