Quite true, although there are some other interesting bits in the summary:
Continued warming to temperatures that now exceed the stable conditions of most of the Holocene epoch is likely to cause ice-shelf instability to encroach farther southward along the Antarctic Peninsula.
Another interesting tidbit:
the Antarctic Peninsula did not experience a widespread Medieval Warm Period/Little Ice Age sequence comparable to Northern Hemisphere climate at that time.
So it appears the peninsula did not experience the Medieval Warm Period and it's now about the maximum temperature it's been at since the last ice age (and still warming). Additionally, if there was a global MWP, then the peninsula may be so disconnected from global temperature trends that looking at it is next to useless, although the lack of a MWP/LI sequence is also evidence that the MWP/LI sequence either wasn't global or wasn't strong enough to affect the peninsula.
I expect they'll meddle in it about as much as they meddle in the current sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide markets. You are aware that the U.S. already operates at least 2 such markets already, right?
So they were elected by a minority, but I'm not sure it qualifies as "a (relatively) small number of people voting for" them because they received 14 million votes and 17 million votes in the 1932 elections.
You need to think things through a little more carefully. A false accusation of rape does not require that actual sex have occurred.
I know of a case where a young man was accused of rape by a underage girl and her mother, as it turned out this girl had had shockingly bad luck, of the last dozen houses they pair had rented, all of them had been next door to rapists, however, the mother and her daughter always graciously dropped the charges once a rather larger cash transfer was made to their bank accounts.
Granted, this is hardly typical of rape allegations, but it's important to remember that a rape charge can be prosecuted even if there is no actual evidence to indicate that sex ever took place. Both rape and false rape allegations are serious crimes that can ruin the lives of entirely innocent people.
I would think they were more concerned that he might walk into a DMV or similar low-security government office and start hacking up the people as a signal to "start the revolution". Some of the stuff he posted to his Facebook page appears seriously disturbed. Not only does he claim that the government perpetrated 9/11 and that Obama is a communist (pretty standard crazy conspiracy stuff), he accuses "world leaders" of preforming ritual sacrifices of children and claims that the Bushes "have a secret Castle in Colorado where they have been raping and sacrificing children for many years". That's pretty specific and insane.
From a casual inspection of his Facebook scroll, he looks seriously crazy. Combining the crazy, the delusions of grandeur, and the threats, I can certainly see why he needed a psychiatric evaluation. He seems to be spiralling into madness.
I'm not American so maybe it's different in the States, but I only remember ever being taught about Native, Roman, Norse or Greek mythology as foundational information. In other words, we were taught the basics of their Gods so that we would know who Mars, Aries, Loki and Raven were when they came up in literature we were reading. Given that pretty much every student in every regular english class in the United States already knows who Jesus is, why should they try to teach people what they already know?
Due to cognitivie dissonance, they may end up being the same thing. People don't like to think they're dishonest, so when they dishonestly pretend that they think that way, they tend to end up thinking that way. There has to be a clear and immediate reward to avoid that trap. Since politicians would spend years pretending to believe that stuff and would mostly assoiciate with other people who believe (or also pretend to believe), it's almost inevitable that they would end up believing it, regardless of their original beliefs.
So either they believe it, or they are slowly convincing themselves to believe it.
There's no evidence they asked her to lie. She was deciding on her own what was fact and what wasn't. The story is a fabrication. The court found there was no distortion of Fox's part.
The court originally found that she was fired for threatening to reveal the distortion of the report. That decision was overturned because the court determined that the behaviour she threatened to expose was not criminal. That hardly seems to be consistent with your description.
This is the entire point I was making - that both sides of the debate are equally as biased as the other.
Assuming both sides are equally biased is exactly as stupid as assuming neither side is biased. The sides will rarely, if ever, be equally biased.
Also, the article you linked has the basis for the "right to lie" claim in it:
Because the FCC’s news distortion policy is not a “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102, Akre has failed to state a claim under the whistle-blower's statute. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment in her favor and remand for entry of a judgment in favor of WTVT.
Ask yourself this, if the FCC news distortion policy is not a "law, rule or regulation", then what is it? And how does it prevent news distortion? The court certainly seems to have inadvertently neutered the rules against fabricated news.
The issue was that a television reporter refused to do their job, and expected to get away with it because she felt she had a personal right to decide what their station should and shouldn't broadcast.
Speaking of distortions, the reporter refused to lie for the corporation and they fired her. There's no need to bias your account with pejorative language.
Actually, I think you're grossly misrepresenting the case. If I recall correctly, the reporters refused to alter the key conclusions on a report about Monsanto's hormone injection program for milk cows. Apparently they found a statistically significant increase in cancer rates among drinkers, and the Fox News editor told them to change to say they did not find that or else Monsanto would pull a giant advertising contract from the station. They refused and the editor fired them. The sued for wrongful dismissal and violations of the whistle blower protection act. What the court decided is that Fox News had no legal obligation to tell the truth and thus it wasn't breaking any laws, and thus the reporters in question weren't entitled to whistle blower protections.
Fox is by no means any more misleading than any other major network - it's just slanted in the opposite direction from most others which makes it "stand out".
Frankly, I think that's a false statement. The other Networks don't exist to push an ideological view, Fox News does. That alone is likely to make it consistently and considerably more misleading than other networks, partly because they tend to always be misleading people in the same direction. It's like the difference between averaging random numbers between 0 and 10 and averaging random numbers between 5 and 10. Most of the time the second average will be further from 5 than the first.
If the story above, is true, it does show a history of dishonesty, chicanery, and an inability to accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Unfortunately, that story of a lifetime of blame shifting and deception is entirely too plausible. Party because his reaction to the story about gathering a gang of kids to bully the new kid who didn't look like rest of them, was simply off. The only reason you wouldn't remember holding someone down and shaving their hair off is if you did that sort of thing regularly. Considering some of the people who merely witnessed the assault are still a little traumatised by it, Mitt really does appear to be a strange one.
I've talked to some otherwise reasonable people who voted for Bush (twice even), and their reasons were spectacularly stupid. They voted for him because they hoped to one day be rich enough to take advantage of the massive tax cuts for the rich. These were 9 to 5, mid level IT people.
It's a fairly common delusion among Americans, even when the only thing they're doing to reach the goal is buying lottery tickets, that they believe that one day they will be one of the rich and powerful and thus they oppose any limits on the rich and powerful. It's madness.
The best explanation of Romney's flip flopping was pretty simple: He just wants to win so he says whatever people want to hear and does whatever the loudest voices in his party tell him to do. As president he'll probably do whatever the real power controllers in the Republican party tell him to do. That will probably start with pay backs to his billionaire backers.
Maybe if you were to provide some details or evidence as to what you're talking about? You wrote "If you cut down all the trees you get a desert. No matter what the climate." Which is clearly false on the face of it. Maybe you'd like to provide some mitigating context? If you're specifically talking about the Dust Bowl, the causes are more complex than "cut down all the trees [and] you get a desert".
So you are actually talking about the recent Scandinavian tree ring data? They wrote about that too. The problem appears to be that you're comparing one regional proxy of summer temperatures (with a 100 year smoothing filter) to a combination of global proxies of annual temperature (with a 40 year smoothing filter). Additionally, given that Scandinavia is around 55-70 degrees North, a trend from that region is highly likely to report amplified cooling (or warming) when compared to the global trend because the poles tend to cool (and warm) faster than rest of the planet.
Additionally, you might want to watch this video on the Medieval Warm Period.
Actually, it's probably because of blocking weather patterns that are being caused by a decrease in temperature difference in Arctic and the Tropics. The Arctic air currents are breaking the blocking patterns up like they used to because the currents are weaker. The Arctic is warming faster than the Tropics, in part because of declining sea ice, as you may have noticed ice is white and water is not. As the sea ice declines, the water absorbs heat from the sun that would have previously been reflected by the ice accelerating the heating trend.
Also it's either El Nino or La Nina, and according to a quick Google search we are currently neutral (between the two conditions), but it looks like we're building towards an El Nino condition for the fall.
You know what's really cool about Skeptical Science? They already did that. I'm surprised that someone who claims to have a degree in mathematics is foolish enough to believe that tree rings from a single country are a better measure of temperatures than a global network of thermometers.
No, it's a data point and doesn't matter. Trends do.
It's still a notable event. It could be an outlier, but every outlier is a notable event as well.
If you cut down all the trees you get a desert. No matter what the climate.
Actually, you usually don't. Usually the trees grow back (it takes time), sometimes you get grass land or savannah. The problem may be that you don't understand what a desert is. It's classified as "a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants", cutting the trees down usually doesn't have that much effect on regional precipitation patterns.
Actually, the argument put forth by Hansen is that the frequency and distribution of warm climate events has shifted so far from a 1950-1980 base line that it is highly unlikely that the results would be generated randomly by a stable climate. It's not "look how hot it is in July", it's look at the distribution of warm temperature events around the world. They've been increasing in frequency and strength while cold events are getting weaker and less frequent. The warm events are consistently larger, more extreme, and more frequent than the cold events, which is exactly what you would expect if global warming were occurring. Significantly, if global cooling were happening you'd expect the cold events to be larger, more extreme, and more frequent than the hot events. If neither were occurring the events should be close to equally balanced (over time) with some warm years and some cool years and we aren't seeing that either. The last 30 years of temperatures show a consistent warm bias that is statistically significant and unlikely to be random chance.
And the paper was published at the start of May, so it doesn't take into account this summer's weather.
Actually, the models do a reasonable job of projecting scenarios. Most of the "models can't predict the future" stuff is from people who don't understand what a model is. The first clue is that models don't make predictions, they project what will happen given a set of predictions. This is important, because when evaluating a models performance, you shouldn't fault the model if the predicted events are different from what actually happened. The predictions are external to the model. To properly evaluate the models performance, you have to go back and use the actual events (fossil fuel use, land change, solar input, volcanic activity and other factors) and see how close it's projections were to reality when given real events to determine essentially how well it would have performed with a "perfect" prediction of the future inputs to the model.
Most of the models used to project global warming scenarios do a reasonably good job once the differences between predicted events and actual events are taken into account (remember the predicted events are external, hypothetical data fed into the model). A frequent trick used by global warming "sceptics" is to take the scenario that was furthest from actual events and using that to "prove" that the models are unreliable. If you are interested in reading up on some historical perspective on climate modelling, Skeptical Science did a series of blog posts called Lessons from Past Climate Predictions looking at the record. It can be quite an informative read.
That's the definition from the referenced (WUWT) blog post, and I agree with you: it's a pretty lame metric for a heat wave in an area that regularly gets temperatures well over that level.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.
There was no global warming in the last 10 years.
This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.
It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.
Take this chart [forgottenliberty.com] for example
That chart looks like it's been mislabelled or doctored, depending on how charitable you want to be to Spencer. Here's a video explaining the provenance of several such errors.
Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things.
There are a lot of "real scientists" doing exactly that, Hansen is taking a different approach to tackle the "is this global warming or nature" question. It's still science, even if you disagree with the results.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
From that paragraph, it's clear you don't either understand science and/or don't understand religion. It seems to me, that "learning new things all the time and refining our understanding of this stuff" is clearly science and clearly not religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true, although there are some other interesting bits in the summary:
Another interesting tidbit:
So it appears the peninsula did not experience the Medieval Warm Period and it's now about the maximum temperature it's been at since the last ice age (and still warming). Additionally, if there was a global MWP, then the peninsula may be so disconnected from global temperature trends that looking at it is next to useless, although the lack of a MWP/LI sequence is also evidence that the MWP/LI sequence either wasn't global or wasn't strong enough to affect the peninsula.
I expect they'll meddle in it about as much as they meddle in the current sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide markets. You are aware that the U.S. already operates at least 2 such markets already, right?
That's an easy one, he's obviously pro-death. He believes that women who have sex and criminals both deserve to die because they're both evil.
Actually Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the President of Germany in 1933. The National Socialist Party came in second place in the 1930s general election, and Hitler came in second in the 1932 Presidential election. In 1932 the National Socialist Party got 37.3% of the vote, and in a second election in 1932 the Nazis got 33.1% of the vote. In both those elections the Nazis received the largest share of the vote. After those two elections, the results are tainted because the Nazis used their Machtergreifung voter suppression campaign to increase their share of the vote and suppress the vote of their opponents.
So they were elected by a minority, but I'm not sure it qualifies as "a (relatively) small number of people voting for" them because they received 14 million votes and 17 million votes in the 1932 elections.
You need to think things through a little more carefully. A false accusation of rape does not require that actual sex have occurred.
I know of a case where a young man was accused of rape by a underage girl and her mother, as it turned out this girl had had shockingly bad luck, of the last dozen houses they pair had rented, all of them had been next door to rapists, however, the mother and her daughter always graciously dropped the charges once a rather larger cash transfer was made to their bank accounts.
Granted, this is hardly typical of rape allegations, but it's important to remember that a rape charge can be prosecuted even if there is no actual evidence to indicate that sex ever took place. Both rape and false rape allegations are serious crimes that can ruin the lives of entirely innocent people.
I would think they were more concerned that he might walk into a DMV or similar low-security government office and start hacking up the people as a signal to "start the revolution". Some of the stuff he posted to his Facebook page appears seriously disturbed. Not only does he claim that the government perpetrated 9/11 and that Obama is a communist (pretty standard crazy conspiracy stuff), he accuses "world leaders" of preforming ritual sacrifices of children and claims that the Bushes "have a secret Castle in Colorado where they have been raping and sacrificing children for many years". That's pretty specific and insane.
From a casual inspection of his Facebook scroll, he looks seriously crazy. Combining the crazy, the delusions of grandeur, and the threats, I can certainly see why he needed a psychiatric evaluation. He seems to be spiralling into madness.
I'm not American so maybe it's different in the States, but I only remember ever being taught about Native, Roman, Norse or Greek mythology as foundational information. In other words, we were taught the basics of their Gods so that we would know who Mars, Aries, Loki and Raven were when they came up in literature we were reading. Given that pretty much every student in every regular english class in the United States already knows who Jesus is, why should they try to teach people what they already know?
Due to cognitivie dissonance, they may end up being the same thing. People don't like to think they're dishonest, so when they dishonestly pretend that they think that way, they tend to end up thinking that way. There has to be a clear and immediate reward to avoid that trap. Since politicians would spend years pretending to believe that stuff and would mostly assoiciate with other people who believe (or also pretend to believe), it's almost inevitable that they would end up believing it, regardless of their original beliefs.
So either they believe it, or they are slowly convincing themselves to believe it.
There's no evidence they asked her to lie. She was deciding on her own what was fact and what wasn't. The story is a fabrication. The court found there was no distortion of Fox's part.
The court originally found that she was fired for threatening to reveal the distortion of the report. That decision was overturned because the court determined that the behaviour she threatened to expose was not criminal. That hardly seems to be consistent with your description.
This is the entire point I was making - that both sides of the debate are equally as biased as the other.
Assuming both sides are equally biased is exactly as stupid as assuming neither side is biased. The sides will rarely, if ever, be equally biased.
Also, the article you linked has the basis for the "right to lie" claim in it:
Because the FCC’s news distortion policy is not a “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102, Akre has failed to state a claim under the whistle-blower's statute. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment in her favor and remand for entry of a judgment in favor of WTVT.
Ask yourself this, if the FCC news distortion policy is not a "law, rule or regulation", then what is it? And how does it prevent news distortion? The court certainly seems to have inadvertently neutered the rules against fabricated news.
The issue was that a television reporter refused to do their job, and expected to get away with it because she felt she had a personal right to decide what their station should and shouldn't broadcast.
Speaking of distortions, the reporter refused to lie for the corporation and they fired her. There's no need to bias your account with pejorative language.
Don't worry, OP misrepresented the story.
Actually, I think you're grossly misrepresenting the case. If I recall correctly, the reporters refused to alter the key conclusions on a report about Monsanto's hormone injection program for milk cows. Apparently they found a statistically significant increase in cancer rates among drinkers, and the Fox News editor told them to change to say they did not find that or else Monsanto would pull a giant advertising contract from the station. They refused and the editor fired them. The sued for wrongful dismissal and violations of the whistle blower protection act. What the court decided is that Fox News had no legal obligation to tell the truth and thus it wasn't breaking any laws, and thus the reporters in question weren't entitled to whistle blower protections.
Fox is by no means any more misleading than any other major network - it's just slanted in the opposite direction from most others which makes it "stand out".
Frankly, I think that's a false statement. The other Networks don't exist to push an ideological view, Fox News does. That alone is likely to make it consistently and considerably more misleading than other networks, partly because they tend to always be misleading people in the same direction. It's like the difference between averaging random numbers between 0 and 10 and averaging random numbers between 5 and 10. Most of the time the second average will be further from 5 than the first.
If the story above, is true, it does show a history of dishonesty, chicanery, and an inability to accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Unfortunately, that story of a lifetime of blame shifting and deception is entirely too plausible. Party because his reaction to the story about gathering a gang of kids to bully the new kid who didn't look like rest of them, was simply off. The only reason you wouldn't remember holding someone down and shaving their hair off is if you did that sort of thing regularly. Considering some of the people who merely witnessed the assault are still a little traumatised by it, Mitt really does appear to be a strange one.
I've talked to some otherwise reasonable people who voted for Bush (twice even), and their reasons were spectacularly stupid. They voted for him because they hoped to one day be rich enough to take advantage of the massive tax cuts for the rich. These were 9 to 5, mid level IT people.
It's a fairly common delusion among Americans, even when the only thing they're doing to reach the goal is buying lottery tickets, that they believe that one day they will be one of the rich and powerful and thus they oppose any limits on the rich and powerful. It's madness.
The best explanation of Romney's flip flopping was pretty simple: He just wants to win so he says whatever people want to hear and does whatever the loudest voices in his party tell him to do. As president he'll probably do whatever the real power controllers in the Republican party tell him to do. That will probably start with pay backs to his billionaire backers.
Maybe if you were to provide some details or evidence as to what you're talking about? You wrote "If you cut down all the trees you get a desert. No matter what the climate." Which is clearly false on the face of it. Maybe you'd like to provide some mitigating context? If you're specifically talking about the Dust Bowl, the causes are more complex than "cut down all the trees [and] you get a desert".
So you are actually talking about the recent Scandinavian tree ring data? They wrote about that too. The problem appears to be that you're comparing one regional proxy of summer temperatures (with a 100 year smoothing filter) to a combination of global proxies of annual temperature (with a 40 year smoothing filter). Additionally, given that Scandinavia is around 55-70 degrees North, a trend from that region is highly likely to report amplified cooling (or warming) when compared to the global trend because the poles tend to cool (and warm) faster than rest of the planet.
Additionally, you might want to watch this video on the Medieval Warm Period.
I think it's pixies but I have no proof. You?
Try doing some reading.
Actually, it's probably because of blocking weather patterns that are being caused by a decrease in temperature difference in Arctic and the Tropics. The Arctic air currents are breaking the blocking patterns up like they used to because the currents are weaker. The Arctic is warming faster than the Tropics, in part because of declining sea ice, as you may have noticed ice is white and water is not. As the sea ice declines, the water absorbs heat from the sun that would have previously been reflected by the ice accelerating the heating trend.
Also it's either El Nino or La Nina, and according to a quick Google search we are currently neutral (between the two conditions), but it looks like we're building towards an El Nino condition for the fall.
You know what's really cool about Skeptical Science? They already did that. I'm surprised that someone who claims to have a degree in mathematics is foolish enough to believe that tree rings from a single country are a better measure of temperatures than a global network of thermometers.
No, it's a data point and doesn't matter. Trends do.
It's still a notable event. It could be an outlier, but every outlier is a notable event as well.
If you cut down all the trees you get a desert. No matter what the climate.
Actually, you usually don't. Usually the trees grow back (it takes time), sometimes you get grass land or savannah. The problem may be that you don't understand what a desert is. It's classified as "a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants", cutting the trees down usually doesn't have that much effect on regional precipitation patterns.
Actually, the argument put forth by Hansen is that the frequency and distribution of warm climate events has shifted so far from a 1950-1980 base line that it is highly unlikely that the results would be generated randomly by a stable climate. It's not "look how hot it is in July", it's look at the distribution of warm temperature events around the world. They've been increasing in frequency and strength while cold events are getting weaker and less frequent. The warm events are consistently larger, more extreme, and more frequent than the cold events, which is exactly what you would expect if global warming were occurring. Significantly, if global cooling were happening you'd expect the cold events to be larger, more extreme, and more frequent than the hot events. If neither were occurring the events should be close to equally balanced (over time) with some warm years and some cool years and we aren't seeing that either. The last 30 years of temperatures show a consistent warm bias that is statistically significant and unlikely to be random chance.
And the paper was published at the start of May, so it doesn't take into account this summer's weather.
Actually, the models do a reasonable job of projecting scenarios. Most of the "models can't predict the future" stuff is from people who don't understand what a model is. The first clue is that models don't make predictions, they project what will happen given a set of predictions. This is important, because when evaluating a models performance, you shouldn't fault the model if the predicted events are different from what actually happened. The predictions are external to the model. To properly evaluate the models performance, you have to go back and use the actual events (fossil fuel use, land change, solar input, volcanic activity and other factors) and see how close it's projections were to reality when given real events to determine essentially how well it would have performed with a "perfect" prediction of the future inputs to the model.
Most of the models used to project global warming scenarios do a reasonably good job once the differences between predicted events and actual events are taken into account (remember the predicted events are external, hypothetical data fed into the model). A frequent trick used by global warming "sceptics" is to take the scenario that was furthest from actual events and using that to "prove" that the models are unreliable. If you are interested in reading up on some historical perspective on climate modelling, Skeptical Science did a series of blog posts called Lessons from Past Climate Predictions looking at the record. It can be quite an informative read.
That's the definition from the referenced (WUWT) blog post, and I agree with you: it's a pretty lame metric for a heat wave in an area that regularly gets temperatures well over that level.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.
There was no global warming in the last 10 years.
This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.
It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.
Take this chart [forgottenliberty.com] for example
That chart looks like it's been mislabelled or doctored, depending on how charitable you want to be to Spencer. Here's a video explaining the provenance of several such errors.
Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things.
There are a lot of "real scientists" doing exactly that, Hansen is taking a different approach to tackle the "is this global warming or nature" question. It's still science, even if you disagree with the results.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
From that paragraph, it's clear you don't either understand science and/or don't understand religion. It seems to me, that "learning new things all the time and refining our understanding of this stuff" is clearly science and clearly not religion.