Weather is chaos theory in motion, climate is basically weather averaged over time, and climate trends are the patterns that that climate data makes on various charts and graphs and spreadsheets. It’s not unusual to see jags and dips and spikes in climate records, in fact, that’s what you’d strongly expect to see. But for fossil fuel shills who make a lucrative living deceiving the public about anthropogenic climate change, any dip is good news. Ignore the spikes and trend lines, play up only the dips, and you can present “evidence” the planet must be cooling with every new record warm month and every new hottest year! It’s nice work, if you can get it, and if you have the stomach for lying your sleazy ass off.
Dips have been hard to come by lately, but there was a slight sideways move in the NASA GISS climate record on the heels of an exceptionally hot year almost 20 years ago. This statistical artifact was warmly received by the usual suspects and eagerly christened The Pause:
The skeptics had for years suggested that following the then-record warm year of 1998 and throughout the beginning of the 21st century, global warming had slowed down or “paused.” But the 2015 paper, led by NOAA’s Thomas Karl, employed an update to the agency’s influential temperature dataset, and in particular to its record of the planet’s ocean temperatures, to suggest that really, the recent period was perfectly consistent with the much longer warming trend.
Pauses happen in complex systems. Days get warmer through spring and into summer, but not every succeeding spring day is slightly warmer than the one right before it and slightly cooler than the day that follows. A pause in the warming of the biosphere due to industrial emissions would have been possible—in fact over time it’s highly probable—and dips or pauses would no more spell the end of anthropogenic climate change than a brisk spring day would negate the inevitable onset of summer.
But it turns out there was no significant pause after all! What appeared in the charts and graphs of the time was exaggerated a tiny bit because data collection around 1998 was finally starting to shift from ships to specialized, unmanned buoys.
But the increasing use of buoys created an issue of reconciling the two data sources to piece together a seamless and continuous record — and NOAA was, essentially, siding with the buoys when it comes to accuracy. … Failing to account for this difference, once the shift from ship data to buoy data occurred, had led NOAA’s temperature record to be too cold — and also appeared to dampen the overall rate of global warming.
Another zombie lie bites the dust. But never fear, the fossil-fuel walking dead will jump right back up and keep performing; the show must go on, at least as long as they’re getting paid to perform.