List of excuses for ‘The Pause’ in global warming
The current count: 52 excuses
RSS satellite data showing the 18 year ‘pause’ of global warming
List last updated on September 11th, 2014
1) Low solar activity
2) Oceans ate the global warming [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]
3) Chinese coal use [debunked]
4) Montreal Protocol
5) What ‘pause’? [debunked] [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]
6) Volcanic aerosols [debunked]
7) Stratospheric Water Vapor
8) Faster Pacific trade winds [debunked]
9) Stadium Waves
10) ‘Coincidence!’
11) Pine aerosols
12) It’s “not so unusual” and “no more than natural variability”
13) “Scientists looking at the wrong ‘lousy’ data” http://
14) Cold nights getting colder in Northern Hemisphere
15) We forgot to cherry-pick models in tune with natural variability [debunked]
16) Negative phase of Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation
17) AMOC ocean oscillation
18) “Global brightening” has stopped
19) “Ahistorical media”
20) “It’s the hottest decade ever” Decadal averages used to hide the ‘pause’ [debunked]
21) Few El Ninos since 1999
22) Temperature variations fall “roughly in the middle of the AR4 model results”
23) “Not scientifically relevant”
24) The wrong type of El Ninos
25) Slower trade winds [debunked]
26) The climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought [see also]
27) PDO and AMO natural cycles and here
28) ENSO
29) Solar cycle driven ocean temperature variations
30) Warming Atlantic caused cooling Pacific
[paper] [debunked by Trenberth & Wunsch]31) “Experts simply do not know, and bad luck is one reason”
32) IPCC climate models are too complex, natural variability more important
33) NAO & PDO
34) Solar cycles
35) Scientists forgot “to look at our models and observations and ask questions”
36) The models really do explain the “pause” [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]
37) As soon as the sun, the weather and volcanoes – all natural factors – allow, the world will start warming again. Who knew?
38) Trenberth’s “missing heat” is hiding in the Atlantic, not Pacific as Trenberth claimed
[debunked] [Dr. Curry’s take] [Author: “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus”]
39) “Slowdown” due to “a delayed rebound effect from 1991 Mount Pinatubo aerosols and deep prolonged solar minimum”
40) The “pause” is “probably just barely statistically significant” with 95% confidence:The “slowdown” is “probably just barely statistically significant” and not “meaningful in terms of the public discourse about climate change”
41) Internal variability, because Chinese aerosols can either warm or cool the climate:
The “recent hiatus in global warming is mainly caused by internal variability of the climate” because “anthropogenic aerosol emissions from Europe and North America towards China and India between 1996 and 2010 has surprisingly warmed rather than cooled the global climate.”[Before this new paper, anthropogenic aerosols were thought to cool the climate or to have minimal effects on climate, but as of now, they “surprisingly warm” the climate]
42) Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’ really is missing and is not “supported by the data itself” in the “real ocean”:
“it is not clear to me, actually, that an accelerated warming of some…layer of the ocean … is robustly supported by the data itself. Until we clear up whether there has been some kind of accelerated warming at depth in the real ocean, I think these results serve as interesting hypotheses about why the rate of surface warming has slowed-down, but we still lack a definitive answer on this topic.” [Josh Willis]43) Ocean Variability: [NYT article]
“After some intense work by of the community, there is general agreement that the main driver [of climate the “pause”] is ocean variability. That’s actually quite impressive progress.” [Andrew Dessler]44) The data showing the missing heat going into the oceans is robust and not robust:
” I think the findings that the heat is going into the Atlantic and Southern Ocean’s is probably pretty robust. However, I will defer to people like Josh Willis who know the data better than I do.”-Andrew Dessler. Debunked by Josh Willis, who Dessler says “knows the data better than I do,” says in the very same NYT article that “it is not clear to me, actually, that an accelerated warming of some…layer of the ocean … is robustly supported by the data itself” – [Josh Willis]45) We don’t have a theory that fits all of the data:
“Ultimately, the challenge is to come up with the parsimonious theory [of the ‘pause’] that fits all of the data” [Andrew Dessler]46) We don’t have enough data of natural climate cycles lasting 60-70 years to determine if the “pause” is due to such natural cycles:
“If the cycle has a period of 60-70 years, that means we have one or two cycles of observations. And I don’t think you can much about a cycle with just 1-2 cycles: e.g., what the actual period of the variability is, how regular it is, etc. You really need dozens of cycles to determine what the actual underlying variability looks like. In fact, I don’t think we even know if it IS a cycle.” [Andrew Dessler]47) Could be pure internal [natural] variability or increased CO2 or both
“this brings up what to me is the real question: how much of the hiatus is pure internal variability and how much is a forced response (from loading the atmosphere with carbon). This paper seems to implicitly take the position that it’s purely internal variability, which I’m not sure is true and might lead to a very different interpretation of the data and estimate of the future.” [Andrew Dessler in an NYT article ]48) Its either in the Atlantic or Pacific, but definitely not a statistical fluke:
It’s the Atlantic, not Pacific, and “the hiatus in the warming…should not be dismissed as a statistical fluke” [John Michael Wallace]49) The other papers with excuses for the “pause” are not “science done right”:
” If the science is done right, the calculated uncertainty takes account of this background variation. But none of these papers, Tung, or Trenberth, does that. Overlain on top of this natural behavior is the small, and often shaky, observing systems, both atmosphere and ocean where the shifting places and times and technologies must also produce a change even if none actually occurred. The “hiatus” is likely real, but so what? The fuss is mainly about normal behavior of the climate system.” [Carl Wunsch]50) The observational data we have is inadequate, but we ignore uncertainty to publish anyway: [Carl Wunsch in an NYT Article]
“The central problem of climate science is to ask what you do and say when your data are, by almost any standard, inadequate? If I spend three years analyzing my data, and the only defensible inference is that “the data are inadequate to answer the question,” how do you publish? How do you get your grant renewed? A common answer is to distort the calculation of the uncertainty, or ignore it all together, and proclaim an exciting story that the New York Times will pick up…How many such stories have been withdrawn years later when enough adequate data became available?”51) If our models could time-travel back in time, “we could have forecast ‘the pause’ – if we had the tools of the future back then” [NCAR press release]
[Time-traveling, back-to-the-future models debunked] [debunked] [“pause” due to natural variability]52) ‘Unusual climate anomaly’ of unprecedented deceleration of a secular warming trend
PLOS one Paper Macia et al. discussed in European Commission news release here.Additional related comments from climate scientists about the “pause”
1) My University screwed up the press release & didn’t let me stop them from claiming my paper shows the “hiatus will last another decade or two.” [Andrew Dessler]
2) “This [the ‘pause’] is not an existential threat to the mainstream theory of climate.” [Andrew Dessler]
3) “In a few years, as we get to understand this [the ‘pause’] more, skeptics will move on (just like they dropped arguments about the hockey stick and about the surface station record) to their next reason not to believe climate science.” [Andrew Dessler]
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