Summer 2012

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Denying the Deniers

THE SOURCE: “Asymmetric Seasonal Temperature Trends” by Judah L. Cohen, Jason C. Furtado, Mathew Barlow, Vladimir A. Alexeev, and Jessica E. Cherry, in Geophysical Research Letters, Feb. 25, 2012.

Climate change deniers have made much hay of research that claims that global temperatures have stopped rising. Global warming, they gleefully conclude, must not be the threat so many think it is. But such thinking overlooks important nuances, argue Judah L. Cohen and his coauthors. Their research suggests that temperatures have continued to rise in many parts of the world during some parts of the year, even as the global average has barely budged.

The authors analyzed global land temperatures for the period 1979–2010 using observational data and climate modeling.  They found that the annual increase in average global temperature became smaller, then disappeared altogether, starting in the late 1990s. When the researchers broke the data down by season, however, they found that things looked very different. Significant warming trends were evident in spring, summer, and fall, with global increases over the decade 2001–10  ranging from 0.68 °C in the summer to 0.88 °C in the fall. In central and northern Eurasia, summer and fall temperatures increased more than double those amounts.

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