I’ve had some…spirited…discussions with people claiming that the last ten years has seen a flattening of temperature as alluded to by David earlier. He covered some basic points, while leaving out that smoothing of the data across the El Niño-La Niña cycle has shown no decline thus far.
In the discussions, I’ve pointed out that the last few years has seen La Niña (cooling of the Pacific) with a solar minimum, and yet still the temperatures barely fell. I said that when El Niño started again, we’d most likely break the 1998 mark and if the sun picks up activity at the same time, we may see a very fast jump in the coming couple years.
Now that El Niño has started, it has set new records and most likely next year will be the hottest on record.
The obsession with surface temperature is also off the mark as it is rather variable and not representative of the full thermodynamics. When looking at ocean energy, it changes the picture a tad.
That is the main reason why ice is melting so rapidly at the poles. Even when people are talking about ice, they focus on surface. While that’s bad enough, the volume is much worse. This is because the immense increase in energy of the water under the ice is eating through it rapidly and that leads to sheering.
All of this has been accelerating while we’ve had the best possible conditions for it to slow down.
Oh yeah, and the increased temperatures and emissions are leading to fast ocean acidification.