Claim: A global warming pause that didn’t happen hampered climate science | Science News
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.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Monckton in April 2022 on the “new” Pause: The new temperature Pause lengthens: now at 7 years 6 months – No global warming since 2014
“The new Pause has lengthened by another month. On the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, seven and a half years have passed since there was any trend in global warming at all…. Global temperature has not been rising steadily (or, since October 2014, at all).”
