Critique of ‘Debunking the climate hiatus’, by Rajaratnam, Romano, Tsiang, and Diffenbaugh

Records of global temperatures over the last few decades figure prominently in the debate over the climate effects of CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, as I discussed in my first post in this series, on What can global temperature data tell us? One recent controversy has been whether or not there has been a `pause’ (also referred to as a `hiatus’) in global warming over the last 15 to 20 years, or at least a `slowdown’ in the rate of warming, a question that I considered in my second post, on Has there been a `pause’ in global warming?

As I discussed in that post, the significance of a pause in warming since around 2000, after a period of warming from about 1970 to 2000, would be to show that whatever the warming effect of CO2, other factors influencing temperatures can be large enough to counteract its effect, and hence, conversely, that such factors could also be capable of enhancing a warming trend (eg, from 1970 to 2000), perhaps giving a misleading impression that the effect of CO2 is larger than it actually is. To phrase this more technically, a pause, or substantial slowdown, in global warming would be evidence that there is a substantial degree of positive autocorrelation in global temperatures, which has the effect of rendering conclusions from apparent temperature trends more uncertain.

Whether you see a pause in global temperatures may depend on which series of temperature measurements you look at, and there is controversy about which temperature series is most reliable. In my previous post, I concluded that even when looking at the satellite temperature data, for which a pause seems most visually evident, one can’t conclude definitely that the trend in yearly average temperature actually slowed (ignoring short-term variation) in 2001 through 2014 compared to the period 1979 to 2000, though there is also no definite indication that the trend has not been zero in recent years.

Of course, I’m not the only one to have looked at the evidence for a pause. In this post, I’ll critique a paper on this topic by Bala Rajaratnam, Joseph Romano, Michael Tsiang, and Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Debunking the climate hiatus, published 17 September 2015 in the journal Climatic Change. Since my first post in this series, I’ve become aware that `tamino’ has also commented on this paper, here, making some of the same points that I will make.  I’ll have more to say, however, some of which is of general interest, apart from the debate on the `pause’ or `hiatus’.