From Watts Up With That?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The New Pause has lengthened by a further two months to 8 years 11 months. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH monthly satellite global-temperature dataset for the lower troposphere shows no global warming at all from June 2014 to April 2023.

As usual, the start and end dates of the New Pause are not cherry-picked. The end date is the most recent month for which data are available; the start date is the farthest back one can reach and still find a zero trend. It is what it is.

For comparison, here is the entire dataset for 44 years 5 months since December 1978. It shows a long-run warming rate equivalent to 1.3 K/century, of which 0.3 K has already occurred since January 2021, leaving just 1 K to go (on the current trend) until 2100, by which time reserves of coal, oil and gas will be largely exhausted.

We are no longer in la Niña conditions. They ended in March 2023, when the temperature of the Niño-3.4 region of the equatorial eastern Pacific rose above –0.5 K:

One reason why el Niño-watchers predict that an new el Niño is on its way is the gradual westward extension of the warm pool in in the top 300 m of the tropical Pacific, the hallmark of el Niño, as NOAA’s image shows –

NOAA thinks there is a 62% chance of an el Niño developing. If it does develop, it will probably bring the latest Pause to an end. Nevertheless, these long Pauses are a visual demonstration of the now-undeniable fact that the rate of global warming predicted by IPCC in 1990 has proven to be greatly in excess of the subsequent outturn.

First, note that the 0.136 K/decade trend in the 400 months (exactly a third of a century) since 1990 is barely above the 0.133 K/decade trend since 1978. Notwithstanding business-as-usual increases in emissions, very little acceleration in the global-warming rate is evident.

In fact, IPCC’s midrange prediction in 1990 of 0.3 K/decade business-as-usual warming since that year exceeds the 0.136 K/decade real-world global warming rate observed since then by a startling 120%. Indeed, even the 0.2 K/decade lower bound of IPCC’s 1990 prediction exceeds observed reality by close to half. Yet policy is being made by scientifically-illiterate governments on the basis of the 0.5 K/decade upper-bound prediction, which exceeds observed reality by a shocking 268%.

Annual emissions are indeed tracking the business-as-usual Scenario A in IPCC (1990). The growth is almost double that which was predicted under Scenario B. It is now clear that IPCC’s conversion of emissions to forcings, and thus its predictions of global warming, had been grossly overwrought and that, therefore, the threatened “climate emergency” is absent.