Contra NOAA, Warming Pause Real, Say Climate Alarmists

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H. Sterling Burnett

Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News at The Heartland Institute

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.

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A new paper in Nature: Geoscience acknowledges what climate realists have long pointed out: Climate models grossly overstate the amount of measured warming and, in particular, they fail to account for a recent 18-year period in which carbon dioxide emissions rose, yet there was an extended pause in surface warming. This paper is important because it is written by among the most vocal scientific climate alarmists. The lead author of the study, Benjamin Santer, a scientist implicated in the Climategate scandal, has always been quick to deride climate realists. In 2015 when Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz discussed the global warming “hiatus” during a congressional hearing, the Daily Caller writes Santer and Carl Mears “authored a lengthy blog post in 2016 critical of Cruz’s contention there was an 18-year ‘hiatus’ in warming that climate models didn’t predict.” In addition, Santer recently co-authored a paper purporting to “debunk statements EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made that global warming had ‘leveled off.’”

Yet in this new paper, Santer and his co-authors basically admit skeptical politicians like Cruz and Pruitt and numerous scientists were right: Climate models fail to replicate the warming pause in the early twenty-first century. In the Nature paper, Santer, et al. (including Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann) write, “In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble. … Over most of the early twenty-first century … model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed … partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.”

You just can’t make this stuff up folks. Reasons for climate alarm are in retreat.