Each month when RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) updates its global average temperature data, Lord Christopher Monckton calculates how far back one can go in the RSS record without showing a positive trend, i.e., how long “the pause” is. It’s been lengthening for several years and as of the end of August had reached 18 years and 8 months. Now, with a strong El Niño developing in the Pacific, the calculation yields a new starting point — not January of 1997 but February. We might say we’ve hit a “pause in the lengthening of the pause.”

No doubt climate alarmists will complain, “But you can’t know the lengthening of the pause will resume! What if instead the pause begins to shorten? Don’t call it a pause in the lengthening of the pause!”

Okay, sure. If they’ll admit that their choice of “pause” to describe the absence of global warming for the last 18 years and 8 months is itself open to the same objection.

To avoid prejudice in the terms, we should simply be talking not about a “pause” or an “end” but about an “absence of warming” over the last 18 years and 8 months. That leaves the question totally open as to whether the warming will resume, continue to be absent, or be replaced by cooling. Some folks would call it not counting chickens before the hatch.

Monckton anticipates and answers the charge of cherry-picking:

> The start date is not cherry-picked: it is calculated. And the graph does not mean there is no such thing as global warming. Going back further shows a small warming rate. And yes, the start-date for the Pause has been inching forward, though rather more slowly than the end-date, which is why the Pause continues on average to lengthen. And, like it or not, so long a stasis in global temperature is simply inconsistent not only with the extremist predictions of the computer models but also with the shrieking panic whipped up by the rent-seekers rubbing their hands with glee in Paris.

Republished from The Cornwall Alliance.