The “Pause” in global warming is real – not an urban myth concocted by evil ‘deniers’ – a study has found, signalling the development of a major schism within the climate alarmist camp.

“It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims,” the paper in Nature Climate Change says.

Though the paper’s findings are not controversial – few serious scientists dispute the evidence of the temperature datasets showing that there has been little if any global warming for nearly 19 years – they represent a tremendous blow to the climate alarmist “consensus”, which has long sought to deny the “Pause’s” existence.

First, the study was published in Nature Climate Change a fervently alarmist journal which rarely if ever runs papers that cast doubt on the man-made-global-warming scare narrative.

Secondly, it directly contradicts a widely-reported study produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year which attempted to deny the existence of the “Pause” (also known as the “hiatus”). This NOAA study was widely mocked, quickly debunked and is now the subject of a Congressional investigation by Rep Lamar Smith. What’s novel about this new study in Nature Climate Change, though, is that it’s not skeptics and Republicans doing the mocking and the debunking: it’s the kind of people who in the past were very much in the alarmist camp, including – bizarrely – none other than Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who co-authored the paper.

What we have here, in other words, is signs of a major rift within the climate alarmist camp with different factions adopting different tactics to cope with the failure of their collapsing narrative.

On one side are people like Thomas Karl and Thomas Petersen, the hapless NOAA scientists given the unenviable task of producing that risible paper last year which did its best to deny that the Pause was a thing.

On the other are what might be called the “rats deserting the sinking ship” faction who have produced this new paper for Nature Climate Change, in which finally they concede what skeptics have been saying for many years: that there has been no “global warming” since 1998.

This divergence in the alarmist camp is now going to create a dilemma for all those liberal media outlets – from the BBC to the Guardian to the LA Times – which reported on NOAA’s “death of the pause” study as if it were a reliable and credible thing.

Are they now going to report on the counter-narrative? Or are they going to ignore it and hope no one notices?

The man who would like more than anyone to know the answer to this question is David Whitehouse, Science Editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a former science editor at the BBC (till the point when his skepticism became too much for his employer).

That’s because in 2007, he was one of the first scientists to draw attention to the mysterious slowdown in global warming.

As he recalls in the Spectator:

In 2007 I pointed out that it was curious that in recent years the global annual average temperature had not increased at a time when greenhouse gasses were increasing rapidly and when the media was full of claims that the earth’s temperature was getting higher and higher. I proposed no explanation but said that it was a curious observation that would probably change in the near future. I was lambasted for being a denier and liar. Yet in the following years the global temperature did not increase. Some vocal scientists spent more time saying it was wrong than actually looking at the data. While many in the media portrayed the phenomenon as a desperate weapon used by sceptics to undermine climate science, real scientists took notice and began to study the warming pause. It was not long before it was being discussed at conferences and in scientific journals. Something was clearly different about the nature of global temperature change since 1997 than it had been in the previous two decades. It was not only slower, but not increasing at all for many years. Indeed it was said in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that the “pause” or “hiatus” is the biggest problem in climate science.

Whitehouse is too polite to name the alarmist shills and activist attack dogs who have fought so hard over the years to discredit anyone who has dared suggest the existence of a Pause. So I will. But in a separate article. It seems to me that these people are so disgusting, corrupt, nauseating and malign that they shouldn’t simply be tacked on to the end of a news story. They should be made to perform the internet equivalent of Cersei’s Walk of Shame; or, at the very least, to be put in the stocks and pelted with excrement.

In the meantime let us all draw comfort from the fact that a) the alarmists are finally being forced to concede that their skeptic adversaries are right and b) that they are starting to turn on one another. This is the beginning of the end for the alarmist “consensus”. And not before time.