Extracting and analyzing the warming trend in global and hemispheric temperatures

This paper offers an updated and extended attribution analysis based on recently published versions of temperature and forcing datasets. It shows that both temperature and radiative forcing variables can be best represented as trend stationary processes with structural changes occurring in the slope of their trend functions and that they share a common secular trend and common breaks, largely determined by the anthropogenic radiative forcing. The common nonlinear trend is isolated and further evidence on the possible causes of the current slowdown in warming is presented. Our analysis offers interesting results in relation to the recent literature. Changes in the anthropogenic forcings are directly responsible for the hiatus as in Estrada et al. (2013a), while natural factors such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode, as well as the new temperature adjustments in Karl et al. (2105) contribute to weaken the signal. In other words, natural variability and data adjustments do not explain in any way the hiatus, they simply mask its presence.