Scientists can now explain the “pause” in global warming that skeptics have used to bolster their arguments. Skeptics had claimed we have nothing to fear from climate change because it has stopped being a problem.

 

A new study has found that global temperatures have not flat-lined over the past 15 years, as weather station records have been suggesting, but have in fact continued to rise as fast as previous decades, during which we have seen an unprecedented acceleration in global warming.

 

The findings will undermine the arguments of leading skeptics, such as the former Chancellor Lord Lawson, who have criticized scientists from the Met Office and other climate organizations for not accepting that global warming has stopped since about 1998.

 

Two university scientists have found that the “pause” or “hiatus” in global temperatures can be largely explained by a failure of climate researchers to record the dramatic rise in Arctic temperatures over the past decade or more.

 

When Kevin Cowtan of York University and Robert Way of Ottawa University found a way of estimating Arctic temperatures from satellite readings, the so-called pause effectively disappeared and the global warming signal returned as strong as before.

 

The paucity of surface-temperature records in the remote and inaccessible Arctic has long been recognized as a problem for global estimates, not least by the Met Office itself.

 

However, the scale of the Arctic warming highlighted by Dr Cowtan and Dr Way has surprised seasoned climate researchers.