That’s basically how Roger Pielke Jr. describes the latest effort to erase the Pause, or Hiatus, or Slowdown.

New study claims that more than 200 peer-reviewed climate science papers are fatally flawed & the result of “political pressure from climate contrarians” https://t.co/UqU5r1Hq9X — Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) December 19, 2018

The New Left Wing Fail this time leads the charge of the main stream media to report that:

Global warming is WORSE than we thought because the famous ‘pause’ between 1995 and 2013 never happened . . . . . .

Oh no, it’s worse than we thought! Hey, that’s new; haven’t heard that before.

But seriously, these ‘experts’, these ‘scientists’ (Mann, Rahmstorf, Risbey, Lewandowsky, Oreskes, Cowtan et al) are telling us that over 200 peer reviewed scientific papers published on the ‘alleged climate pause’ are all wrong basically because of something called ‘selection bias’, which leads to dodgy statistical analysis combined with political pressure from climate deniers and fossil fuel companies.

The two papers can be referenced here and here.

Here is what the authors of one of those papers say about the ‘false narrative’ which is the alleged Pause:

With the ‘pause’ (or ‘hiatus’), a false narrative about an alleged inconsistency between natural fluctuations of global temperature and ongoing global warming was inserted into climate discussion. Once the notion of a ‘pause’ was established, some of the major journals gave prominent feature to articles about it (Nature 2017). The IPCC formalised the ‘pause/hiatus’ for the climate community in its 5th assessment report by defining and accepting it as an observed fact about the climate system (Stocker et al 2013) [Box TS.3]. Many climatologists also adopted the ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ into their own language about climate change. The adoption of these terms by the mainstream research community gave the ‘pause’ further legitimacy, even though they often explained that it was not unusual in the context of natural variability.

In hindsight, with current GMST datasets, there is no statistical evidence for a ‘pause’. That is the case regardless of which dataset is used and even using statistical tests that inflate the significance of the results. Global warming did not pause in observations (according to any common usage of the term or in statistical terms), but clearly we need to understand how and why scientists came to the conclusion that it had in order to avoid future episodes of this kind.

So, apart from alleging that inappropriate statistical analyses, the use of ‘wrong’ datasets and not being able to foretell the future (i.e. that an entirely natural warming event – a super El Nino – would bust the Pause in 2015/16), the author’s argument also rests upon the assertion that the natural decadal fluctuations in climate were not at all unusual or unexpected and thus a 15 year ‘pause’ was entirely predictable – except it wasn’t. No models were predicting a pause of 15 years prior to it happening, nor indeed in the years after it happened, because of fluctuations in the rate of natural decadal/multidecadal warming and cooling.

I questioned Stefan Rahmstorf on this precise point on Twitter:

That implies your expectations were such that there was a discrepancy. But such a slow warming phase was to be expected given the variability. In fact, the *absence* of an interval with a trend as low as 2000-2012 would have been 95% significant, see https://t.co/LM7L1su9tA — Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) December 20, 2018

Well that's strange:

"In contrast to earlier analyses for a ten-year period that indicated consistency between models and observations at the 5% confidence level, we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model — Jaime Jessop (@Balinteractive) December 20, 2018

projections even at the 2% confidence level."https://t.co/CdzH4TQ57V — Jaime Jessop (@Balinteractive) December 20, 2018

Stefan replied:

Yep, that is one of the papers that fell for the selection bias, although that is a well-known issue even explained at Wikipedia. I discussed that in this German blog article: https://t.co/HHudrjs7tB As far as I can tell that paper was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. — Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) December 20, 2018

Sorry, don't read German. Meehl et al, 2013:

"Thus the occurrence of a 15 year duration internally generated zero temperature trend, though rare in the model (one event in 375 years of model simulations) . . ."

Selection bias too?https://t.co/8Pxu8f4UCp — Jaime Jessop (@Balinteractive) December 20, 2018

No, but now you are citing RCP4.5 future warming simulations up to 2080, as the sentence preceding the one you cite explains. Of course with such more rapid warming you expect much fewer 'pauses' than in the past. — Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) December 20, 2018

Here is the authors' justification for using RCP4.5: "We choose to analyze results from the RCP4.5 scenario because it has CO2 increasing at a rate moderate enough that internally generated decadal time scale variability can occasionally offset the forced warming." — Jaime Jessop (@Balinteractive) December 20, 2018

After which, Twitter silence was the very loud reply. It would seem that, contrary to the author’s assertions about natural variability, a Pause lasting 15 years or more was an event either not predicted by the models beforehand or extremely rare in model simulations performed after the event; certainly not ‘entirely expected’ and explicable with reference to current knowledge regarding natural decadal variability, as claimed.

Update 21/12/2018

This is a very interesting thread on the two Pause denial papers, with Richard Betts defending the academic integrity of colleagues who published studies on the Pause. Goes up and down from this tweet.

Last para of the part II paper: “constant public and political pressure may have caused scientists to take positions that they would not have taken in the absence of such opposition”. IMO it’s pretty serious & insulting to accuse fellow scientists of bowing to political pressure — Richard Betts (@richardabetts) December 19, 2018

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