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At the online Spiegel here, science journalist Axel Bojanowski writes about the 15-year pause in global warming, which Nature here calls “the biggest mystery in climate science.”

Bojanowski describes a situation where scientists have been taken aback by the unexpected pause, and are now scrambling for a way to explain it, or to deny that it even exists. Some “sense a campaign” behind the claims of a warming pause and say the media is overhyping it. The warming continues, some scientists insist. There’s been “a breakdown in the communication” of the science, Spiegel quotes other warmist scientists.

The problem that Spiegel describes seems to be one where the observed data was allowed to speak for itself to the public before the scientists ever got the chance to repackage it to their liking.

Spiegel writes, quoting Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading:

Since 1990 in its 5 reports the UN IPCC failed somewhat to provide clear details over the possibilities of a slowdown in warming. Studies on this were ‘first published after the pause’.”

Bojanowski looks into why this is so. In a nutshell: That a slowdown in warming was possible never even occurred to the scientists. Reality caught them with their pants down.

He writes:

Climate models had never expected the pause: Only 3 of 114 climate simulations were able to reproduce the trend of the past years, the IPCC concludes in its latest report. The reason for the deviation between models and observations is unclear.”

Bojanowski then presents some of the explanations now being floated for the “pause”: volcanoes, Pacific trade winds, heat hidden deep in the ocean, PDO, solar activity, Chinese air pollution, and even “faulty” methodology for computing the global temperature (it’s warming after all).

At the end he quotes University of Colorado environmental sociologist Maxwell Boykoff, who offers climate scientists a little advice on communicating the science:

Our studies have shown which strategies promise no success: vindictive, condescending and dogmatic lecturings.”