Have this at the ready when the jackboots get in your face about the new NOAA study

You're going to hear the Freedom-Haters crow about this:

It is one of climate contrarians' most widely repeated arguments against mainstream climate science: Global warming slowed down — or even stopped — in 1998. 

Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the world's most credible mainstream climate-science authority, acknowledged in its 2013 report that warming slowed down during this period. 

The IPCC said the temperature trend from 1998 to 2012 was about one-third to one-half of the warming trend during the period from 1951 to 2012.

However, a new study published Thursday in the journal Science by top climate researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aims a kill shot at the hiatus once and for all. Led by Thomas R. Karl, who directs NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, North Carolina, scientists say that the so-called pause in warming during that period was an artifact of improperly adjusted surface-temperature data. 

Not so fast:

Scientists who have investigated the warming hiatus or are otherwise involved in assessing climate change on various timescales said the study's key shortcoming is that it does what mainstream climate scientists have long criticized climate contrarians — often now referred to as "climate denialists" — of doing: cherry-picking start and end dates to arrive at a particular conclusion.
Gerald Meehl, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told Mashable in an email that while he finds the new study laudable for improving temperature measurements, there are flaws in how the researchers interpreted the data. For example, Meehl said there is still a lower warming trend from 1998 to 2012, compared to the previous base period of 1950 to 1999, "thus there is still a hiatus defined in that way." 

Meehl said adding two years to the time period by including 2013 and 2014, which was a record-warm year, makes the warming trend appear to be 38% larger than previous studies that did not include them.
"My conclusion is that even with the new data adjustments, there still was a nominal hiatus period that lasted until 2013 with a lower rate of global warming than the warming rate of the last 50 years of the 20th century," he said, "and a factor of two slower warming than the previous 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s."

Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, told Mashable that the study does not support the conclusion that global warming didn't slow down for a relatively short time period. 

"It is clear that Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products," Goddard said in an email. "However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally.This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014."

Another senior climate researcher, Kevin Trenberth of NCAR, said the hiatus depends on your definition of the term. To him, global warming never stopped, as climate skeptics argue, because most of the extra heat from manmade greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide) was redirected deep into the oceans from 1998 to 2012. However, surface temperatures did warm more slowly during this time. 

"I think the article does emphasize that the kind of variation is now much more within the realm of expectations from natural variability, but it is a bit misleading in trying to say there is no hiatus," he said in an email. 

The linked article cites Michael Mann, that paragon of scientific integrity, as having a beef with a 1998 starting point for the hiatus.  Indeed, the author of the article seems to be driven by agenda to conclude that when you look at the big picture, the planet is indeed frying.

This current development in the war over human advancement is not over.  But in the meantime, don't let it affect how you adjust your thermostat or what kind of car you shop for.