A 4 June scientific paper at Science magazine presented “an updated global surface temperature analysis” bearing on the much-discussed global warming hiatus. The paper concluded that “the IPCC’s statement of two years ago—that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’–is no longer valid.” Climate-consensus scoffers across the media immediately began reacting—usually derisively, and sometimes with outright vituperation.
The paper comes from Thomas R. Karl of the National Centers for Environmental Information at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and eight coauthors. It reports on “newly corrected” data. The closing paragraph points to a figure and summarizes as follows:
[T]here is no discernable (statistical or otherwise) decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century. Our new analysis now shows the trend over the period 1950-1999, a time widely agreed as having significant anthropogenic global warming, is 0.113°C dec-1, which is virtually indistinguishable with the trend over the period 2000-2014 (0.116°C dec-1). Even starting a trend calculation with 1998, the extremely warm El Niño year that is often used as the beginning of the “hiatus,” our global temperature trend (1998-2014) is 0.106°C dec-1—and we know that is an underestimate due to incomplete coverage over the Arctic.
Many in the media simply reported that scientists at NOAA now believe that no hiatus happened. A few such articles displayed some sarcasm against the scoffers. “Sorry, deniers,” taunted a Daily Beast headline. Salon’s subhead, alluding to a stunt in the Senate chamber by Republican senator James Inhofe, asked, “Bummed about the news that the ‘hiatus’ never existed? Try throwing a snowball!” A Science magazine commentary opened by recalling that global warming skeptics “crowed” about the formerly perceived but now vanished hiatus.
Certitude with attitude? Scoffers more than matched it, as shown just by the headlines.
Breitbart.com lobbed “Making the planet warmer by fiddling with spreadsheets” and “‘Hide the hiatus!’ How the climate alarmists eliminated the inconvenient ‘pause’ in global warming.” For an Investor’s Business Daily editorial it was “NOAA scientists can't find the heat, so they start a fire.” At the Examiner: “How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause.”
The Register’s headline mocked: “A pause in global warming? Pah, FOOLS. There was NO PAUSE: Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything.” The Patriot Post, which advertises endorsements of its work from national figures, leveled blunt accusations: “NOAA lies to justify UN climate treaty” and “NOAA lies about the warming hiatus.” The Examiner invoked the totalitarian memory hole from the novel 1984: “How NOAA took a page from George Orwell to disappear the global warming hiatus.”
Headlines at the Daily Caller and at Power Line continued the dishonesty accusations: “NOAA fiddles with climate data to erase the 15-year global warming ‘hiatus’” and “New paper on the ‘pause’ is another exercise in data fudging.”
Elsewhere, journalists dispassionately included in their reports news of what they saw as plausible cautiousness about the NOAA paper, or even disagreement with it. A Los Angeles Times news report put it this way: “Researchers representing the scientific mainstream also rejected the idea that global surface temperatures never stopped rising.” That article quoted a scientist well known on the West Coast, NASA’s William Patzert: “It’s always good to go back and look at the data as carefully as possible and make sure it’s calibrated correctly. But the hiatus is history and it was real.”
The Australian Science Media Centre published comments from 10 experts. Notes of caution appeared from Tim Osborn, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia; from Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre; and from Piers Forster, a professor of climate change at the University of Leeds.
A long piece at Mashable made, but did not fully substantiate, this claim:
Mashable sought out the views of about a dozen top climate scientists not involved in the new study. Remarkably, they were nearly unanimous in saying that while it improves the accuracy of surface-temperature records, the study does not support the authors’ conclusion that the so-called warming pause never happened. Instead, they said it simply proves that changing the start and end dates used for analyzing temperature trends has a big influence on those measurements, a fact that was already widely known.
The article reported in particular on cautions from Gerald Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.
Lots of news reports have quoted Judith Curry of Georgia Tech. “Color me ‘unconvinced,’” she wrote in a blog posting that ends with this widely quoted put-down: “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.”
But wait, isn’t Professor Curry an incorrigible and not-credible climate-consensus scoffer, same as John Christy and Richard Lindzen? That’s a question beyond the scope of this media report and the reporter’s capacities, but bearing on it is this fact: In January 2014, when Steven Koonin welcomed participants to the Climate Change Statement Review Workshop he was chairing for the American Physical Society, he made a point of acknowledging the participation of “experts who credibly take significant issue with several aspects of the consensus picture.” Curry, Christy, and Lindzen participated.
Like Curry, Christy and Lindzen are being quoted in the current climate-wars battle over the NOAA paper. The Washington Post called Christy “the University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist who has constructed and studied temperature records of the lower atmosphere using satellite data” and reported that he believes “atmospheric data do not exhibit the short term warming seen in Karl’s analysis.”
Also at the Post, Chris Mooney joined a few other observers in watching another skirmish in the battle over the NOAA paper:
Another major issue is what all the published studies seeking to explain the “hiatus,” with respect to natural changes in the climate system that suppressed warming, were actually doing, if there wasn’t actually a hiatus.
Karl’s answer is that these researchers were studying real natural phenomena that did suppress warming—meaning that without such phenomena, the last 15 years might have been a blockbuster warming period.
“Those things won’t persist, and when they’re gone, that means the rate of temperature is free to increase even more than it would have,” he says. “And you can make the case that had those factors not been operating, we might be talking now about why the temperatures have been warming more rapidly.”
By these lights, the work remains valuable. But some are a bit more critical of scientists for seeming to validate the notion of a slowdown, including by publishing such a thick shelf of studies of a phenomenon that, now, NOAA is saying may not exist.
Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes recently co-authored a paper depicting research on the “hiatus” as a case study in how scientists had allowed a “seepage” of climate skeptic argumentation to affect the formal scientific literature. Of the new NOAA study, she said in an e-mail: “I hope the scientific community will do a bit of soul searching about how they got pulled into this framework, which was clearly a contrarian construction from the start.”
National Geographic boiled that down: “‘A huge amount of scientific work and effort has gone into explaining a phenomenon which actually doesn’t exist,’ Oreskes says.” That article also quotes Gavin Schmidt of NASA and the blog RealClimate: “The fact that such small changes to the analysis make the difference between a hiatus or not merely underlines how fragile a concept it was in the first place.”
But it also quotes Marc Morano, a former aide to Sen. Inhofe and “publisher of the contrarian Climate Depot website,” who says that the NOAA paper “merely adds to the dueling data sets” and predicts that it will have “virtually no impact in the climate debate.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
