Post-truth tales reinforce entrenched world views Lukas Schulze/Getty

A favourite climate contrarian talking point is that there was a pause or “hiatus” in warming from 1998 until the early part of the current decade.

With the last three years being by far the hottest on record, we’ve heard somewhat less about this faux pause, but there are still those who cling to this utterly debunked idea. The science is clear. Warming continued unabated, as established by multiple independent data sets from around the world, and numerous studies in peer-reviewed journals.

But that hasn’t stopped British newspaper The Mail on Sunday trying to resurrect a dead duck: this time claiming that scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) played fast and loose with data on a well-regarded 2015 paper in Science that definitively showed there was no pause in global warming.


Cue Lamar Smith, Republican chair of the US Congress House Science Committee and his cronies, who not only ate up the newspaper’s warped claim, but gleefully promoted it, tweeting up a storm and proclaiming “falsified data!” The real story is that these Republicans embraced an easily debunked story because it told them precisely what they wanted to hear.

This is just the latest example of the post-truth scourge bombarding society. Propagandists deliver tribal tales that reinforce entrenched world views. The role of the UK tabloid press in this latest episode was central. The Mail piece was posted online on Saturday night, at the same time as a separate fake news video attacking NASA and NOAA was posted by the Wall St. Journal.

Within hours, the Mail’s story was retold on numerous other right-wing media sites in the UK, the US, and beyond. And the House Science Committee’s Republican majority quickly posted a Sunday press release praising it and publishing it in full on its website.

The whole thing had been built entirely on an interview with one disgruntled former NOAA employee, John Bates. His assertions, published simultaneously in Judith Curry’s contrarian climate blog and the Mail, have now been thoroughly debunked in the science press.

The reality is this: the science in the 2015 paper is impeccable and has been replicated and confirmed by other research groups publishing in peer-reviewed journals; data used in the paper were not experimental, biased or improperly archived; and the paper was not rushed to publication.

In the final analysis, this was much ado about nothing, a bureaucratic issue involving data archiving procedures raised by someone not involved in the substance of the science. Such specious, mountain-out-of-molehill arguments are promoted when critics don’t have a legitimate scientific case to make.

But fossil-fuelled politicians and the right-wing media serving as their megaphones will continue to wring every ounce of faux controversy they can out of this episode. For unlike the scientists they are criticising, they don’t care about scientific truth. They care only about advancing their political agenda.