If you’re relatively new to the climate scene, you may not remember a time five to 10 years ago, when deniers were very passionate about “the pause” or “hiatus” in warming, which was little more than a cherry-picked trend line starting at what was then the hottest year, 1998.
It was so popular that it even “seeped” into mainstream science, in part because so many people felt compelled to debunk it. Paradoxically, all the effort spent debunking it granted a greater degree of legitimacy than it ever deserved.
Then 2015 shattered the hottest year record, and it was no longer such a convenient argument. Then 2016 shattered the hottest year record set in 2015, and all of a sudden 1998’s warmth didn’t seem so hot, and deniers more or less abandoned the talking point.
Until now, unfortunately. Because they’re now dusting off the hiatus playbook, and suggesting that since 2020’s temperatures were basically tied with 2016, we might be looking at the start of a new 5 year pause.
Not one but two denial blogs published this profoundly bad-faith, and just plain bad, argument last week. On the 14th, Christopher Monckton’s “new pause?” post went up on WUWT, while on the 15th, GWPF’s David Whitehouse made a similar argument.
Remarkably, even though these two struggle to attempt to make the same “argument” about how, if you pretend like the world began in 2015, then this warming thing is no big deal, they also manage to contradict one another!
GWPF’s post claims that, despite official reports that 2020’s heat was dampened slightly by La Niña conditions, it was El Niño conditions that pushed up temperatures. Monckton, on the other hand, claims that the La Niña conditions will perhaps be “lengthening the Pause perhaps until the Glasgow climate conference this December.”
So not only does beginning a trendline in 2014 instead of 2015 make it obvious that these two are being intentionally deceptive, but they can’t even get things right between themselves!
Do they deserve a standing ovation for this? Hardly. But they probably think they deserve a round of a-pause.
