When global warming was occurring faster than climate models expected during the 1990s, there was little effort by the mainstream climate science community to look into why, despite plenty of skeptic voices (such as our own) pointing to the influence of natural variability. Instead, headlines proclaimed “Global warming worse than expected,” which fueled the human-caused climate change hysteria (favored by the 1990s White House) and helped build the push for calls to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. But since the late 1990s, there has been no statistically significant warming trend in the highly-cited HadCRU4 temperature record, and both the RSS and UAH satellite records are now in their 21st consecutive year without a significant trend. This behavior contrasted with, and called into question, the veracity of climate model projections. And it was these projections upon which rested the case for a dangerous human influence on the climate. Again, skeptic voices were raised in objection to the mainstream view of climate change and the need for government intervention. But this time, the skeptic voices were accompanied by data that clearly showed that rather than “worse than expected,” climate change was actually proceeding at a quite modest pace.
It was only then, with the threat of losing support for actions to mitigate climate change—actions that a top U.N. climate official, Christine Figueres, described as an effort “to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history” —that the mainstream climate community started to pay attention and began investigating the “hiatus” or “pause”—the words so despised by Lewandowsky and Oreskes.
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