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The most up-to-date temperature data shows no warming for 17 and a half years

Data just released from Remote Sensing System Inc. (RSS), which includes February 2014, shows that global temperature trends have flatlined since 1996. (See first graph below from the Climate Depot.) RSS is one of the two satellite-based datasets (The other is the University of Alabama at Huntsville.) and one of the five standard global temperature datasets. It is the first to release data that includes February.

If you go to the RSS website, you’ll see that, according to their data, the globe has warmed .23 degrees F since 1979. But what they don’t explicitly point out is that all of the warming took place during the first half of that 35-year period. On the other hand, this fact becomes quite clear if one examines the second graph below taken from the RSS site, which shows the entire 35-year period. The yellow area shows the predictions of climate models during that period. As RSS notes "The troposphere has not warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict." (emphasis in original)

Interestingly, RSS points out that "climate models cannot explain this warming [between 1979 and the late 1990s] if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation." But, by implication, given the graph above, those same models cannot explain the flatlining of those temperatures after 1996 with the increase in CO2 included. Maybe the problem is with the models.

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