When it comes to climate change, I feel like Michael Corleone in Godfather III: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I already noted here earlier my latest rumble with some climatistas in Boulder on Monday, and today I see the news that the temperature “pause” is back on again.
Last fall, conveniently just before the Paris climate summit, the government announced to great fanfare that a re-analysis of the temperature data showed that there had been no pause in global temperature since 1998—that the planet has been getting steadily hotter all along. There was a lot of criticism of potential data manipulation, but as I was busy working on other projects I didn’t look into and left it to John to cover, which he did in several posts.
Earlier this week “a prominent group of researchers,” as Nature magazine describes them, has contested the previous “no pause” finding, and conclude that there was indeed a pause that the climate models can’t account for very well:
The latest salvo in an ongoing row over global-warming trends claims that warming has indeed slowed down this century.
An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.
Now a prominent group of researchers is countering that claim, arguing in Nature Climate Change that even after correcting these biases the slowdown was real.
“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”
Amazingly, one of the authors of the new paper is Michael Mann of hockey stick fame. Maybe we should say the “pause” has been “Mann-splained”?
Here’s Scientific American on the story yesterday:
The disagreement may seem esoteric, but it underpins the biggest climate disagreement of the past decades. Climate models, which are virtual representations of our planet, project that temperatures were much higher in the early 2000s than was the case in reality. Scientists have been trying to understand why.
But remember: everything is settled, shut up, and hand over your car keys. Because we can ignore it, unless you’re the moral equivalent of Holocaust denier.
And from the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
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