Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists

[Igel]

9. There are a number of proposals for temporary reprieves.

More CO2 is being sequestered in the deep ocean--that the boundary between the cold, deep ocean and the middle regions that atmospheric CO2 gets into isn't as impermeable as thought.

Problem: Even if increased deep ocean CO2 has been observed, and even if isotope analysis of the deep water CO2 shows it's recently moved from the atmosphere, atmospheric concentration of CO2 has, in fact, continued to build up, so even if it's being sequestered there should still be some increases in T over the last dozen years on average. But it's flatlined. It's only "increased" because they've increased the window for calculating the moving average. Early GW deniers used the same trick to try to make the upward trendline for global warming go away. (It's known as principled hypocrisy--the principle being that the data has to be made to say what you think it should when public policy decisions are on the line and you think you're right.)

Another option: That ENSO just happens to be trending cooler than it had been.

Problem: The anti-AGW folk retorted that global warming was just ENSO trending towards having warm water surface off the western South Am coast--and that that's precisely how global warming gets implemented.

That the data are wrong. 'Nuff said on that point.

That the Arctic Oscillation happens to be trending more often to the east than it had been. But it had trended west before that, and helped boost temperatures. The Arctic Oscillation is a fairly newfangled discovery, so we don't have much of an observational history for it.

And the winning answer, until there's a need for a better one: That the Arctic is the Arctic, and it's only one subset of the data.

The runner up: Global warming is still complex, the models not as complex, and if there's a hiccup that we haven't figured out it's a chance to have our models trashed and do some new science. Or it's just a random event. Shit happens--it's why there's a 95% or a 99% confidence interval, and not a 99.99999999% confidence interval.