All right, so we’re slightly premature. By one measure – according to Bishop Hill – we’re still a month away before “no global warming” achieves its coming of age.

But by other measurements, as Matt Ridley notes in the Wall Street Journal, we’re already as much as 19 or even 26 years into “no global warming” “depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere.”

Still, whichever measurement you pick, it’s really not looking good for the Warmists – whose stubborn ongoing refusal to acknowledge the failure of the planet’s temperatures to accord with their computer models’ doomsday predictions is starting to look so shameless and desperate it’s really about time they considered a name change. How about “deniers”?

Sure, they’ve found lots of excuses to explain the so-called “pause” in global warming. (“Pause” by the way is a most unscientific term which we really shouldn’t allow them to get away with. It presupposes that they know that continued warming is inevitable. Which they don’t. No one does – and that’s the fundamental problem)

According to Ridley, they’ve found at least three dozen:

Nearly 40 different excuses for the pause have been advanced, including Chinese economic growth that supposedly pushed cooling sulfate particles into the air, the removal of ozone-eating chemicals, an excess of volcanic emissions, and a slowdown in magnetic activity in the sun. The favorite explanation earlier this year was that strong trade winds in the Pacific Ocean had been taking warmth from the air and sequestering it in the ocean. This was based on a few sketchy observations, suggesting a very tiny change in water temperature–a few hundredths of a degree–at depths of up to 200 meters.

And you never know – one of these myriad excuses might actually hold some water. But even if one of them does, it scarcely lets the Warmists off the hook. On the contrary, it makes their predicament even worse. That’s because, if any of these theories are correct then it means that “natural variation” (ie climate doing what climate will, regardless of man’s puny influence) is much greater than all those computer models have previously acknowledged.

Or, to put it another way, it means that all that certainty about the causes of global warming and the likelihood of its increasing dramatically (as expressed with increasing hysteria in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s five assessment reports) is based on a massive lie. These people claim to know but they haven’t a clue.

Matt Ridley sometimes likens the drastic measures being urged on us to combat climate change as like “using chemotherapy to cure a cold.” But it could be even worse than that. We know the patient doesn’t have cancer. It now looks increasingly probable that the poor patient who is being put through all this misery at the mad climate doctors’ behest doesn’t even have a sniffle.