‘Hide the Hiatus!’ How the Climate Alarmists Eliminated the Inconvenient ‘Pause’ in Global Warming

What’s the most embarrassing and inconvenient truth for the cause of climate alarmism?

Probably the fact that there has now been no “global warming” for 18 years and six months. Not only does this contradict all the doomladen climate models cited in the IPCC’s various reports – none of them predicted the so-called “Pause” – but it also means that not one of the kids in school being fed climate propaganda by their on-message teachers has ever personally lived during a time of global warming.

So it’s quite understandable that – just as they tried to do with the “Medieval Warming Period” and also “the decline” (which proved so troubling to Michael Mann and his pals) – the alarmists are doing their damnedest to write the “Pause” (or, if you will, “hiatus”) out of scientific history.

And now they’ve done it!

Or so the journal Science tells us in a new paper being greeted with a predictably rapturous reception by the usual suspects at the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

Here, for example, is Pravda’s take:

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

“The reality is that there is no hiatus,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science

So that’s it then, is it? Game over for the deniers, now dramatically disarmed of their most powerful weapon by “the Science”?

Er, not quite, no, as this exquisitely damning rebuttal from the Global Warming Policy Forum makes clear.

The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening.

And how did Karl et al notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.”

Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along.

Karl’s paper makes much of the fact that the methods used for gathering sea temperature data have changed over the years: in the old days it used to involve buckets; more recently, engine intake thermometers. Hence his excuse for these magical “adjustments”. Apparently (amazingly, conveniently), the measurements used since 1998 have been “running cold” and therefore needed correcting in a (handy) upward direction in order to show what has really been happening to global warming. Once you realise this – global warming turns out to be as real and present and dangerous as ever it was.

As the GWPF reports there are several glaring problems with Karl’s paper, starting with the fact that it contradicts all the other surface temperature data sets and also satellite data (which clearly shows no warming post 1998). Also, without any plausible explanation, Karl also chooses not to use the data from the Argo array “that is our best coherent data set on ocean temperatures.” The suspicion naturally arises that this is because if Karl had used the Argo findings, they would have made his paper look ridiculous.

But, of course, accuracy and scientific integrity was never the point of this exercise.

Rather, it’s sole point was to garner quotations like the ones amassed by the Guardian (et al) and relayed to the faithful who will now unquestionably accept it as evidence that their cause is just.

Here below is the rationale for Karl’s paper. The actual science is a sublime irrelevance for, as ever, this is all about politics.

Prof Michael Mann, whose analysis of the global temperature in the 1990s revolutionised the field, said the work underlined the conclusions of his own recent research.

“They’ve sort of just confirmed what we already knew, there is no true ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in warming,” he said. “To the extent that the study further drives home the fact … that global warming continues unabated as we continue to burn fossil fuels and warm the planet, it is nonetheless a useful contribution to the literature.”

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at London’s Grantham Research Institute, said the news that warming had been greater than previously thought should cause governments currently meeting in Bonn to act with renewed urgency and lay foundations for a strong agreement at the pivotal climate conference in Paris this December.

“The myth of the global warming pause has been heavily promoted by climate change sceptics seeking to undermine the case for strong and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ward.

Since scientists began to report a slower than expected rate of warming during the last decade, climate sceptics have latched on to the apparent dip in order to question the validity of climate models.

Last February, US Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told CNN: “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.”

Cruz’s rival for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush, was using the pause to argue for inaction as early as 2009.