Well, looky here!

Some cracks are appearing in the climate-change monolith:

The “Pause” in global warming is real – not an urban myth concocted by evil ‘deniers’ – a study has found, signalling the development of a major schism within the climate alarmist camp.

“It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims,” the paper in Nature Climate Change says.

Though the paper’s findings are not controversial – few serious scientists dispute the evidence of the temperature datasets showing that there has been little if any global warming for nearly 19 years – they represent a tremendous blow to the climate alarmist “consensus”, which has long sought to deny the “Pause’s” existence.

First, the study was published in Nature Climate Change a fervently alarmist journal which rarely if ever runs papers that cast doubt on the man-made-global-warming scare narrative.

Secondly, it directly contradicts a widely-reported study produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year which attempted to deny the existence of the “Pause” (also known as the “hiatus”). This NOAA study was widely mocked, quickly debunked and is now the subject of a Congressional investigation by 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

60%

. What’s novel about this new study in Nature Climate Change, though, is that it’s not skeptics and Republicans doing the mocking and the debunking: it’s the kind of people who in the past were very much in the alarmist camp, including – bizarrely – none other than Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who co-authored the paper.

What we have here, in other words, is signs of a major rift within the climate alarmist camp with different factions adopting different tactics to cope with the failure of their collapsing narrative.

On one side are people like Thomas Karl and Thomas Petersen, the hapless NOAA scientists given the unenviable task of producing that risible paper last year which did its best to deny that the Pause was a thing.

On the other are what might be called the “rats deserting the sinking ship” faction who have produced this new paper for Nature Climate Change, in which finally they concede what skeptics have been saying for many years: that there has been no “global warming” since 1998.

This divergence in the alarmist camp is now going to create a dilemma for all those liberal media outlets – from the BBC to the Guardian to the LA Times – which reported on NOAA’s “death of the pause” study as if it were a reliable and credible thing.

I knew that someday the lack of credibility would overwhelm the narrative.