No, the Human-Driven Processes Warming the Globe Have Not Paused. Why Do You Ask?

You know, I think that my colleague Richard Muller and the New York Times did a very bad thing when he wrote and they printed this:

Richard Muller: A Pause, Not an End, to Warming:

THE global warming crowd has a problem. For all of its warnings, and despite a steady escalation of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the planet’s average surface temperature has remained pretty much the same for the last 15 years…

Even though Muller concludes:

Most of us hope that global warming actually has stopped. (Not everyone; some argue that the warming is good.) Perhaps the negative feedback of cloud cover has kicked in… or the ocean absorption of atmospheric heat is playing a new and more decisive role. Alas, I think such optimism is premature. The current pause is consistent with numerous prior pauses…

The initial claim that global warming has in any sense “paused” seems to me to be very misleading indeed.

Joe Romm: Faux Pause 2: Warmest November On Record, Reports NASA:

Last month saw the hottest global November surface temperature on record, according to the latest data from NASA…. Of course, the global surface temperature is only one of many indicators the planet just keeps warming, as I wrote in my September post, “Faux Pause: Ocean Warming, Sea Level Rise And Polar Ice Melt Speed Up, Surface Warming To Follow.” Now two new studies demolish the myth that warming–including surface warming–has not continued apace. Stefan Rahmstorf, Co-Chair of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, discusses the first paper at RealClimate:

A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows that the global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated… data gaps in the weather station network, especially in the Arctic….

The second study also reveals “Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward”….

Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research investigates how the warming of the Earth’s climate has behaved over the past 15 years… while the rate of increase of average global surface temperatures has slowed since 1998, melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and warming oceans have continued apace…. The myth of the ‘pause’ is based on ignoring 98 percent of global warming and focusing exclusively on the one bit that’s slowed.