Updated list of 63 excuses for the 18-26 year 'pause' in global warming

"If you can't explain the 'pause', you can't explain the cause"

RSS satellite data showing the 18 year 'pause' of global warming

An updated list of at least 29 32 36 38 39 41 51 52 63 excuses for the 18-26 year statistically significant 'pause' in global warming, including recent scientific papers, media quotes, blogs, and related debunkings: 

1) Low solar activity

2) Oceans ate the global warming [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

3) Chinese coal use [debunked]

4) Montreal Protocol

5) What ‘pause’? [debunked] [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

6) Volcanic aerosols [debunked]

7) Stratospheric Water Vapor

8) Faster Pacific trade winds [debunked]

9) Stadium Waves

10) ‘Coincidence!’

11) Pine aerosols

12) It's "not so unusual" and "no more than natural variability"

13) "Scientists looking at the wrong 'lousy' data" http://

14) Cold nights getting colder in Northern Hemisphere

15) We forgot to cherry-pick models in tune with natural variability [debunked]

16) Negative phase of Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation

17) AMOC ocean oscillation

18) "Global brightening" has stopped

19) "Ahistorical media"

20) "It's the hottest decade ever" Decadal averages used to hide the 'pause' [debunked]

21) Few El Ninos since 1999

22) Temperature variations fall "roughly in the middle of the AR4 model results"

23) "Not scientifically relevant"

24) The wrong type of El Ninos

25) Slower trade winds [debunked]

26) The climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought [see also]

27) PDO and AMO natural cycles and here

28) ENSO

29) Solar cycle driven ocean temperature variations

30) Warming Atlantic caused cooling Pacific [paper] [debunked by Trenberth & Wunsch]

31) "Experts simply do not know, and bad luck is one reason"

32) IPCC climate models are too complex, natural variability more important

33) NAO & PDO

34) Solar cycles

35) Scientists forgot "to look at our models and observations and ask questions"

36) The models really do explain the "pause" [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

37) As soon as the sun, the weather and volcanoes – all natural factors – allow, the world will start warming again. Who knew?

38) Trenberth's "missing heat" is hiding in the Atlantic, not Pacific as Trenberth claimed
[debunked] [Dr. Curry's take] [Author: “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus”]

39) "Slowdown" due to "a delayed rebound effect from 1991 Mount Pinatubo aerosols and deep prolonged solar minimum"

40) The "pause" is "probably just barely statistically significant" with 95% confidence:

The "slowdown" is "probably just barely statistically significant" and not "meaningful in terms of the public discourse about climate change"

41) Internal variability, because Chinese aerosols can either warm or cool the climate:

The "recent hiatus in global warming is mainly caused by internal variability of the climate" because "anthropogenic aerosol emissions from Europe and North America towards China and India between 1996 and 2010 has surprisingly warmed rather than cooled the global climate." 

[Before this new paper, anthropogenic aerosols were thought to cool the climate or to have minimal effects on climate, but as of now, they "surprisingly warm" the climate] 

42) Trenberth's 'missing heat' really is missing and is not "supported by the data itself" in the "real ocean":

"it is not clear to me, actually, that an accelerated warming of some...layer of the ocean ... is robustly supported by the data itself. Until we clear up whether there has been some kind of accelerated warming at depth in the real ocean, I think these results serve as interesting hypotheses about why the rate of surface warming has slowed-down, but we still lack a definitive answer on this topic." [Josh Willis]

43) Ocean Variability:

"After some intense work by of the community, there is general agreement that the main driver [of climate the "pause"] is ocean variability. That's actually quite impressive progress."

44) The data showing the missing heat going into the oceans is robust and not robust:

" I think the findings that the heat is going into the Atlantic and Southern Ocean’s is probably pretty robust. However, I will defer to people like Josh Willis who know the data better than I do."-Andrew Dessler. Debunked by Josh Willis, who Dessler says "knows the data better than I do," says in the very same NYT article that "it is not clear to me, actually, that an accelerated warming of some...layer of the ocean ... is robustly supported by the data itself" - Josh Willis

45) We don't have a theory that fits all of the data:

"Ultimately, the challenge is to come up with the parsimonious theory [of the 'pause'] that fits all of the data" [Andrew Dessler]

46) We don't have enough data of natural climate cycles lasting 60-70 years to determine if the "pause" is due to such natural cycles:

"If the cycle has a period of 60-70 years, that means we have one or two cycles of observations. And I don’t think you can much about a cycle with just 1-2 cycles: e.g., what the actual period of the variability is, how regular it is, etc. You really need dozens of cycles to determine what the actual underlying variability looks like. In fact, I don’t think we even know if it IS a cycle." [Andrew Dessler]

47) Could be pure internal [natural] variability or increased CO2 or both

"this brings up what to me is the real question: how much of the hiatus is pure internal variability and how much is a forced response (from loading the atmosphere with carbon). This paper seems to implicitly take the position that it’s purely internal variability, which I’m not sure is true and might lead to a very different interpretation of the data and estimate of the future." [Andrew Dessler]

48) Its either in the Atlantic or Pacific, but definitely not a statistical fluke:

It's the Atlantic, not Pacific, and "the hiatus in the warming...should not be dismissed as a statistical fluke" [John Michael Wallace]

49) The other papers with excuses for the "pause" are not "science done right":

" If the science is done right, the calculated uncertainty takes account of this background variation. But none of these papers, Tung, or Trenberth, does that. Overlain on top of this natural behavior is the small, and often shaky, observing systems, both atmosphere and ocean where the shifting places and times and technologies must also produce a change even if none actually occurred. The “hiatus” is likely real, but so what? The fuss is mainly about normal behavior of the climate system." [Carl Wunsch]

50) The observational data we have is inadequate, but we ignore uncertainty to publish anyway:

"The central problem of climate science is to ask what you do and say when your data are, by almost any standard, inadequate? If I spend three years analyzing my data, and the only defensible inference is that “the data are inadequate to answer the question,” how do you publish? How do you get your grant renewed? A common answer is to distort the calculation of the uncertainty, or ignore it all together, and proclaim an exciting story that the New York Times will pick up...How many such stories have been withdrawn years later when enough adequate data became available?"

51) If our models could time-travel back in time, “we could have forecast ‘the pause’ – if we had the tools of the future back then” [NCAR press release]

[Time-traveling, back-to-the-future models debunked] [debunked] ["pause" due to natural variability]

52) 'Unusual climate anomaly' of unprecedented deceleration of a secular warming trend

53) Competition" with two natural ocean oscillations

54) 'Global quasi-stationary waves' from natural ocean oscillations

55) Reduced warming in North Atlantic subpolar gyre

56) Satellites underestimate cooling from volcanic aerosols

57) Increase in mid- and upper level clouds

58) Colder eastern Pacific and reduced heat loss in other oceans

59) A "zoo of short-term trends"

60) IPCC Synthesis Report excuses for the "pause": volcanoes, solar activity, possible redistribution of heat:

61) Climate Policies?!

62) "Global warming causes no global warming"

63) Global warming will speed up after a "pause" due to "change of fundamental understanding about how greenhouse warming comes about"

52 excuses to blow your carbon diet

Additional related comments from climate scientists about the "pause"

1) My University screwed up the press release & didn't let me stop them from claiming my paper shows the "hiatus will last another decade or two." [Dessler]

2) "This [the 'pause'] is not an existential threat to the mainstream theory of climate." [Andrew Dessler]

3) "In a few years, as we get to understand this [the 'pause'] more, skeptics will move on (just like they dropped arguments about the hockey stick and about the surface station record) to their next reason not to believe climate science." [Andrew Dessler]

4)  "if you try really hard to mangle the data, and cherry pick very skillfully, you can make a case" for the "pause"

5) Michael Asten from Monash University’s School of Earth ­Atmosphere and Environment said that, while opinions on causes differed, the existence of the pause was settled. “Only activists dare claim the pause in global temperature does not exist,” Professor Asten said
and a roundup of climate scientists talking about no warming, from Jimbo at WUWT, and via Andrew Bolt's Herald Sun blog

Jimbo on Watts Up With That rounds up the climate scientists confessing to this lack of warming:

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005

“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009

‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

Dr. Judith L. Lean – Geophysical Research Letters – 15 Aug 2009
“…This lack of overall warming is analogous to the period from 2002 to 2008 when decreasing solar irradiance also countered much of the anthropogenic warming…”

Dr. Kevin Trenberth – CRU emails – 12 Oct. 2009

“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming…..The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Dr. Mojib Latif – Spiegel – 19th November 2009

“At present, however, the warming is taking a break,"……."There can be no argument about that.”

Dr. Jochem Marotzke – Spiegel – 19th November 2009

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community.... We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Dr. Phil Jones – BBC – 13th February 2010

“I’m a scientist trying to measure temperature. If I registered that the climate has been cooling I’d say so. But it hasn’t until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend.”

Dr. Phil Jones – BBC – 13th February 2010

[Q] B – “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming”

[A] “Yes, but only just”.

Prof. Shaowu Wang et al – Advances in Climate Change Research – 2010

“…The decade of 1999-2008 is still the warmest of the last 30 years, though the global temperature increment is near zero;…”

Dr. Robert K. Kaufmann – PNAS – 2nd June 2011

“…..it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008…..”

Dr. Gerald A. Meehl – Nature Climate Change – 18th September 2011

“There have been decades, such as 2000–2009, when the observed globally averaged surface-temperature time series shows little increase or even a slightly negative trend1 (a hiatus period)….”

Met Office Blog – Dave Britton (10:48:21) – 14 October 2012

“We agree with Mr Rose that there has been only a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century. As stated in our response, this is 0.05 degrees Celsius since 1997 equivalent to 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade.”

Dr. James Hansen – NASA GISS – 15 January 2013

“The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.”

Dr. Virginie Guemas – Nature Climate Change – 7 April 2013

“…Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period…”

Dr. Hans von Storch – Spiegel – 20 June 2013

“…the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero….If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models….”

Professor Masahiro Watanabe – Geophysical Research Letters – 28 June 2013

“The weakening of k commonly found in GCMs seems to be an inevitable response of the climate system to global warming, suggesting the recovery from hiatus in coming decades.”

Professor Rowan Sutton – Independent – 22 July 2013
“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years.”

And, no, they never saw this coming:



UPDATE: Oh, did they forget to mention the planet wouldn’t actually warm for a while? Their bad: 

Scientists have long been aware that climate change would not happen at a fixed rate and could include periods where temperatures remain stable for 10 to 20 years, but admitted they had failed to explain this to the public in the past.

Prof Rowan Sutton, Director of Climate Research at the University of Reading, said: “Within the field we have taken for granted that there will be variations in the rate of warming, it is totally accepted and is no surprise ...[it] would correct to say that wasn’t the message that we communicated more widely and that probably is a failing.”

UPDATE: C3 has updated the Wayne's World list of excuses for the "pause":

Related:

Climate Depot Analysis: ‘There have been at least 10 separate explanations for the standstill in global warming’ – 1) Low Solar Activity; 2) Oceans Ate Warming; 3) Chinese Coal Use; 4) Montreal Protocol; 5) Readjusted past temps to claim ‘pause’ never existed 6) Volcanoes 7) Decline in Water Vapor 8) Pacific trade winds 9) ‘Coincidence’ 10) ‘Stadium Waves’

‘Warming Interrruptus’ – Causes for The Pause

Quotable Global Warming Hiatus Quotes