Warming climate is real or misunderstood?

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to speed up. It is estimated that the world produced about 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. And yet “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade”.

Climate scientists consider it is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The puzzle that greenhouse-gas emissions and temperatures did not match does not mean global warming is presentational. Temperatures in the first dicade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th.

An increasing body of research is suggesting that it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.

If this is possible, the climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean global warming is not real. （From The Economist）