Has global warming hit a plateau?

And what would that mean for the threat of catastrophic climate change?

NASA
(Image credit: NASA)

Why has the warming trend slowed?

Climatologists aren't sure. What they do know is that the average air temperatures at the earth's surface have risen only about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1998 — the hottest year of the 20th century — even as humanity has continued to pour vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The world pumped roughly 110 billion tons of CO2 into the air between 2000 and 2010 — about a quarter of the total put there by mankind since the start of the Industrial Revolution. According to the prevailing models of man-made climate change, greenhouse gases heat the planet by trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere that might otherwise radiate into space. So the additional emissions over the past decade should have caused average temperatures to continue to climb as steeply as they did in the 1980s and 1990s. Climate-change skeptics say the plateau in warming proves that the climate isn't as sensitive to greenhouse emissions as scientists claim, and that it would therefore be foolish to adopt costly measures to limit the use of fossil fuels that emit CO2. "There is no problem with global warming," said Ian Plimer, an earth sciences professor at Australia's University of Melbourne. "It stopped in 1998."

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