NYT, new and even more content-free

The New York Times is struggling with inconvenient climate data, but it's not ready to give up yet.  The caption to this week's environmental blogpost reads: "Despite a recent lull, climate scientists say it is an open question whether the pace of warming has undergone any lasting shift."

That sentence is almost entirely free of meaning.   Let's assume for the sake of argument that there was in fact warming in an earlier period, and not just jimmied data:  the sentence still is meaningless.   For one thing, the acknowledged "recent lull" would be more honestly described as a "period in which not even partisans can find evidence of warming in the actual data."   Discovering a flatline where you badly wanted to find an increase doesn't mean that the "pace" of warming has changed.  It means that any warming that might have been taking place earlier has stopped.  It has not merely "reduced its pace," it has stopped.

What's more, the question isn't whether a "change of pace" will "last," but whether the current lack of warming will shift into actual warming at some point in the future.   Again, assuming the prior warming period was genuine, what we have is a warming period followed by a flat period.  Does it make sense to assume that the previous warming trend was the true reality, and the recent flat period merely a "shift" in the reality that may or may not "last"?  It would be at least equally valid to say that the current flat period is the norm, and that the previous warming was the fluke that wouldn't "last."  That's especially true if your model is completely incapable of explaining or predicting either one.

The whole thing is just a muddleheaded way of saying the NYT believes that warming will occur in the future. When they believed they had a warming trend to point to in the past, they could with some credibility insist that there was no reason to believe it would not continue. What's the excuse now that the recent trend is flat? Why is the trend that suited their purposes decades ago more predictive than the more recent trend, which doesn't?

Particularly surprising is the casual reference to how the climate system is "still dominated by natural variability." Back when they thought the temperatures were still rising, "natural variability" was the refuge of denialist scoundrels.  Now it's back in fashion to explain why rising CO₂ didn't result in warming after all -- even though it's surely going to someday.

Finally, the old straw man:  the NYT sneers at denialists who dispute the role of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.  News flash:  no one disputes the role of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.  Lots of people do point out that it is a very weak greenhouse gas in comparison with the far more abundant greenhouse gas known as water vapor, and that there is good reason to believe that initial warming from  CO₂  causes an increase in cloud cover, which operates as a negative feedback mechanism to slow or even stop any warming that gets started.  All of which merely explains why the climate tends to cycle over very long periods rather than to run away in any direction.