This post is going to be a quick one because the paper it's about was supposed to be published today but apparently hasn't been published yet. I'm not sure what's going on with that. I'll probably have more to say once the paper is actually published, but in the meantime, I'll just discuss the press release.

The paper is the newest one from Stephan Lewandowsky. Everyone here should know Lewandowsky for his previous work which says since people who believe in global warming don't believe in conspiracy theories, global warming skeptics must be conspiracy nuts. Yes, he seriously argues that. In scientific journals. And he gets paid by universities to do it. And yet, this newest paper may be even crazier.



This new paper is about the recent "pause" in global warming. The press release explains:

Crucially, on previous occasions when decadal warming was particularly rapid, the scientific community did not give short-term climate variability the attention it has now received, when decadal warming was slower. During earlier rapid warming there was no additional research effort directed at explaining ‘catastrophic’ warming. By contrast, the recent modest decrease in the rate of warming has elicited numerous articles and special issues of leading journals. This asymmetry in response to fluctuations in the decadal warming trend likely reflects what the study’s authors call the ‘seepage’ of contrarian claims into scientific work.

According to this, when natural variability increased the apparent global warming trend, scientists didn't pay much attention to natural variability. When natural variability decreased that trend, scientists paid lots of attention to natural variability.

Because of contrarians. Not because understanding what affects the apparent global warming trend is a good idea.

And this is a problem. Not because scientists ignoring natural variability is a bad thing, mind you. That's alright. It was cool for scientists to ignore natural variability when it made global warming look "catastrophic." It would have been cool for scientists to ignore the fact global warming has significantly slowed down over the last couple decades.

What isn't cool is for contrarians to force scientists to study natural variability to try to understand just what affects the planet's temperatures. Because heaven forbid scientists, you know, do science.