Cause for the pause

The standard view among climate change scientists is that people who don't buy the story are in the pay of the Koch brothers or some similar nefarious interest group. Maybe some of them are, but there are also moderate skeptics, such as yours truly, who find that the climate change scientists can be their own worst enemies. This week's report from the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center is a case in point.

The new report in essence claims to prove that the much-discussed pause or hiatus in global warming, which seems to have started in 1998 (an El Nino year), never actually happened. Now of course, the belief in a pause was itself based on data that were collected and analyzed by climate scientists, rather than by stooges of the Koch brothers. Still, if the conclusion isn't what the NOAA wanted, the data must be wrong, so they've undertaken an exercise to remove "biases" from the dataset, and hey presto, no pause!

The thing is, slightly dodgy treatment of the data is nothing new when it comes to climate change science. The most famous example is, of course, the scientists at UEA in England, who used a very long data series to demonstrate the reality of global warming -- and then destroyed the literally irreplaceable data! Or there's Dr Michael Mann''s iconic "hockey stick" graph of long-term climate change. Nobody was collecting climate data back in medieval times. so Dr Mann used tree ring data to analyze the situation back then, and right up to the 20th century. But then a funny thing happened: tree ring data in recent decades have not shown any evidence of rising global temperatures -- so Dr Mann spliced on a completely different set of data to prove the conclusion he wanted.

Problem one for the moderate skeptic then: can we really trust the data? But even assuming we can, there's another issue. Many climate change scientists tried to ignore the pause in the early years, arguing (not unreasonably) that they had never suggested that warming would be a straight-line process.  However, as the pause has moved well into its second decade, this stance has become harder to justify.  Earlier this year, even the UN's IPCC report was forced to acknowledge the reality of the pause.

After denial, then, attempts at explanation. Most climate change scientists looking to explain the pause, including the aforesaid Dr Mann, seem to have settled on the almost untestable hypothesis that the deep oceans must be somehow absorbing the heat; and if so, woe betide us when the oceans' ability to act as a heat "sink" is used up, because then the atmosphere will really start to heat up. But...if there never really was a "pause" to begin with, then these great theories, posited by scientists who are in some cases quite willing to sue you if you don't believe them (Dr Mann again) were, quite simply, wrong.

Problem two for the moderate skeptic, then: the science isn't "settled", or anything like it, so please stop insisting that it is. Shouting down people who disagree with you -- and the latest worrying theme here is that climate change deniers are "a threat to national security", which is just a step short of accusing people of being traitors -- is not big, and it's not clever.

For a much angrier analysis of the new "data", check this out.