Climate Scientists: 'Oh No, We Can't Explain The Great Global Warming Surge So We'll Just Erase It - Like We Did With The Pause'

After going on, and on, and on about it non stop for 16 months, and advancing numerous potential explanations, including marine fuel aerosols (the disappearance thereof), solar activity, ‘weird’ El Ninos and ‘uncharted territory’ type manmade global warming, at the same time as dismissing Hunga Tonga as a possibility, ‘experts’ have finally come to the conclusion that the Great Global Warming Surge of 2023 is . . . . . a statistical artifact! No, really. The similarity with what happened with the much talked about and then totally ignored Global Warming Pause of 1998-2013 is uncanny:

It was one of the biggest climate change questions of the early 2000s: Had the planet’s rising fever stalled, even as humans pumped more heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere?

By the turn of the century, the scientific understanding of climate change was on firm footing. Decades of research showed that carbon dioxide was accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere, thanks to human activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down carbon-storing forests, and that global temperatures were rising as a result. Yet weather records seemed to show that global warming slowed between around 1998 and 2012. How could that be?

After careful study, scientists found the apparent pause to be a hiccup in the data. Earth had, in fact, continued to warm. This hiccup, though, prompted an outsize response from climate skeptics and scientists. It serves as a case study for how public perception shapes what science gets done, for better or worse.

By the mid-2000s, climate skeptics had seized on the narrative that “global warming has stopped.” Most professional climate scientists were not studying the phenomenon, since most believed the apparent pause fell within the range of natural temperature variability. But public attention soon caught up to them, and researchers began investigating whether the pause was a real thing. It was a high-profile shift in scientific focus.

By the early 2010s, scientists were busily working to explain why the global temperature records seemed to be flatlining. Ideas included the contribution of cooling sulfur particles emitted by coal-burning power plants and heat being taken up by the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Such studies were the most focused attempt ever to understand the factors that drive year-to-year temperature variability. They revealed how much natural variability can be expected when factors such as a powerful El Niño are superimposed onto a long-term warming trend.

Scientists spent years investigating the purported warming pause — devoting more time and resources than they otherwise might have. So many papers were published on the apparent pause that scientists began joking that the journal Nature Climate Change should change its name to Nature Hiatus.

Yes, scientists did spend many years writing literally hundreds of academic studies attempting to explain the highly inconvenient Pause which became even more inconvenient when those pesky climate sceptics began pointing to its existence. So the ‘experts’ pulled out all the stops and even IPCC AR5 had to reluctantly admit the existence of the post 1998 ‘hiatus’ or ‘slowdown’ in its Summary for Policy Makers published in 2013. But having failed to explain the Pause, or ‘hiatus’ or ‘slowdown’, scientists hit upon a new idea: retrospectively adjust the global temperature data in order to invent more warming after 1998, and then publish a paper statistically erasing the Pause and don’t talk about it ever again. It worked, the Great Global Warming Pause of 1998-2013, which even the Met Office published three consecutive papers on, was memory-holed.

Then in 2015, a team led by researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a jaw-dropping conclusion in the journal Science. The rise in global temperatures had not plateaued; rather, incomplete data had obscured ongoing global warming. When more Arctic temperature records were included and biases in ocean temperature data were corrected, the NOAA dataset showed the heat-up continuing. With the newly corrected data, the apparent pause in global warming vanished. A 2017 study led by Hausfather confirmed and extended these findings, as did other reports.

Now it looks like exactly the same tactics are going to be used to erase the very inconvenient global warming acceleration of 2023, simply because GHG warming could not explain it, neither could manmade aerosols or even El Nino, so it was looking like scientists would have to accept the existence of a hitherto unexplained natural cause of the warming - which is a threat to the Settled Science. ‘We can’t have the sun, or poorly understood natural internal variability, or, God forbid, a bloody volcano causing huge spurts in global warming! It interferes with our enforced consensus manmade global warming narrative.’ So they did this:

We use changepoint models, which are statistical techniques specifically designed for identifying structural changes in time series. Four global mean surface temperature records over 1850–2023 are scrutinized within. Our results show limited evidence for a warming surge; in most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023. As such, we estimate the minimum changes in the warming trend required for a surge to be detectable. Across all datasets, an increase of at least 55% is needed for a warming surge to be detectable at the present time.

Unfortunately, climate change sceptics are going to make it easier for them this time because they mistakenly believe that by erasing the global warming surge, it will dial back climate alarmism and extreme weather hype. It won’t; it will just reinforce the consensus global warming narrative, bury inconvenient research and then it will be back to business as usual, just as it was after the Pause. WUWT explains, in relation to another recently published paper blaming the global warming spurt on El Nino:

In recent days, climate skeptics have found support for their doubts about the so-called climate crisis. A recent study, The 2023 Global Warming Spike Was Driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (Raghuraman et al., 2024), attributed the significant temperature spike in 2023 to natural causes, particularly the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), rather than to anthropogenic factors. This seems like good news for those of us who have long been critical of the mainstream climate narrative. However, it’s important to remember that skepticism isn’t simply about accepting findings that align with our beliefs. Real skepticism demands a critical approach to all claims, including those that might seem to bolster our position.

Indeed, as I pointed out here:

Something drove the very rapid acceleration in global mean surface temperature starting June 2023, but it was not El Nino and this continuous insistence that it was El Nino is pseudoscientific garbage and highly suspect in my opinion.