Comment Re:Wait (Score 1) 465
You're completely misrepresenting the facts. Nobody has denied that temperatures had flatlined. What they objected to was the false conclusion that the hiatus meant global warming was over.
Every single rebuttal of the "hiatus" that I've seen has been essentially "Yes there is a pause in global warming, but only if you carefully narrow the years studied."
For instance if you look at short segments of the long term warming trend you can find multiple instances of where over the course of a number of years it actually cooled. The hiatus proponents have essentially been looking at the temperature over a week time and said "looks like there'll be no winter this year, it's been warming the entire first week of November!"
So yes, it is a denier hoax, in that it hasn't meant the end of Global Warming as Deniers have proposed. And yes we understand the cause of this specific short term variability. If it suddenly got much hotter than we predicted we would also look for an explanation as to why things are above expected predictions.
Climate ultimately is somewhat simple. Just like a perpetual motion machine claim you have to look for input and output energy. Even though the world wasn't warming, it was still absorbing a massive amount of energy. Where was it going? If your water tank has a leak you can clearly see its level going down. You can know there is a leak without knowing the cause. There was a "leak" in the energy models. We knew how much water (heat) should be in the tank (world) but even with lots of water going in we didn't know where it was going since the water level wasn't rising (earth wasn't warming).