Why are you guys arguing over whether there's been a 15-year pause in warming? There has been. I'm no AGW skeptic but the data is unambiguous. There are a lot of guesses as to why the warming trend has slowed to near-zero, but none have been confirmed as of yet. We don't know if warming will resume this year, in 10 years, or never.
I'm not defender of gturner but he's at least right about that particular detail that people seem to keep harping on.
I don't see anyone arguing over the existence of the "hiatus". The contention, from my perspective, are
gturner's sweeping, generalized, unscientific and factually incorrect statements
such as: "the Earth's temperature is lower than when the new crop of drivers on the highway was born"
and "According to the IPCC AR5 report, the Earth's temperature hasn't warmed in about 17.5 years." The very IPCC report
gturner references shows that these are simply not true.
Look, it's not as if there were a post that stated, "Don't forget the "hiatus" in the rise of global temperatures which, while the earth's temperature did continue to rise to highest levels in centuries, it did rise at a slower pace than the decade preceding the previous fifteen years. Of course, there are potential mitigating factors for this hiatus, including volcanic eruptions, lower solar output, and missing temperature data from the arctic regions - which we know are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world - but this new set of data warrants both a closer scrutiny of current climate models and a closer scrutiny of further temperature data."
That, at least, would have been a scientific and rational post. But that's not what
gturner posted. Instead, we got sensationalized or misrepresented data that ignores the scientific response to that data, as well as the overwhelming alread-accepted scientific evidence.
For example:
Sweeping, sensationalized and irrational statements.
Sources that poorly support his assertion.
These posts follow the trend of making sweeping statements that are either untrue, misinformed, or misrepresentative of facts, scientific and otherwise.
There's no substantiation for the assertion that the SPM "does not come from scientists." In fact it
does.
And the SPM is not an "unsupportable claptrap ... which has virtually no connection to the output of the climatologists conclusions therein." The language in the SPM is strikingly similar to that from the Technical Summary:
SPM said:
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850 (see Figure SPM.1). In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
TS said:
It is certain that global mean surface temperature (GMST) has increased since the late 19th century (Figures TS.1 and TS.2). Each of the past three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any the previous decades in the instrumental record
And each of those summary points is supported, in the SPM, by the scientific data expanded upon within the TS.
The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show awarming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C, over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist. The total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78 [0.72 to 0.85] °C, based on the single longest dataset available(see Figure SPM.1)
This is why I went with the SPM in the first place - to provide more concise (yet still scientifically supported statements) within the context of the discussion.
And finally, the two cited sources include contributors from the "Key Economic Sectors and Services" and "International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments" and focused almost exclusively on his area of expertise, "My focus in this letter is exclusively on one section of the SPM, namely SPM.5.2, International Cooperation. I am not representing nor referring to any other parts of the SPM."
So while this doesn't discredit the notion that a large conference of people would be rife with debate, infighting, and special interests, it's worth noting that neither source objects to the fundamental science behind the report - the science which supports the conclusions in the SPM (which is, as seen above, is reflective the content in the TS). Furthermore,
gturner's post also ignores the overwhelming fact that that vast majority of scientists that contributed to the AR5 did
not resign in protest.