You may wonder why such a statement would be made in the New York Times. Well, not because they're giving up on the Cult of Angry Gaia. No.
What's happened is that given the 15 year long hiatus in temperature change, certain proofs that the Science Is Settled You Guys have to be tossed out in order to save the rest of it. In the editorial, the author argues that the Hockey Stick was always silly and therefore we shouldn't be misled by reliance upon it.
The Hockey Stick showed, and projected, ever-rising global temperatures; well that was just plain ol' silly, this writer now says, and you shouldn't hold it against Global Warming that one of their most widely publicized Political Advertisements turns out to have been bunk.You think that one's good. Check this out:
The writer claims he "predicted" the 15 year pause in temperature increase.This is what they meant by "the science is settled":
“Suppose... future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously — that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small — then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.”As Epa says,