A list of excuses by the "global warming" crowd for the 18-year "pause" in warming

Highlights from the list of excuses/explanations for the 18-26 year ‘pause’ in global warming (by WUWT and The HockeySchtick)

1) Low solar activity

Note that the "Believe the Science: global warming is caused by us burning fossil fuels" crowd has always claimed the sun's output is, like, totally constant, so global warming cannot possibly be attributed to the sun."  But when they need an excuse for the pause in GW, suddenly the sun isn't constant at all!  No sir!  And that science is, like, totally settled, li'l dudes.

2) Oceans ate the global warming [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

3) Chinese coal use [debunked]

4) If there's really a pause, it's due to the success of the Montreal Protocol

5) There is no ‘pause’!  [debunked] [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

6) Volcanic particles in the atmosphere [debunked]

7) Unusual amount of water vapor in the atmosphere 

11) Pine aerosols in the atmosphere!

8) Faster Pacific trade winds [debunked]

25) Slower trade winds [debunked]

9) Stadium Waves

10) ‘Coincidence!’

12) It’s “not so unusual” and “no more than natural variability”

13) “There's no pause because you're looking at the wrong ‘lousy’ data” http://

14) Cold nights getting colder in Northern Hemisphere

15) We forgot to cherry-pick models in tune with natural variability [debunked]

16) Negative phase of Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation

17) AMOC ocean oscillation

18) “Global brightening” has stopped

19) “Ahistorical media”

21) Fewer El Ninos since 1999

24) The wrong type of El Ninos

22) Temperature variations fall “roughly in the middle of the AR4 model results”

23) “Not scientifically relevant” (i.e. if we don't think it's relevant, it's not)

26) The climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought [see also]

27) "natural cycles" and here

But remember when the skeptics said "Climate has always been changing; it's a normal, natural cycle"? The warmies wouldn't hear of it. "Un-possible!" But when *they* need to invoke "natural cycles," suddenly that explains any shortcomings SO well!
28)  "different natural cycles"

29) Solar cycle driven ocean temperature variations

30) Warming Atlantic caused cooling Pacific

[paper] [debunked by Trenberth & Wunsch]

31) “Experts simply do not know, and bad luck is one reason”

32) Natural variability again

33) Natural oscillations--again

34) "Solar cycles"--i.e. natural variability yet again

35) Scientists forgot “to look at our models and observations and ask questions”

36) (not an excuse but) "Our climate models are so good that they really do explain the “pause” [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

37) As soon as the sun, the weather and volcanoes – all natural factors – resume their normal strength, the world will start warming again (oooh, natural variation *yet again*)

38) All the “missing heat” is hiding in the Atlantic, not Pacific
[debunked] [Dr. Curry’s take] [Author: “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus”]

39) It's not a pause, just a “slowdown” due to “a delayed rebound effect from 1991 Mount Pinatubo aerosols and deep prolonged solar minimum”

40) The “pause” is “probably just barely statistically significant” and not “meaningful in terms of the public discourse about climate change”

41) Internal variability, because Chinese aerosols can either warm or cool the climate:

The “recent hiatus in global warming is mainly caused by internal variability of the climate” because “anthropogenic aerosol emissions from Europe and North America towards China and India between 1996 and 2010 has surprisingly warmed rather than cooled the global climate.”
[Before this new paper, anthropogenic aerosols were thought to cool the climate or to have minimal effects on climate, but as of now, they “surprisingly warm” the climate]

42) The ‘missing heat’ really is missing--but there's no *real* pause--we just need to find that missing heat

Story quotes Joshua K. Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "If you are wondering whether [evidence of a pause] is meaningful in terms of the public discourse about climate change,...no. The basic story of human caused global warming and its coming impacts is still the same: humans are causing it and the future will bring higher sea levels and warmer temperatures."

43) Ocean Variability: [NYT article]

45) We don’t have a theory that fits all of the data:

47) Could be natural variability or increased CO2; or both

“this brings up what to me is the real question: how much of the hiatus is pure internal variability and how much is a forced response (from loading the atmosphere with carbon). This paper seems to implicitly take the position that it’s purely internal variability, which I’m not sure is true and might lead to a very different interpretation of the data and estimate of the future.” [Andrew Dessler in an NYT article ]

48) Missing heat is either in the Atlantic or Pacific

It’s the Atlantic, not Pacific, and “the hiatus in the warming…should not be dismissed as a statistical fluke” [John Michael Wallace]

49) The other papers with excuses for the “pause” are not “science done right”:

” If the science is done right, the calculated uncertainty takes account of this background variation. But none of these papers, Tung, or Trenberth, does that. Overlain on top of this natural behavior is the small, and often shaky, observing systems, both atmosphere and ocean where the shifting places and times and technologies must also produce a change even if none actually occurred. The “hiatus” is likely real, but so what? The fuss is mainly about normal behavior of the climate system.” [Carl Wunsch]

50) The observational data we have is inadequate (but we ignore uncertainty to publish anyway): [Carl Wunsch in an NYT Article]

51) (not an effort to rationalize the pause but) “We could have forecast ‘the pause’" (i.e. our climate model is scary-accurate!)” [NCAR press release]

[Time-traveling, back-to-the-future models debunked] [debunked] [“pause” due to natural variability]

52) It's an ‘Unusual climate anomaly’ of unprecedented deceleration of a secular warming trend