Hiding the Hiatus: Global Warming on Pause

As world leaders, climate activists, and a swarm of media commentators converged on Paris for COP 21, the UN’s extravagant climate-change summit, they unleashed a torrent of heated rhetoric about the supposed, still-imminent global-warming catastrophe. Hyperbolic expressions such as “catastrophe,” “apocalypse,” “disaster,” “final warning,” “last chance for humanity,” and “existential threat” flowed freely.

 

But one all-important word was conspicuously not on the lips of the assembled alarmists: hiatus. They studiously avoided that word like the plague, and with good reason; it threatens their entire agenda. Various dictionaries define “hiatus” as a break, gap, or interruption in time or continuity. As it pertains to “climate change,” the “hiatus” refers to the widely accepted fact that the most reliable temperature data, from orbiting weather satellites, show no warming for nearly two decades.

 

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