"Travesty" Trenberth et al are in the Wall Street Journal today, taking issue with last week's letter suggesting that panic over global warming is not required. Presumably, the message from the scientific establishment is that panic is a necessity.
It's pretty dull stuff - "97% of climatologists whose funders expressed a preference" - that kind of thing. But I was struck by this:
Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record.
I do wish people would make it clear where the differences lie. Otherwise we will get nowhere. Sceptics note that the temperature has flatlined since the turn of the millennium. Upholders say this means nothing, it's just a pause, and the long-term trend remains upward. Fine. Maybe we should talk about model falsification or something.
But take a look at that sentence again. I don't see how the long-term trend (normally assessed over 30 years) can not have been abated to some extent by a 10-year flatlining. Is the maths they use in climatology a bit different?