That 'no warming since 1998' bollocks meme.

I've had this blog post written but on hold for some months, I never seemed to have the mind to publish, but I've just stumbled upon someone claiming 'no global warming for 18 years', and it's moved me to post.




First off, let's clear two things up.

1. Anyone who says there has been no warming since 1998 is either;

a) unacquainted with the data or
b) cannot read graphs.

The hiatus started from around 2003. 1998 was an outlier followed by a continuation of warming.
e.g. NASA GISS, the blue lines being hand drawn.

So that's 11 years of the hiatus, not 16, how anyone comes to the figure 18 I don't know and frankly, didn't care enough to ask.

2. The other associated canard that can be dispensed with ease is the insinuation that we don't know what's caused the hiatus in global warming. There is a pretty strong framework of explanation centring on 1) The ENSO, 2) Sulphate aerosols from vulcanism or human emissions, 3) Low solar activity, 4) a boreal winter contribution as a result of sea ice loss.

Kaufman et al, 2011, Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998 to 2008. Link.
Foster & Rahmstorf, 2011, Global temperature evolution 1979 to 2010. Link.
Kosaka & Xie, 2011, Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling. Link.
Cohen et al, 2012, Asymetric seasonal temperature trends. Link.

There is a further point: The hiatus in global warming (GW) is tied to the measures of surface and atmospheric warming, as Trenberth & Fasullo point out, this is too narrow a definition of GW. When one takes a wider view it is hard to argue that the energy imbalance causing GW has ceased. However as most of us who have been following this issue for years are used to using datasets such as the NASA GISS Land Ocean Temperature Index as a measure of GW I'm prepared to go easy on this point, in my opinion there is a hiatus, albeit one in the surface temperature and atmospheric datasets commonly used for global average temperature.


Those two issues (and the third detail) aside. There is a fundamental and very revealing issue with the hiatus meme as asserted by the more dim witted climate change denialists, and insinuated by the more intelligent ones. Consider the following two examples.

1) It's been a cold winter, in March things start to warm up, then in the second week of April a cold snap hits. Snow showers roll in from the north and the UK experiences daily maximum temperatures just above zero, very cold for April in the UK. So the denialist concludes that summer is over and starts posting on his blog that we'd all better get ready for a prolonged winter, through June, July and August!

2) At a party someone runs a nylon comb through their hair and amazes the denialist by picking up bits of tissue paper with the comb. Inspired by this, the denialist concludes that gravity is a liberal conspiracy, a great lie devised by so-called scientists, he blogs on this (it's normally a 'he'), hammering home the point that the scientific consensus on gravity is a socialist inspired fraud.

Yes there are people stupid enough to draw such idiotic conclusions, but they really are in the minority, the average climate change denialist would not make these mistakes. They would see an externally driven warming due to the sun's angle in the sky increasing and hours of daylight increasing, driving a general warming from winter to summer. When this is interrupted by anomalous weather they wouldn't conclude that winter is starting, they would accept that blips happen in the transition from the cold of winter to the warm of summer. Likewise, in the second example, they would understand that just because another factor is able to overcome the force of gravity, this does not mean that the gravity is disproved.

So the denialist can seem like a reasonably intelligent person in most situations. Like many people they may simply be using past experience to make up for a lack of understanding, no fault in that, show me a human that doesn't employ this technique at times! Yet when we take the denialist into the realm of their weird mental hang-up they ignore the comprehension or experience they would apply in those two mundane situations, blinded by a desire to attack the idea of human driven global warming, they fall into a trap that would make them seem foolish in those more mundane situations.

This stupid meme that the hiatus in global warming means warming won't start again once the factors driving the hiatus abate (as they will), or that the hiatus somehow disproves the settled science that increased atmospheric CO2 traps infra red radiation and warms the planet, is really just a waste of everybody's time.