Reading around about the so-called "climate change hiatus" I just came across this interesting letter published in Nature on the 26th February 2014 by a group of researchers from several countries led by Sonia Seneviratne (Switzerland) indicating how the term "pause" or "hiatus" being applied to the recent period of slowdown in the increasing trend of average temperatures is "ill-chosen or even misleading in the context of climate change".
To assess whether there really is an evolution on the Earth's climate, analyzing the evolution of all the different elements which compose earth's climate is required.
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| Extreme Temperature Trend in the US. Source: NOAA |
It is true that there' s been a slowdown in the increase of global average temperatures over the past ten years. This slowdown can be linked to several causes such as internal climate variability, a change in the solar energy input, increased stratospheric water vapor or strong La Niña events. But climate is not only composed of mean temperatures.
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| Source: http://www.tiempo.com/ |
The authors point out that extremes of warm temperatures haven't stopped growing. In fact, these climatic anomalies have presented the greatest increase over the last decade just like other climate change-related elements such as ice melting, sea level rise and ocean heat content haven't stopped growing. Such rise in the most extreme phenomena indicate without any doubt that there is no such "pause".
Moreover, particularly this increase in warm extremes has negative effects on health, agriculture, ecosystems and infrastructure.
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