FALSE: GLOBAL WARMING HASN’T STOPPED
Written by Odhiambo Shem on March 15, 2023
A twitter post claiming that global warming has stopped is false.
“Beware the Grand Solar Minimum. 9 times more people die from the cold compared to heat. Global warming has stopped”, states the claim.
In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that those years had been among the warmest since the year 1860. The report further states that between the years 1997 and 1998, there came the powerful El Niño, which transferred huge amounts of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. Due to this weather pattern, earth’s temperature soared, but then appeared to dramatically slacken.
According to the IPCC Assessment Report 5, Working Group 1, global average surface temperature between 1998 and 2012 rose at less than a half the rate it did between 1951-2012. This was a bit strange, since global warming ought to accelerate over time as people increase the rate at which they add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. This made climate skeptics by mid 2000s to seize on the narrative that ‘global warming had stopped’.
In 2015, a team of researchers led by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a report in the journal Science, indicating that the rise in global temperatures hadn’t plateaued, but ongoing global warming had been obscured by incomplete data. After including more arctic temperature records and correcting biases in ocean temperature data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dataset showed the heat-up continuing. With this data, the apparent pause in global warming vanished.
Source: Science News
These findings were confirmed and extended by another study conducted in 2017 by Zeke Hausfather, who is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst. Zeke assessed warming in 2017 using instrumentally homogenous sea surface temperature (IHSST) records. Through this series he found that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature Volume 4 (ERSSTv4) successfully rectified a notable cooling bias available in ERSSTv3b during the previous two decades minus introducing any detectable residual trend bias. The results of the study concluded that the most accurate composite estimate of global sea surface temperature trends during the two previous decades are represented in ERSSTv4. This supported another previous finding which reported that the rates of surface warming in recent years had been underestimated.
We looked into this claim stating that global warming has stopped and found it to be false.
This fact-check was produced by Sky 106.1 FM with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, International Fact-Checking Network, and African Fact Checking Alliance network.
