There’s an interesting trend going around, I’ve noticed. That is to pronounce the global warming hiatus a “myth”.
Here’s the Guardian calling it “the most flaky meme”.
Popular Science says that the hiatus never actually happened.
Phil Plait chimes in with the same.
So, if the pause was never real, why do people keep talking about it? Why, those evil deniers, that’s why!
Plait: “Climate science deniers are very fond of showing extremely deceptive temperature graphs:”
The Guardian: “This particular myth has been a favorite of deniers over the past decade…”
The Pacific Standard: “The “global warming pause” quickly became a favorite talking point of climate deniers”
Got it. It’s those evil, evil deniers who put this insane idea out there that global warming had stopped. Deniers like, say, Nature Climate Change:
Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001.
Or those notorious deniers over at Science:
Global warming seems to have paused over the past 15 years
Or the Koch-funded propaganda outfit Nature:
After a rise of 0.5°C in the 25 years starting in the mid-1970s, the change in Earth’s global mean surface temperature has been close to zero since the turn of the century
Or those terrible conservatives over at Advances in Climate Change Research:
….the pause of global warming in the last decade….
Or the republicans over at The Journal of Climate Research:
The recent hiatus in global warming…
And so on. You can try this for yourself – just use google scholar to look for the term.
Now, you can say that the global warming pause was a data artefact (though if the models completely failed to predict it – and they did indeed so fail – I’m not sure how much we should trust their prediction in the future). You can say that global warming will start up again (which it seems to have done). You can say it will be worse in the futre.
What you cannot do honestly, is Argue Like Stalin and claim that only eeeeeevil deniers are responsible for thinking this.
