Global warming has been gradually increasing despite a 15-year "hiatus" in rising temperatures, according to a study published this week in Nature Climate Change.
Even though average surface temperatures have stayed steady for the past decade and a half, the number of extremely hot days has increased during the same span of time, CBC News reported.
Scientists and lawmakers look to the average global temperature to track climate change. According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth's average temperature didn't change much between 1998 and 2012.
Terming the steady temperature a "temporary hiatus," the panel cited other possible factors, such as the ocean absorbing excess heat, as possible explanations.
The recent study says that during this supposed pause in rising temperatures, other climate change measures have indicated a warming trend.
The researchers examined temperature data and the number of extremely hot days each year from 1997 and 2010, comparing these figures to the average for 1979 to 2012.
They discovered that the amount of land affected by intense heat has been steadily increasing and that more than twice the land area has extremely hot days compared with 30 years ago.
"This analysis shows that not only is there no pause in the evolution of the warmest daily extremes over land but that they have continued unabated over the observational record," said the study, which was published Wednesday in Nature Climate Change.
"Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that the most 'extreme' extremes show the greatest change."
The Swiss, Canadian and Australian researchers behind the paper cite melting Arctic ice and snow and intensely hot days as evidence that global warming hasn't been on pause at all.
"We highlight that the term pause, as applied to the recent evolution of global annual mean temperatures," the authors wrote, "is ill-chosen and even misleading in the context of climate change."
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