A new paper is being published in Science magazine that purports to refute the 18-year “pause” in global warming. A press release on the paper came off embargo about an hour ago, so you will be seeing news stories about it soon. Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts explain the provenance of the paper:

There is a new paper published the journal Science about the recent slowdown in global surface warming (released from embargo today at 2PM eastern). It is from Tom Karl and others at NOAA’s newly formed NCEI, National Centers for Environmental Information (a merger of three NOAA data centers: NCDC, NODC and NGDC) and from the government-consulting firm LMI. The lead author is Tom Karl, Director of NCEI and Chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The paper is Karl et al (2015) Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus. “Possible” is obviously the key word in the title.

It turns out that the paper contains no new information. It merely perpetrates the same old fraud that we have written about many times, altering past data to create the appearance of a warming trend where none exists. The new data set offered in the Science article keeps the overall warming trend from 1981 to the present the same. Therefore, in order to do away with the pause (much as warmists have tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period), the authors adjust pre-pause temperatures downward. Presto! No more 18-year plateau. There is much more detail at the link, but here is the key graph:

TO MANUFACTURE WARMING DURING THE HIATUS, NOAA ADJUSTED THE PRE-HIATUS DATA DOWNWARD If we subtract the ERSST.v3b (old) data from the new ERSST.v4 data, Figure 11, we can see that that is exactly what NOAA did.

Figure 11 uses the same data subtraction method to determine the difference between the original measured data, and the “new and improved” adjusted data courtesy of government-funded science. It’s the same story all over again; the adjustments go towards cooling the past and thus increasing the slope of temperature rise. Their intent and methods are so obvious they’re laughable. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could take the new NOAA global surface temperature data seriously.

Dr. Judith Curry expresses her skepticism in characteristically measured fashion:

My bottom line assessment is this. I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies [are] substantially understated. The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth. This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

What we have here is $cience–part of an effort, lavishly funded by taxpayers, to stampede voters into going along with draconian measures to lower everyone’s standard of living. And also, of course, to pay for more global warming research.