Is it official now? Has global surface air temperature warming slowed?

And what is your point?

That we should be driving gas guzzling SUVs?

That we should deposit plant food in our pants everytime the toilets back up at nuclear power plants

Or do you want a scientific explanation for your pause?

The warming trend does have its ups and downs

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator...

There is the Asian Brown Cloud

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud

And the yellow ball in the sky

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1969...

Or, how about reading your own link?

"Only about 2 percent of the planet's overall warming heats the atmosphere, so if we focus only on surface air temperatures, we miss 98 percent of the overall warming of the globe. About 90 percent of the warming of the planet is absorbed in heating the oceans."

<does deep ocean heat also cause bad weather?>

Only when it comes to the surface, which it will. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when the depths are warm enough, they will no longer cool the surface.

The trend since the super El Nino peak of 1998 is +0.06 +- 0.14 C /decade. The trend from 1970 to today is +0.17 +- 0.03 C /decade. (GISTemp)

We cannot say that the background trend has slowed, because the two values are not statistically different from each other: the difference is 0.11 +- 0.14 C/decade.

However, the recent changes in air temperature have been rising at a slower rate than the previous average if you choose to start your trend line from the peak of the hottest El Nino in decades.

Using these data we can't say if the trend is still there or not, the statistics say that it could still be global warming trend + 'noise', such as heat going into the oceans. More complicated statistical techniques (Foster & Rahmstorf 2011) and measurements of the real world (Balmaseda et al, 2013) show that the heat is going into the oceans recently.

So what you can say depends on how you define 'slowing' - do you mean that 1) we're going through a temporary wiggle, or are you trying to say that 2) the background trend of global warming has slowed? You can say 1), but not 2).

Dana is saying what many others have been saying for some time and is reinforcing established facts.

Heat can’t simply disappear, if there’s a mechanism for generating or retaining heat then it has to go somewhere – be it lost into space, the atmosphere, the oceans or wherever it ends up.

We can work out quite easily how much heat is coming into the terrestrial systems and how much is leaving it, the difference is the net heat gain or loss.

Whilst it’s true to say that there has been a decrease in incoming energy (due to a small reduction in TSI and the aerosol effect), the energy budget it is still above the long-term baseline figure. No matter how it’s viewed, more heat is coming into the system than is being lost.

Theoretically at least, this heat could be lost to the deep oceans where it could remain un-noticed and largely undetected. The concern with this model is that any mechanism that can transport heat energy down into the oceans can also bring it back up to the surface, and we know of many such oscillations which do just this.

The Guardian article is quite correct, albeit that it’s perhaps not what some skeptics want to hear.

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EDIT: TO GUNNY T

Your overview of historical climates is by and large an accurate one but there are a couple of errors, quite big ones.

The first is the fact that we have exited the last ice-age, the warming phase ended 8,000 years ago and since then we have been in the early stages of the cooling phase. The second error is that concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases have gone up significantly more than the figure you mentioned, from approx 280 parts per million by volume prior to industrialisation to the current level of just under 400ppmv (a 42% increase). Also, the Little Ice Age was primarily caused by a decline in total solar irradiance.

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It is not a scientific statement. To say that it has 'slowed' implies that it is still warming; but, in fact, depending on the data used, the warming is not statisticallymdistinguishable from zero for 15, 23 , or 90 years. As a scientific matter, global warming has not slowed; it has stopped.

I am a retired Design Engineer who has studied the climate phenomenon for over 20 years. Care to hear the truth about climate change...for a change? Are we or are we not emerging from an Ice age? If in fact we are then we could assume we would experience warming, am I getting ahead of you here?. They taught us about our past ice age back in grade school, before electricity (or was it Independence?). If in fact we are emerging from an ice age that means (ignoring for the moment all the armloads of scientific printouts and gigabytes of Datasets) we are in fact warming and have been for several thousand years deviations in the climate history charts due to Sunspots and solar flares notwithstanding. We even had the localized "Little Ice age" due to thermohaline ocean current anomalies in the 1300-1700 era directly caused by climate warming which at that time began melting polar ice and causing lower salinity. The Vostok Co2 ice core analyses and subsequent Tschumi-Stauffer climate studies show clearly we have cold hot cycles and their accompanying Co2 variations on 100,000 year intervals. Milankovich elliptical orbit effects are causing these Hot/Cold cycles. The integration of sunspot and solar flare contribution to climate change just adds more humps and bumps to the graphs and more snakes to the prediction barrel. Providing a climate OVERVIEW reaching back over 6 million years tells the real story, but we are now faced with arguments based on data going back less than 20,000, the Gore fraud, obscuring the long term picture exposed by old accepted scientific climate history methods. How can man have such a profound effect on the climate in only the past 300 years when normal climate cycles established 6 Million years ago are proceeding as scientifically predicted, the projected temperatures and Co2 values in the mean. That man may be contributing to this climate change is obvious, but the EXTENT to which he is contributing is most assuredly in question. No one to date has been able to address that issue with any degree of Certainty, just a lot of unfounded opinion and fear mongering. Several scientific sources sets the percentage of mans contribution to global greenhouse gas at less than 3%, casting some pretty serious doubts that any changes we make in our energy usage will cause any major change in existing Climate conditions, at least in the foreseeable future. In the meantime media sources continue to show smokestacks belching water vapor as their proof of man made climate change.

If we can find where the heat energy is in the oceans (which we haven't yet), then our alarmist friends here can brag about where it is, but they still can't find it. They've been looking for many years. It's a massive undertaking.

Satellite measurements seem to be the best way to find it. Ocean volume is roughly 40% of the moon's volume. There should be a focus on measuring the ocean depths to find it. How many years will it take? I know that we have the equipment and the scientists to do the measuring. Get on it!

:-)

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When science can conclusively state where the heat is, then they can "save the planet" from it. Until then, alarm bells should be muzzled.

Says who? Some no-nothing paid denialist shill

it always amazes me how news is twisted. 15 years is not an indication of long term warming and extreme events follow the warming that is already there. It's not going backward and cooling.

Please explain ho "Surface warming has slowed" means the same thing as "There is a pause in the warming"