Don’t Be Fooled by a Climate Change ‘Pause’
Misconception: There was a global warming “pause,” so climate change is bunk.
Actually: That’s like saying a temporary dip in the stock market means that the best long-term investment strategy is keeping your cash under the mattress.
Those who deny the science of climate change and the role of human activity in causing it often claim that global warming paused for more than a decade until recently, and that the pause means that climate change is not happening.
There is, in fact, an active debate among scientists about whether the pause even happened at all. Data on global temperature appeared to show a slower comparative rise in the years following 1998, the end of the last El Niño event. But last June, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a paper in the journal Science stating that the pause probably didn’t occur at all, or was at least greatly overstated; they blamed inaccurate data for giving a misimpression of a hiatus in warming.
Because that isn’t complicated enough, the paper became the target of a political attack by a member of Congress, Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who heads the House Science Committee, and disputes the overwhelming scientific evidence underlying climate change. He called the paper evidence of the Obama administration’s “suspect climate agenda.”
Then in February, yet another paper in the journal Nature Climate Change took the opposite view, claiming that a slowdown, at least, is real.
A Week of Misconceptions
We’re using the first week of April as an opportunity to debunk some of the misconceptions about health and science that circulate all year round.
Feeling whipsawed yet? Don’t. This kind of disagreement among scientists happens every day, and when the subject is less politicized it can be fascinating to watch. This is how scientific inquiry moves forward: Putting hypotheses out there and testing them. Most days, it makes a lot more sense than politics does.
In any case, whether or not there was a pause in warming for a dozen years or so has no bearing on the underlying scientific validity of climate change. Even the lead author of the February paper that argued the pause is realsays that the findings do not undermine global warming theory. Besides,record global temperatures for 2014 and 2015 suggest that warming has resumed. But even more important, the long-term trend is clear: Climate change is about the long haul, not short-term variability.
A post by Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist, on the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists put it this way: “Even as a car slows down to go over a “speed bump,” there is no question the car is still advancing down the road.”
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