New study supports doubts about global warming "hiatus"

A study supported previous doubts about a slowdown in global warming since 1998.

Resulting from the change of instrumentation and measurement practices, new data "represents the most accurate composite estimate of global sea surface temperature trends during the past two decades and thus supports the finding that previously reported rates of surface warming in recent years have been underestimated," said the study, published Wednesday on the Science Advances journal and done by a group of the U.S. university professors.

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the global surface temperature "has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years (1998-2012) than over the past 30 to 60 years."

However, a research led by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2015 showed that "the central 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."

Echoing NOAA's research, the new study showed that "ship-based measurements tend to generate temperature readings around 0.12 degrees centigrade higher than those of buoys."

The professors involved pointed out that the mixing of buoy records with ship records led to the different estimates of sea surface temperature. Endi