How do you deal with a dramatic uptick in global temperature if your employer/patrons are fossil fuel companies and conservative spin factories? Anti-science goons took the spike in global temps back in 1998 and pretended that that was where the record began. For a few years it worked, then the Earth caught up and surpassed that 20-year-old high, giving rise to the “pause” myth:
So what to make of it all? The short version is that global warming didn’t stop, scientists knew global temperatures would wobble around and climate scientists aren’t always the best communicators. But also, to paraphrase Stefan Rahmstorf, climate sceptics are not really sceptics at all.
There was no reversal, the laws of physics didn’t stop in 1998, there was no pause. The whole thing was spun out of whole cloth by fossil fuel apologists based on a simple, transparent lie: Starting all measurements at the highest point in a bouncy graph, and insisting that and only that point had to be the start of all comparisons. And, in a few years, they’ll trot out this same subterfuge on the heels of the recent spikes being recorded now, given the chance.