Well this is unexpected — and refreshing. Dr. Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State whose findings helped mold the mainstream view on anthropogenic global warming (and from whence the term “Mann-made global warming” was coined), is among the co-authors of a new study in Nature Climate Change, “Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown.” Right off the bat, the authors state, “It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims [emphasis added].” To be clear, they reject the term “hiatus” — “it is also clear that it has been a ‘slowdown,’ not a ‘stop.’” Nevertheless, the study is interesting in that it refutes NOAA’s claim from last summer.

As James Delingpole at Breitbart notes, “Though the paper’s findings are not controversial — few serious scientists dispute the evidence of the temperature datasets showing that there has been little if any global warming for nearly 19 years — they represent a tremendous blow to the climate alarmist ‘consensus,’ which has long sought to deny the ‘Pause’s’ existence.” Take NOAA, for instance. As we reported in June, NOAA outright rejected any and all claims of a hiatus. “In fact,” we wrote, “according to NOAA, temperatures actually rose twice as high as the previous global scale had predicted or measured.” But many high-profile scientists weren’t buying it. The theory then, as it remains so now, is that NOAA published a report chalk full of pseudoscience in a desperate attempt to influence the Paris climate talks. (Which explains why to this day it refuses to provide email communications to congressional investigators.) The aforementioned Mann study does not change the alarmists’ narrative that greenhouse gases will cause temperatures to keep rising in the future. But it does provide further evidence that NOAA knowingly lied — all for political expediency.