The International Panel on Climate Change released the Fifth Annual Assessment Report on the global temperatures last Friday, reporting on all the scientific data collected over the last year behind global warming. This year’s assessment report has tried to account for one very big surprise in the data: the earth is not warming.

Over the last decade, climate researchers have found the earth’s global temperature has actually remained relatively constant. The IPCC attributes this pause in the global warming to a number of potential reasons, most notably the ocean acting as a greenhouse gas sink, according to a paper published in the journal Nature in April of this year. The researchers had found that around the top 700 meters of the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean absorbed a vast majority of the excess energy in Earth’s atmosphere.

More than 800 authors across more than 39 countries contributed to the 2,500-page assessment. The assessment is comprised of millions of observations and numerical data from climate model simulations. However, the data can be only so useful when the models make mistakes.

Climate models are simply simulations of Earth’s systems. The functionality of these models is determined by comparing their past predictions with data that already exists from the past. Global models, such as the global climate change models from the IPCC, are comprised of data derived from dozens upon dozens of these models. What this means is that these models are only as strong as their data and input from scientists. With each new variable that researchers discover, these models become more accurate in their predictions. That models failed to foresee a pause in global warming is most likely due to scientists’ inability to identify all the variables that exist—such as the Pacific Ocean acting as a greenhouse gas sink—in the Earth’s systems.

So, ultimately, the climate scientists have made educated guesses, but admit they do not fully understand what is going on with Earth’s climate, especially with this recent pause in rising temperatures even as greenhouse gases keep going up. So while media and politicians and the public argue about whether climate change exists, most scientists are searching for where all that heat extra heat is going if not the Earth’s surface. The ocean is one of several possible answers, or it could be a mix of all of them.

That is not to say the IPCC is absolved of blame for incorrectly diagnosing the Earth’s problems. Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, believes the approach the IPCC takes to climate change is fundamentally flawed. Consensus-seeking, she says, introduces bias into the science.

“They don’t challenge it and say, well, how might this be wrong?” she told Fox News. “What are all the different reasons or ways this could be wrong? And once you start looking at it that way, you come up with a lot of different answers.”