This is exactly the sort of position that manufactures new climate change skeptics. If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures a

This is exactly the sort of position that manufactures new climate change skeptics. If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures actually going up", then that throws all of climatology into doubt. Global temperature is the question that motivates this field, yet you're arguing here that whether it was going up or stable was merely an "idea" rather than a matter of measuring physical reality. It is absurd that such a basic question is actually a matter of dispute at this point: reading thermometers and averaging them just isn't that difficult compared to what other scientific fields routinely accomplish. There's also an interesting social viewpoint on display: you claim the "climate science community" is a completely separate group from "skeptics" and they only "had" to spend time answering the "question" of a pause due to "beating the drum". Are there no climate scientists skeptical of beliefs in their own field, like there are in every other field of science? If not, why not? Why are people asking obvious questions like "why does it seem temperatures stopped rising" seen as nuisance outsiders rather than fellow scientists seeking the truth? From an outsider's perspective this looks a lot like groupthink. There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused. This is not true, as refurb already showed. To spell it out, his [2] link starts by saying: "The United Nations panel of climate science experts mentioned it in a 2013 report, scientists have published more than 200 papers analyzing it, and climate deniers said it was proof that climate change didn't exist, but in reality the global warming pause or hiatus never occurred." Over 200 papers published analysing a pause is clear evidence that this was a broadly held idea. There seems to be a problematic tendency in climatology to try and retroactively rewrite history. Prior disputes or false predictions are recast as "scientists didn't actually believe that" or "scientists weren't actually wrong after all" using dubious, Orwellian style practices. Even temperature records themselves are constantly being rewritten: basic questions like "what was the temperature on date X at location Y" had different answers in the past to what they do now. As another example, elsewhere in this thread [1] the author of the paper we're discussing claims he couldn't find any papers that predicted global cooling. Predictions of a new ice age were widely covered in the media and discussed in the literature in the 1970s. There were global conferences and scientific summits held about it. Embarrassingly, some random Hacker News commentator was able to produce a list of six such papers within an hour of that post being made. What is wrong with climatology? Other fields like physics or medicine don't have problems dealing with their past history of wrong experiments, theories or measurements. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263