Some of us have been saying all along the denier's favorite meme — that global temperatures have stopped rising — is just a bit of statistical sleight of hand.
Now a new paper in Science by a handful of NOAA's top researchers shows that, in one of the author's own words "There is no slowdown in global warming." This has already garnered widespread coverage, from the New York Times, to the Guardian (twice), USA Today, the AP, WaPo, LA Times, Smithsonian, RealClimate (written by NASA's Gavin Schmidt), UK Met's Doug McNeall, Carbon Brief (which got quotes from a number of scientists), Greg Laden, The Hill, NatGeo, and even the Wall Street Journal!
Seeing as how it fully deflates the sails of the deniersphere's treasured “hiatus” narrative, they have done their best to push back, with GWPF and Cato both issuing statements. Like always, however, their cries fall flat. The paper actually adjusts DOWN the warming of the past, which is the opposite of what they often claim NOAA does. If you'd like a taste of the Watts et al. response, then Sou's got the whopper for you. Stay tuned, though—she promises there's more to come.
In a nutshell, the paper found that when you correct for measurement issues with ocean temperatures (for example, standardizing insulated vs uninsulated buckets used to draw the water to measure the temperature) and use a larger database of weather stations, what appeared to be a slow down in the rate of warming since the record-hot El Nino year of 1998 disappears.
So while some were speculating that 2014 and 2015's record heat would be the death of the pause, this paper shows that there was never a pause in the first place.
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