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From that very link: > "Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it's paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look

From that very link: > "Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it's paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing," said Tim Palmer, a co-author of the report and a professor at University of Oxford.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
The Arctic has actually warmed far faster than models predicted. The normal response in science to a model that gets things this badly wrong is, "Hey, that model isn't very accurate!" not "The models were right all along!" The debate about the hiatus is a political debate. "Worse" and "better" are political terms. "Accurate" and "inaccurate" are scientific terms. In scientific terms, the models are not very accurate. Much less accurate than most people appreciate. This does not mean we should now feel free to gather the entire world's supply of hydrocarbon fuels into a big heap in the midst of old-growth rainforest and set it on fire for the purpose of roasting endangered species. AGW is real and a real problem. It just means climate models are not very accurate. Unfortunately they have been sold as being very accurate, which is embarrassing now they are proving not to be. It's even more embarrassing when people point to their horrible accuracy in the Arctic as if it was somehow confirmatory of the model's predictions. That's only even remotely the case if you believe the Earth's climate system is a linear one-dimensional system, so you can meaningfully extrapolate an error into the future. You can't: if you could, we wouldn't need models in the first place.