Fact of the Day

US researchers have looked again not just at the data for the last 60 years but at how it has been collected, and done the sums again. They conclude, in the journal Science,  that the “estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature rise.” Climate sceptics have repeatedly claimed that global warming has slowed or stopped. This has not been the case. The new analysis lifts the rate of warming from 2000 to 2014 to 0.116°C per decade, which if anything is an acceleration, not a slowdown. Thirteen of the hottest years ever recorded have all occurred in the last 14 years, and 2014 was the hottest of them all. Between 1998 and 2012, the world warmed at the rate of 0.086°C per decade, more than twice the rate of 0.039°C per decade measured by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.