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Scientists have long labored to explain what appeared to be a slowdown in global warming that began at the start of this century as, at the same time, heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.

When adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agency said.

“The notion that there was a slowdown in global warming, or a hiatus, was based on the best information we had available at the time,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, a NOAA unit in Asheville, N.C. “Science is always working to improve.”

Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilization and to the natural world.

Longstanding claims by climate-change skeptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians in Washington to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

Another day, another series of ridiculous and incorrect claims about global warming getting far more air than they deserve. The latest comes from none other than David Rose, a man who has serially misunderstood climate change so consistently that if he told me the sun would rise tomorrow, I'd be more inclined to believe the Earth had stopped rotating. He writes articles for the Daily Mail —it would be an insult to the fish to wrap them in this tabloid — and he uses a lot of typical techniques wielded by deniers, including cherry picking and misdirection. While he doesn't always deny global warming is happening, he does think it's not as bad as scientists say. I'll also note he has claimed the world is cooling, too, despite all the evidence (and I do mean all of it). But if you deny what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are telling you, then in my opinion that makes you a denier.

Rose is, as usual, grossly exaggerating the death of global warming.

First, the "pause" is a claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 or so. This claim was never really true. 1998 was an unusually warm year, so if you start your measurements there it doesn't look like temperatures have risen much. But if you go back farther in time, the upward trend is very obvious. You have to look at the trend, and not short-term fluctuations!

that 2014 was the warmest year since careful record keeping began in 1880.

2010 and 2014 are basically tied for warmest year.

The two agencies use slightly different methods, so they have different readings for the difference between 2014 and the previous warmest year, 2010, with N.O.A.A. putting it at 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit (0.04 degrees Celsius), while NASA got 0.036 degrees (0.02 Celsius) — which this analysis says is well “within uncertainty of measurement.”

Most of the people President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen for the top tiers of his administration have expressed doubt that climate change is caused by human activity.

The E.P.A. writes and enforces environmental regulations, and is the most important government entity shaping policy on climate change.

A global-warming skeptic, Mr. Trump has vowed to cancel the accord, which the Obama administration helped broker, in his first 100 days as president.

“I think he is cute, saying whatever comes to his mind. I think the U.S. is a cute country too, because a person like him became the president,” said Prof. Ding.

The president said in a 2012 tweet that the Chinese created “the concept of global warming.”

Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.

"Evaluating the economic impact of water scarcity in a changing world," was published March 26 in Nature Communications, and uniquely captures the interdependent effects of global trade consistently with differences in regional climate policies as well as river basin-specific capacity to address water scarcity risks.

The researchers coupled physical and economic models to simulate thousands of potential climate futures for 235 major river basins -- a technique known as scenario discovery -- to better understand how water scarcity is a globally-connected phenomenon, with local conditions having reverberations across the globe in industries such as agriculture, energy, transportation and manufacturing.

Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.

As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.

The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.

fresh look at the way sea temperatures are measured has led government scientists to make a surprising claim: The puzzling apparent hiatus in global surface warming never really happened

Mainstream scientists have struggled to explain to the public how climate change can be getting worse if the warming of the planet's surface slowed at the turn of the century. Their various theories have chalked it up to dust and ash blasted into the sky by volcanic eruptions, a rare period of calm in the solar cycle, and heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean and other waters.

“I don't find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

It’s awfully hard to find any upside in a global pandemic that’s sickened nearly 115 million people and killed more than 2.5 million. But throughout 2020, there was some good news buried in the bad concerning that other great infirmity: the sickly state of the earthly climate.

According to a report released March 2 by the International Energy Agency, 2020 on the whole saw a total drop-off in global CO2 emissions of 6%

In December of 2020, not only had CO2 output rebounded, it actually rose to a level 2% higher than in the same month in 2019. “The rebound in global carbon emissions toward the end of last year is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide,”

Before the grounding of the massive Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal, some 50 vessels a day, or about 10% of global trade, sailed through the waterway each day

It's either waiting to transit the canal or stuck in port while owners and shippers decide what to do.

Lloyd's List estimates that the waiting game is costing $9.6 billion per day.

The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19.

As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year

This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,

, in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.

By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.

While railing about how difficult it’s become for the man on the street to separate facts from beliefs, he brought up his favorite global impasse again: climate change. Despite scientific evidence that stacks higher than the Egyptian pyramids, Maher lamented that there are still Americans walking around who “don’t think the sun is hot.”

Maher asks why facts are becoming marginalized. The answer is right under his nose. When Darwin discovered the slow pace of evolutionary change (millions of years), he also explained what happens to us when the complexity of our problems exceeds the capabilities our brains have evolved to this point. It’s simple: when facts become incomprehensible, we switch to beliefs. In other words, all societies eventually become irrational when confronted with problems that are too complex, too large, too messy to solve.

Thankfully, we have two weapons earlier civilizations didn’t have: models for high failure rates and neuroscience. Take the venture capital model for example. No matter how much due diligence venture capitalists perform, they can’t pick a winner from a loser more than 20 percent of the time. But the enormous success of those winners overshadows the failures, so venture capitalists are successful in spite of themselves.

I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.

He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.

Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.