I recall the last el Nino vividly as I was back in Chicago for a visit and was surprised to find myself being able to wear nothing more than a light sweater in early December.Torchwood wrote:Cherry picking data. The "no global warming for 18 years" starts from the last big El Nino, in 1997-98, when the world was abnormally warm. There is another big one starting now
I would say that cherry-picking is the claims in media that this el Nino is due to man-made global warming rather than a quasi-periodic natural event.
Anyways, the pause argument excludes the past el Nino time points.
Aside from the group at US NOAA that took ancient ship bucket and intake measurements, with their unknown systematic uncertainties, as the gold standard and fit the far more accurate recent buoy data to them to get rid of the "pause", instead of the obvious standard vice versa, even most climate scientists admit to the existence of the pause. At last count, there are over 50 purported explanations for it.
This also raises the issue of how does one separate out the possible small contribution of AGW to the change in global temperature in the "global temperature" time series which exhibits the large natural variations in temperature of a driven dynamic non-linear system far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
The sad reality is that the entire field of "AGW climate science" is mostly based on grossly underestimating statistical and systematic errors.