The green side of the climate debate is getting terribly excited about a paper by Kevin Cowtan, a chemist from the university of York, and Robert G. Way, a geographer from the university of Ottawa. They claim to have discovered that the pause is illusory and due to incorrect estimates of temperatures at the poles. With their new whizz-bang method of making up data they claim to have magicked the missing data into existence and, surprise suprise, actually the poles are warming very quickly and the pause doesn't exist.
Judith Curry is having fun with the paper, noting that the methods they use to estimate the missing data are not exactly suited in the particular circumstances of polar temperatures:
- the statistical infilling technique of kriging 'makes no physical sense' when applied across land/ocean/sea ice boundaries
- satellite data is 'not useful' when applied to the polar regions
- data reanalyses are 'not useful' because of temporal inhomogeneities in the datasets that are assimilated.
It will be interesting to see how much traction it gets outside the green ghetto.