The Pause in Global Warming: A Numerical Approach

Abstract

A Monte Carlo simulation of monthly mean surface temperatures is used to construct a time series of 156 moving decadal temperature trends in a 165-year sample period from 1850 to 2014. We define the current pause in global warming as five consecutive moving decades without a statistically significant decadal temperature trend and find that although such pauses are prevalent in the dataset, the prevalence is mostly a feature of the non-warming first half of the period 1850-1932. The current pause of 2001-2014 is the sole such occurrence in the warming latter half of the sample period 1933-2014. We conclude that the 2001-2014 pause in warming is unlikely to be a manifestation of random natural variability in the context of an overall warming trend.