Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists

[padruig]

15. not so fast ...

Kosaka and Xie recently published in Nature (doi:10.1038/nature12534) that the 'pause' in heating is likely due to equatorial surface cooling in the Pacific ocean.

Their abstract provides an excellent summary -

"Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen
in the twenty-first century1,2, challenging the prevailing view that
anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms
have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3–6,
but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering
observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that
accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles
climate simulations and observations.We present a novel method
of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing,
in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea
surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a
climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is
limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces
the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation
coefficient r 50.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current
hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our
simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of
the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter
cooling in northwestern NorthAmerica and the prolonged drought
in the southernUSA.Our results show that the current hiatus is part
of natural climate variability, tied specifically to aLa-Nin˜a-like decadal
cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the
future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue
with greenhouse gas increase."

This gives an insight into the mechanics. Now about the ice, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has switched from their nominal average datum period 1979-2000 to a new thirty year average extending from 1981 to 2010. This thirty year average datum period has been adopted in other data sets as well.

The net effect is that the numbers as we have seen them change just slightly, an effect that the climate denial crowd has latched on to suggesting that the earth is actually 'cooling'.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2013/06/updating-the-sea-ice-baseline/