- Bishop Hill blog

For those who have been following the unfolding saga of the latest Lew paper, the said work of art has now been published at Global Environmental Change. There is little that will cause anyone any great surprise - it's all out of the standard Lewandowsky playbook: strawman following nonsense following outright falsehood. Take the case he outlines for why there is no pause:

Claims about a “pause” typically invoke a period commencing in 1998; the top panel of the figure shows that that year saw particularly high temperatures owing to an extreme El Niño event. When this single outlying year is omitted (as illustrated in the bottom panel), the purported pause in warming is no longer apparent. Statistically, what one observes is a decrease in the rate of warming—a slowdown, if you will—but this slowdown is at most modest: during the last 15 years (1999–2013) the linear trend is .13 °C/decade, compared to the trend for the overall period (1970–2013) which is .18 °C/decade. It is only when 1998 is arbitrarily used as the starting point to define the “pause” that the recent rate of global warming has been appreciably lower (.10 °C/decade) than the long-term trend.

...

Thus, arguments about a “hiatus” or “pause” can only be sustained by ignoring the fact that the most recent trend is statistically nearly identical to that of other decades unless a single particular year is used as a starting point—in other words, only by cherry-picking.

I love the way the reviewers of the paper have turned a blind eye to Lew's failure to actually cite any examples of people picking 1998 as their start point, instead letting him set about this straw man with all of the rhetorical tools at his disposal, quickly beating him a pulp.

Then there are the outright falsehoods, for example this one:

Likewise, the positive fluctuation from the long-term trend leading up to 2007 was not used to re-assess (transient) climate sensitivity, in contrast to endeavours that have used the current departure from the long-term trend for that purpose (e.g., Lewis, 2013, Lewis and Curry, 2014, Otto et al., 2013 and Stott et al., 2013).

That statement is so completely divorced from the truth that it's hard to know where to begin. The whole point of the Lewis studies, and Otto et al as well, was to consider the changing climate from preindustrial up to the present day. Here is an extract from Lewis and Curry 2014, the main results of which put TCR in the range 1.22-1.33. I've bolded two alternative sets of results presented by the authors, based on periods that exclude the pause:

Although final periods with end dates considerably before 2011 provide less well constrained
ECS and TCR estimates, it is worthwhile investigating to what extent the low increase in GMST in the 21st century affects ECS and TCR best estimates. Accordingly, we estimated ECS and TCR using final periods from 1987 and 1971 to each of 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. As volcanic forcing is much higher than when 2011 is used as the end date, 1850–1900 is used as the best-matching base period. With a 1987 start date, the resulting ECS best estimates vary between 1.58 K and 1.70 K; those for TCR vary between 1.35 K and 1.37 K. With a 1971 start date, ECS best estimates vary between 1.45 K and 1.53 K; those for TCR vary between 1.20 K and 1.22 K. With a volcanic efficacy of 0.55 assumed, the ECS and TCR best estimates are all slightly lower.

Extending the final year to 2012, and estimating changes from 2011 in radiative forcings and in
energy accumulation where necessary, has a negligible effect on ECS and TCR estimates.

So the Lewis and Curry results are almost entirely impervious to short-term fluctuations in surface temperatures. Yet here we have Lewandowsky and Oreskes and their motley band of co-authors telling their readers the exact opposite.

What kind of a journal lets this sort of thing get published?