The right word may be effective, said Mark Twain, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. As of this week, according to the RSS satellite record, the Great Pause in global warming has now endured for 18 years and one month. Not one of the billion-dollar computer models each of which uses as much electricity as a large town predicted that.

The Pause is the longest continuous period without any global warming since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Dr. Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at RSS, is being besieged by true-believers demanding to know whether the data in my monthly global-warming graphs are real. He has had to tell them the data are indeed real, and are correctly presented, also that the trend line is correctly calculated and presented. There really is no global warming.

However, Dr Mears does not like the evidence shown by his own data. On the RSS blog, he writes:

“The denialists like to assume that the cause for the model/observation discrepancy is some kind of problem with the fundamental model physics, and they pooh-pooh any other sort of explanation. This leads them to conclude, very likely erroneously, that the long-term sensitivity of the climate is much less than is currently thought.”

Come off it, Carl, baby! Your regrettable use of the word “denialists,” with its deliberate overtones trying to compare climate skeptics with Holocaust deniers, reveals you as a “liarist” – one who profitably pushes the evidence in the direction of greater alarm than is scientifically justified.

Now, why do you suppose that the Great Pause is happening, notwithstanding record increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration as China, India, South America, South-East Asia and even poor, dark Africa begin to lift their people out of poverty and stabilize their populations by the simplest, cheapest method known: coal-fired electricity?

Up goes the CO2 concentration. So why has temperature not followed?

A small but determined group of politicized scientists in the United States has tried to create an impression that there is an overwhelming consensus to the effect that the “missing heat” that the shonky official global warming theory says ought to be present is playing hide-and-seek in the deep oceans.

One day, says the cozy group in one of a series of papers it published in the learned journals over the past two or three years, the missing heat will come back up out of the deep oceans and say, “Peek-a-boo!”

They have given the impression of consensus by publishing papers under the names of different lead authors, thus: Meehl et al. (2011); Balmaseda et al. (2013); Trenberth et al. (2014). Sounds like three different groups. But here is the full list of authors of each paper:

Meehl, Arblaster, Fasullo, Hu and Trenberth (2013); Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källen (2013); Trenberth, Fasullo and Balmaseda (2014).

The official designations of these papers, each mentioning only the lead author, artfully conceal the fact that this is a cozy group trying make it look as though the entire scientific community is in agreement.

Worldwide, the liarists – growing ever more desperate as the Great Pause grows ever longer – are taking up the cry that The Models Were Right All Along But The Warming Has Gone Into Hiding, Really And Truly It Has, With Knobs On, Cross My Heart And Hope To Die, So There.

Just one problem with that. The catastrophist clique no longer entirely controls the scientific journals. It tried to, but it didn’t get away with it. In addition to “The ocean ate my global warming,” the scientific journals contain a host of recent papers giving between them no less than 25 – yes, 25 – mutually incompatible explanations of the Great Pause.

Here they are, all 25 of them:

1) Coverage-induced cool bias in recent years, 2) Anthropogenic aerosols from coal-burning, 3) Decline in the warming caused by sooty surface absorbing sunlight, 4) Emission of ash by volcanic eruptions, 5) Reduced solar activity, 6) Effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol in controlling emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, 7) A lower-than-predicted increase in methane concentration, 8) A decrease in stratospheric water vapor concentration, 9) Strengthening Pacific trade winds, 10) Stadium waves in tropical Pacific Ocean circulation, 11) Coincidence, 12) Aerosol particulates from the scent of pine-trees (I kid you not), 13) Natural variability, 14) Cooler night-time temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, 15) Predictions by those models that allowed for the possibility of a pause in global warming, 16) The negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, 17) The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, 18) Global dimming (more “Democrats” about) following the global brightening of 1983-2001, 19) Relative frequencies of distinct el Niño types, 20) Surface cooling in the equatorial Pacific, 21) Pacific cooling amplified by Atlantic warming, 22) A combination of factors, including ENSO variability, solar decline and stratospheric aerosols, 23) Underestimated manmade emissions of soot, 24) A new form of multi-decadal variability distinct from but related to the ocean oscillations and 25) Failure to initialize most models in order to conform with observation, particularly of oceanic conditions.

“Settled science,” anyone? No, I thought not.

So, what’s the truth? A simple diagram explains all:

Will someone tell the world’s politicians before the mad scientists make any more money out of their intellectual feeble-mindedness and scientific illiteracy?