Don't Get Used to the Idea of a Global Warming 'Slowdown'

One of the puzzling things about climate change is a recent slowdown in warming (or as some exaggerators refer to it, a "pause"). The planet's temperatures ticked up by 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit each decade after 1951. But beginning in 1998, the rate slowed to 0.09 degrees per decade, despite the world's nations still pouring copious greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

There are many theories to explain this reduced rate of warming (see below), yet climate-change skeptics have used this event to compose a rousing symphony of pishes and humbugs. For instance, Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently told CNN "there has been no recorded warming" in the past 15 years, and that the "data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing." And the failure of climate models to accurately predict the slowdown was hiding in plain sight in a February editorial in the Wall Street Journal, penned by two atmospheric scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong," they wrote, claiming that the "forecasts for future temperatures have continued to be too warm."