The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant. –Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 5 July 2005
Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried. -Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 7 May 2009
2014 will probably be in the top five warmest, but at the moment it will probably not turn out to be warmer than 2010. It is impossible for it to beat 2010 by a statistically significant margin, even if we define that as only one standard deviation above the decadal mean. Even if 2014 does beat 2010 it will only be by a statistically insignificant margin and well within the inter-annual error bars. In all probability 2014 will continue the global surface temperature standstill in a statistically perfect manner. When will the global surface annual temperature start to rise out of the error bars of the past 18 years? –David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Forum, 28 September 2014
It’s fair to say that this pause is something of an embarrassment to many in the climate research community, since their computer models failed to indicate that any such thing could happen. Just how long the temperature pause must last before it would falsify the more catastrophic versions of man-made climate change obviously remains an open question for many researchers. For the time being, most are betting that it will get real hot real fast when the hiatus ends. –Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 9 September 2014
