This is the problem as I see it from TFA:<p>>> More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots.<p>>> “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung<p>First of all, a hypothesis is NOT a theory. Secondly, they have a goal indicative of an agenda - they're looking for a plausible explanation and publishing speculation as "theory". If you don't have data you're just speculating, and by data I don't mean "yeah, volcanoes erupt and emit stuff". You need data that supports your hypothesis, and if you really want to claim a theory, IMHO you need some kind of mathematical model. If all these weekly explanations had data and models to back them, I don't think there would be nearly so many.<p>To me this resembles the folks who blame every weather event on climate change. Even if I accept the premise, they look like fools trying to tie warm, cold, erratic, extreme, and calm, all to the the same cause with nothing but simple high level hand waving.<p>Never mind my views on certain topics, doesn't all that speculation out in the public view damage the perception of science as a whole? That bothers me.
> New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle.<p>It's acceptable to rush to the conclusion that temperature patterns from the 20th century are driven by anthropogenic influence and declare the matter settled, but when the warming trend doesn't continue I'm supposed to patiently wait for these folks to formulate all manner of alternate hypotheses?
Here's the actual article: <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897</a><p>There's also a short review of the state of the literature in this same issue. Well worth a read: <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full</a><p>(I'm not sure how much of this content is limited to ivory towers)
I believe this is cause #31: others cited include<p><a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/30/list-of-excuses-for-the-pause-now-up-to-29/" rel="nofollow">http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/30/list-of-excuses-for-th...</a><p>Main thing is to keep the show (and funding) ticking along nicely. I'm sure it will.
Is there really a hiatus, then, regardless of cause? How does that square with every new year being the "hottest on record"?<p>Edit: I ask because as a casual observer, I had always thought this "hiatus" was denier-speak. But now it seems to be being taken seriously in the articles I see.
Unlike real science, where a scientist would say, "you know what, we thought our model of X showed promise, but we couldn't reproduce our results in reality, so we moved on", climate scientists seems to say "hmmm, reality isn't following our model, where did reality go wrong?"
I can't believe anyone actually buys into this idea that there's a significant pause. Here's a temperature graph of the past couple decades:<p><a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warming-pause/?wpmp_tp=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm...</a><p>There's a long-term trend with a lot of variability year to year. We happened to have a big temperature spike in the late 90s. That doesn't mean we had a pause afterwards. Measure from the years just before or just after the spike and it doesn't look like a pause at all.