Sunday, February 28, 2016

The "Pause" That Re-Obfuscates

This one, with its Bill Clinton-esque "clarification" ("Global warming 'pause' depends on how you define 'pause' says [sic] scientists"), gave me a chuckle:
After seemingly being put to rest last year, the controversy over a supposed “hiatus” has resurfaced, but this time with a key change in terminology that could temper the pitch of the discussion. 
The idea that global warming took a hiatus in the 2000s has stoked political debate in the United States over the validity of climate models and scientists’ near-universal consensus that global warming has been man-made. If a pause in global warming occurred even as global industries continued to rely on fossil fuels, then perhaps the changes seen in climate scientists could be attributed to natural variation after all, critics of climate change science have argued. 
The debate would seem to have been put to rest last year, after scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recalculated climate data to correct for known biases and found that global warming had not paused as proponents of the hiatus theory had suggested. Last November, the online science journal Scientific Reports published an article that affirmed the NOAA’s claim.
In other words, they "recalculated" for all "known biases" save for their own.

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