Many researchers believe global warming has slowed to a halt; but the heat may have just been hiding.
Climate data only covers about 84 percent of the planet because many Polar regions and areas of Africa are largely undocumented, a University of York news release reported.
Researchers decided to reconstruct the missing temperatures using satellites and data from weather stations and ships.
The team predicted that global warming in the Arctics is happening eight times faster than anywhere else in the world.
The researchers' data directly contradicts findings from the "UK Met Office based on the HadCRUT4 dataset," which suggested that global warming has slowed significantly or even come to a halt since the 1997.
When researchers took the "missing data" into account, they found the warming since 1997 is most likely a whopping two-and-a-half times greater.
"Changes in Arctic sea ice and glaciers over the past decade clearly support the results of our study. By producing a truly global temperature record, we aim to better understand the drivers of recent climate change," Robert Way, a cryosphere specialist and PhD student at the University of Ottawa, said.
The findings are based on observations from hight latitude weather stations, analysis of weather records through history, along with satellite and radiosonde data that laid out temperatures in Earth's lower atmosphere, the news release reported.
"There's a perception that global warming has stopped but, in fact, our data suggests otherwise. But the reality is that 16 years is too short a period to draw a reliable conclusion. We find only weak evidence of any change in the rate of global warming," Doctor Kevin Cowtan, a computational scientist and member of the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, said.
The findings will be published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
